Larp Design : Creating Role-Play Experiences

LARP DESIGN KNUDEPUNKT 2019 LARP DESIGN CREATING ROLE-PLAY EXPERIENCES Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen LARP DESIGN CREATING ROLE-PLAY EXPERIENCES Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen PAY IT FORWARD Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences is a non profit project, and so to a great extent is Nordic larp itself. While the contributions of individual designers and theorists are invaluable, their knowledge grows out of their local and international play communities. We the authors and editors of this book have received no compensation for our work. If you are finding it useful or interesting, we would encourage you to make a donation towards helping more people play more larps. Larpfund helps larpmakers offer subsidized tickets for players who need them. Subsidized tickets are a crucial tool in allowing players of different ages and backgrounds to play and create together. The suggested donation for a copy of this book is €45 – or whatever you can afford, every little helps. Your gift will enable a person in need to participate in creating and experiencing something beautiful. http://larpfund.org/ Larp Design - Creating Role-Play Experiences Copyright © 2019 by the Authors. First hardcover edition, 2019. Corrected second hardcover edition, 2020. This ebook is released under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 international license. This pdf is the December 2021 online release of the second edition and contains a small number of further corrections. It is released under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. If you would like to produce a translation, republish a selection, or make other derivative works, please contact the authors of the specific texts for permissions. Editors: Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Graphic design: Anne Serup Grove. Authors: Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo, Marco Bielli, Maury Elizabeth Brown, Simon Brind, Stefan Deutsch, Anders Lyng Ebbehøj, Søren Ebbehøj, Karin Edman, Alma Elofsson, Alessandro Giovannucci, Andrea Giovannucci, Anne Serup Grove, Tuomas Hakkarainen, Kasper Friis Hansen, Karijn van der Heij, Signe Løndahl Hertel, Kateřina Holendová, Mo Holkar, Anders Hultman, Frederikke Sofie Bech Høyer, Kat Jones, Merli Juustila, Simo Järvelä, Kaisa Kangas, Jonaya Kemper, Johanna Koljonen, Laura Kröger, Katri Lassila, J Li, Frida Lindegren, Tina Leipoldt, James Lórien MacDonald, Irrette Melakoski, Markus Montola, Susan Mutsaers, Martin Nielsen, Elin Nilsen, Oliver Nøglebæk, Klaus Meier Olsen, Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson, Joanna Piancastelli, Eleanor Saitta, Ericka Paige Skirpan, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, Lizzie Stark, Jaakko Stenros, Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, Edin Janković Šumar, Martine Svanevik, Sebastian F. K. Svegaard, Simon Lindman Svensson, Chiara Tirabasso, Anni Tolvanen, Evan Torner, Henry Towsner, Jonas Trier-Knudsen, Iva Vávrová, Annika Waern, Josefin Westborg, Anna Westerling, Danny Wilson, Laura Wood, and Kerstin Örtberg. Cover: Anne Serup Grove. Proofreading: Alexander Bakkensen, Laura Boylan, Monica Gribouski, Mo Holkar, Jason Cox, Bruno Munk Kristensen, Kerry Lambeth, Lise Rasmussen, and Julian Schauf. Additional editing: Markus Montola and Simon Brind. Special thanks: Aurelie De Cognac, Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen, Koma the Cat, Jesper Kristiansen, Magnar Grønvik Müller, Kalle Partanen, Bjarke Pedersen, Mike Pohjola, and the person who sat next to Aina on the train, for not murdering her when she spilled sauce on them, as they clearly saw she was tired and stressed when editing. This book has been published in conjunction with the Knudepunkt 2019 larp conference. Secretly this book is panclou #10. The making of this book has been partially supported by the Academy of Finland funded Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE-GameCult, 312395). Landsforeningen Bifrost Esromgade 15. 2,2 2200 København N www.landsforeningenbifrost.dk Printed in Denmark. ISBN 978-87-971140-0-1 ISBN 978-952-03-2260-1 (pdf) http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-2260-1 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD 9 1// THE FOUNDATIONS OF LARP DESIGN 15 Basic Concepts In Larp Design Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola 16 How Real is Larp? Simo Järvelä 22 An Introduction to Bespoke Larp design Johanna Koljonen 25 Jaakko Stenros How to Pick Your Larp Idea Bjarke Pedersen 31 Learn Design by Rerunning Larps Oliver Skjødt Nøglebæk 35 2// DESIGNING WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE RUTIME 2:1 HOW TO DESIGN THE PRE-LARP PROCESS 41 Designing the Pre-Larp Process Martine Helene Svanevik & Johanna Koljonen 43 Designing ahead of participant needs Karin Edman 54 Describing what actually happens during the larp Henry Piers Towsner & J Li 61 Costumes for Real Bodies Kerstin Örtberg, Anne Serup Grove 68 2:2 ON SITE BEFORE THE RUNTIME 75 How to Schedule the Participant’s Time on Site Alma Elofsson 77 How to Design a Workshop Lizzie Stark 82 How to Run Your Workshop Markus Montola 88 3// DESIGNING THE RUNTIME 3:1 HOW TO MAKE LARPS WHERE STORIES HAPPEN 91 How to Structure a Larp Kaisa Kangas 93 Transparency in Larp Evan Torner 98 Bolvaerk: Surprise Horror Søren Ebbehøj & Kasper Friis Hansen 106 Creating Shared Recollections in a Blackbox Marco Bielli & Chiara Tirabasso 108 Narrative Design Simon Brind 110 Emergent Stories and Directed Narratives Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo & Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn 121 How to Make your Sandbox a Playground Mo Holkar 130 Amusement Park Design Johanna Koljonen 135 The Beginning and the End Kaisa Kangas 136 3:2 HOW TO DESIGN A PLAYABLE FICTION 141 Functional Design Kaisa Kangas 143 Creating or Conveying Cultures Martin Nielsen & Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand 151 Building a Layered Community Alessandro Giovannucci & Andrea Giovannucci 159 This is Not an Edularp! Tina Leipoldt 162 Designing for Equality Frederikke Sofie Bech Høyer 164 Designing for Intersectional Identities Kat Jones, Mo Holkar & Jonaya Kemper 167 Accessibility as PlayabilityEleanor Saitta & Sebastian F. K. Svegaard 174 Designing for Queer and Trans Players Eleanor Saitta & Sebastian F. K. Svegaard 175 Designing Larp for Children Merli Juustila 184 3:3 HOW TO DESIGN PLAYABLE CHARACTERS 191 Basics of Character Design Juhana Pettersson 193 Who Creates the Characters Karijn van der Heij 205 Co-Creative Design with Players Mo Holkar 211 Designing a Character Description Evan Torner 216 Efficient Character Writing for Big Teams Edin Janković Šumar 220 Homework as Player Preparation Laura Kröger 222 Collaborative Character Creation Joanna Piancastelli 225 Writing Realistic, Non-Exploitative Characters Laura Wood 228 3:4 HOW TO DESIGN MECHANICS AND RULES 233 Opt-out and Playstyle Calibration Mechanics Johanna Koljonen 235 Designing the mechanics you need Danny Wilson 238 Putting It All Together: House of Cravnig Danny Wilson 250 Designing Playable Acid Trips Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo, Jonas Trier-Knudsen, Søren Ebbehøj, Anders Lyng Ebbehøj & Klaus Meier Olsen 252 The Notebook Mechanic Bjarke Pedersen 254 Class Privilege and Conflict Escalation Kaisa Kangas 257 Larping the Blues Iva Vávrová & Kateřina Holendová 259 Meta-techniques Anna Westerling & Anders Hultman 262 Portraying Sexual Content in Larp Frida Lindegren 269 The Language of Consent Susan Mutsaers 278 Portraying Violence in Larps Martine Helene Svanevik 281 Meaningful Character Death Stefan Deutsch 287 3:5 HOW TO DESIGN A PLAYABLE ENVIRONMENT 291 Spatial Design for Larps Søren Ebbehøj, Signe Løndahl Hertel & Jonas Trier-Knudsen 293 Geometry of Conversations J Li 306 The Bus Stop Mechanic Simon Lindman Svensson 311 The Piss Room Juhana Pettersson 314 The Fundamentals of Sound Design for Larp Anni Tolvanen & Irrette Melakoski 316 Darkness as Scenography Tuomas Hakkarainen & Katri Elisabet Lassila 329 3:6 HOW TO RUNTIME GAMEMASTER 333 Simulating an Outside World Simon Lindman Svensson 335 Using Discord in A Cyberpunk Setting Ericka Paige Skirpan 340 Using Runtime Directors Anna Westerling & Anders Hultman 342 The Expression Wall Maury Elizabeth Brown 347 How to Run Freeform Evan Torner 350 How to Run Edularp Josefin Westborg 355 4// AFTER RUNTIME 361 Post-Play Activities Maury Elizabeth Brown 363 How to Gather Feedback from Players Annika Waern 373 5// NORDIC LARP FOR OTHER CONTEXTS 389 Nordic Style Larps in Other Traditions Maury Elizabeth Brown & Ericka Paige Skirpan 391 Collaborating with Theatre and other Arts James Lórien MacDonald 398 GLOSSARY 411 BIOGRAPHIES 421 INDEX 429 IN MEMORY OF Elge Larsson (1944–2016) / 9 FOREWORD // Johanna Koljonen // Jaakko Stenros // Anne Serup Grove // Aina D. Skjønsfjell // Elin K. Nilsen Today, there is a thriving international network of larp designers who are interested in creating collaborative, ambitious, and meaningful co-creative experiences. From Denmark to Palestine and from Finland to Spain, and beyond, larp designers are working to explore themes like desire, community, and post-human subjects. They are attempting to create spaces for political reflection and wild enjoyment. They wish to translate a favourite television series or a book into a collective first person experience. These people are working at the forefront of a form of expression, larp, and pushing boundaries. New ideas, terms, theories, and innovations travel in the network, but no-one can know everything that is going on. Co-creating and experiencing the works are larger groups of people, players, who follow the designer’s careers and participate in their works, sometimes travelling long distances to take part. The designers, of course, also play in each other’s larps, and many players in turn take the step to become designers. This book is primarily aimed at all of these larp designers, and people who want to design larps, from beginners to pros. In this book, we have attempted to capture a sliver of the knowledge that is found in this tradition. This is a practical book on larp design. Secondarily, the book is for all larpers who wish to better understand how larp design functions. Finally, this book will be useful for experience designers working in other fields and academics attempting to make sense of this world. This book has been a long time coming. It reflects the collective expertise of a design tradition and a larp community engaged in systematic design work and documentation for more than two decades. Larp design has historically been very focused on what / 16 BASIC CONCEPTS IN LARP DESIGN // Jaakko Stenros // Markus Montola At the outset of this book we need to establish some basic terminology. Some of these terms may appear self-explanatory, but their specific meaning may vary between different larp design traditions, while other terms are more technical, having emerged as part of the discourse around Nordic style larps. WHAT IS A LARP What, in practice, is a larp? The question is surprisingly complicated, depending on if it is viewed from the point of view of the player, the designer, or the community. First, there are the larp designers, sometimes called larpwrights, who create the framework for playing. They decide on the creative content of the larp: what it is about and how it should be executed. To do this, they craft necessary background material for the world, sketch social networks of characters, put together rules and mechanics, design the character creation, plots, schedules, interiors, props, scenography, workshops, and debriefs. Of course, they also do many things that are less obviously about the content, but still affect the larp directly: they advertise the event, correspond with the players, negotiate characters, facilitate workshops before playing starts, and decide what participants will eat and where they should sleep. Players can participate in this creation as well, but even the most egalitarian co-creation process needs to be coordinated by someone. However, what the designers create is only the starting-point – the score – for play. All the written material needed to stage and play a larp is called a larp script. This is the first meaning of larp. The second meaning of larp is the runtime of playing. Once play begins, the players embody the characters and enact the world into being – sometimes in ways that are surprising to the designers. The players create the experience of play, and to certain extent the actual piece, in (and sometimes against) the framework the designers created. The larpwrights can still guide play during runtime, but they cannot remove the influence of the players. The people who run the larp are called (runtime) gamemasters. This is the larp as played, and it is ephemeral, lost the moment the larp ends. The same larp (as written) can be re-staged and played again, but the different runs will be different. PART SECTION CHAPTER 1:1:1 / 17 A larp is usually followed by structured activities – debrief, deroling, and decompression. Here players and organizers come together for an out-of-character cooling-off period, when everyone bids farewell to the fiction. Participants discuss what happened during the larp, and in this discussion a shared and communal meaning of the experience starts to emerge. This is the third larp: the larp as remembered, interpreted, and documented. Later, as the larp is remembered, debated, discussed and critiqued, its meanings continue to shift. While we can simplify this and say that a larp is created by the designers, brought to life and interpreted by the player, and negotiated and narrativized by the participant community, the designer is present in every stage. A poorly designed larp can be elevated by virtuoso runtime gamemasters. The work of a designer does not end when the game has run its course: Just as well-designed workshops contribute toward a play experience, designing the debrief also offers possibilities to reframe and enhance the overall experience. Some designers also write reports about their larps or share other documentation, in part to try to control the narrative about their larp in their community. In common parlance “larp” usually only refers to the runtime, when characters are being played. This book will follow the emerging nomenclature where the “larp” includes all on-site activities, such as the workshops preceding the runtime, where players acquaint themselves with other players, their characters, and rehearse larp mechanics. The cooldown period after runtime, where the players bid farewell to the fiction, is also included. “Larp design” refers to the design of all aspects of the participant’s interactions with the work, not just the parts that occur on location. Larp has an uneasy relationship with storytelling, and the terminology connected to it. In this book we follow Simon Brind’s example – see his chapter later in the book – and use plot in the sense of plotting (the pre-planned parts of the larp and backstory created by the designers), story in the sense of storytelling (what happens moment to moment in the larp), and narrative as an account (the narrativized tale told afterwards of the sequence of events that happened in the larp). These reflect the larp as written, the larp as played, and the larp as remembered. There are a number of terms that help differentiate between things that happen within the runtime of the larp, and things that happen outside it. The term for the boundary between larp and everyday life is magic circle. This is a metaphor for the separate nature of play. Larping, and play in general, are a step apart from quotidian life. Meaning is transformed on the boundary (a foam sword becomes a real sword, a player becomes a character) and repercussion also change. Who we are outside of larp should not impact on how we are interpreted in larp, and the characters we play should not reflect on our everyday selves. Indeed, this is the social contract known as the role-play agreement. In practice, however, the line between the everyday life and the larp is porous. Character feelings always bleed into the player, and vice versa. Yet, to be able to play, we need to pretend that / 18 the larp is clearly separate from the quotidian, as that gives us alibi to act in ways that would be strange or even unthinkable for us outside larp. The most common terms for things that are happening within the larp is ingame, while things that are not part of the larp are offgame. The terms in character and out of character are sometimes used to differentiate specifically between character and player actions. A more specific term in this area is diegetic, which refers to things that are true within the fiction of the larp. The opposite of this in non-diegetic. To put it simply, music in the play area is diegetic if characters can hear it, and not if they cannot. PLAYING TOGETHER Larps are constructed through various implicit and explicit agreements about how to play together. Most fundamentally, there are rules; implicit and explicit agreements of what is being done and how. Some rules are explicit (“the larp ends when the bell rings”) and others are implicit in the culture (“team members walking in the play space in their modern clothes are not present in the medieval fiction”). Various mechanics are often used to focus the narrative or to represent acts that would be impossible, dangerous, or excessively intimate, such as magic, violence, or sex. Rules called metatechniques, typical for many Nordic larps, are gestures and other representations that break the boundary between the character and the player, allowing players to communicate past the mask of the character during runtime. For instance, a metatechnique might be used to indicate that a player is breaking the fourth wall and speaking her character’s thoughts to the other players in a way that the other characters cannot diegetically hear. The runtime of larp is a joint effort for the runtime gamemasters and players. They create the larp together, using the rules, mechanics, and metatechniques. This provides an environment for inter-immersion, where everyone is playing not just their own characters, but supporting everyone else’s play: you cannot play a king unless others play your subjects. Because of how social reality is collectively constructed, the players can be said to be “immersed” in not just their own character, but every character. This is the magic trick that makes the fiction come alive: when everyone pretends that it is real, it starts to feel real. While on the one hand larp is communal and shared, and cannot really work if a player is fully alone, it is on the other hand personal and subjective. Each and every player sees a different part of the larp: the player literally only sees what their character sees. They are both the players on stage and the audience for the playing. This is called first-person audience. Furthermore, there is hidden internal play that may not be visible to any other participant, but that colours the player’s experience. Any fear, desire, surprise, anxiety, or joy a character feels is part of the show enjoyed by the first-person audience. The designer cannot see the larp as the players see it, it is only available to the experiencer. / 19 Consent is an essential concept and an important practice for this playful co-creation. As one can never know in advance exactly what the ensemble of players and organisers will do during a larp, it is not possible to give informed carte blanche consent. Therefore it must be possible to renegotiate and withdraw consent at any time. Numerous rules and mechanics exist for negotiating different limits; it is one thing to negotiate consent for physical boundaries of players, another to negotiate story consent, i.e. what one character can do to another. Consent mechanics and metatechniques are two examples of how designers negotiate the fact that larp is both real and fictional at the same time. There are numerous concepts for understanding the transformation of meaning that happens on the edge of the magic circle. For example, players can steer their characters to act in various ways to generate interesting play or to experience interesting things (“I want to be at the garden at midnights since there is going to be a cool scene there, so I need to rationalize why my character should go there”). Some larps are designed to be intentionally transparent, letting all the participants know roughly what is going to happen, to allow steering towards interesting story outcomes or situations. Furthermore, transparency need not be full in the sense that players know the plot, but it can have a transparency of starting point, for example of character motivation. Allowing all players to read each other’s character descriptions means they will be able to understand why another character would do something, and play it up for drama, even if their characters do not. FORMS OF LARP Larp takes many, many forms. This book concentrates broadly on a specific tradition of Nordic larp, or Nordic style larp. It is collaborative, which means the participants are not each other’s adversaries even though characters might be – they are playing to create something together, not against each other to win. It approaches larpmaking through bespoke design: instead of aiming to design one rules system or story world to enable the telling of all stories a player base might be interested in, it designs the system anew for each event as needed to enable the most suitable themes and actions for that piece. This means Nordic larp tends to be, by international standards, rules-light – a player will not be asked to memorise tens or hundreds of pages of mechanics. Larps in this tradition can be broken down into further categories, although the boundaries between (and the terms for) each keep shifting. Larps that last a full day or several days, possibly with act breaks between different parts, with full scenography and players in full costumes, do not really have an established term. These have been the default setting and thus no single word exists for them. In this book these larps are called longform larps. Longform larps are cumbersome to set up, and most of them are only played once, although re-runs and desig- / 20 ning for multiple runs from the get-go are increasingly common. A larp played only once by a relatively small amount of people can still have an impact on the discourse, as the wide range of longform larps referenced in this book exemplifies. Blockbuster larp is a specific form of longform larp; often a larp targeting an international audience, featuring an expensive venue, high participation fee, and a high concept idea. Blockbuster larps are often based on existing intellectual property, and tend to get hyped in the community – before and after the run. Larps that have a wide, unclear, or even unlimited play area are called pervasive larps. These events take place on the street of a city, amongst unsuspecting bystanders. Pervasive larps in urban environments are also called city larps. Shorter larps, with their length measured in hours instead of days, are called chamber larps. These often also take place in a smaller venue and with fewer players. The demands on scenography and costuming are sometimes lower. Chamber larps are easier to package and restage. Larps that are played in a minimalistic set, with precise control over light, sound, and props, are called blackbox larps. The term comes from theatre black boxes which are one place where staging blackbox larps is handy. This is very much an aestheticized form, where clarity and elegance are often design goals and everything that is incidental is removed. Finally, there are freeform scenarios. In the Nordic countries, these used to be considered halfway between tabletop role-playing and larps, while in for instance the US they were considered a kind of chamber larp. In the international discourse around Nordic larp in the last decade, freeform became lumped in with longform; at the same time a fruitful exchange of design practices took place between the two disciplines, bringing them closer together. In this book we conform to the international standard of using larp as the top category, even though some of the referenced freeform scenarios would have just as natural a place in a book about tabletop role-playing. Freeform scenarios, so called because they have no standard form, are for this same reason difficult to precisely describe. They typically last a few hours, are usually played without costumes, props, or special lighting in whatever space is available, often feature heavy use of inventive bespoke mechanics and metatechniques, and are sometimes heavily gamemastered. ON TERMINOLOGY The terminology presented here has evolved over the years. Many of them are metaphoric and at least seemingly self-explanatory (transparency, runtime), although they have specific meaning. Some of the language has been adapted from other fields (diegetic comes from film theory), some come from academic study of larp (such as pervasive larp), while others have grown within the international larp design community (blockbuster, bleed). / 21 Many terms have migrated from tabletop role-playing games and continue to be used even if they seem nonsensical. Non-player character (NPC) is such a term: Non-player characters obviously have players in larps – they are just usually coordinated by runtime gamemasters and they have less agency. New terms also appear regularly and a useful term can spread like wildfire. This means that it is not always clear who came up with a term. Often the terms are attributed to the community or the tradition, but each term was coined by someone. For example, a few years ago the term herd competence spread throughout the community. It puts into words the idea that running a larp for a group of participants where at least some have prior experience of larping is much easier than running a larp for a group with only beginners. If there is enough herd competence – if there is enough experience in the room – beginners can easily pick up how to larp by following the example of the others. This was quickly followed by herd costuming: when everyone puts a little effort in their costumes in a great environment, everyone will look fabulous. Few people know that “herd competence” was coined by larp designer Teresa Axner, and in this book there are numerous terms that have similarly become seemingly orphan. The meaning of terms can also shift over time. The term blockbuster larp was originally used critically of larps targeting the biggest possible audiences with high production values (and, implicitly, perhaps a weaker game design). Since then it has been embraced by the creators of many big-budget larps, and no implications about quality remain attached to the term. Only terms that are useful survive in design practice. Concepts described as terms are mental tools, things to think with. If they do not make the design practice smoother, new tools are needed and will emerge FURTHER READING: Eirik Fatland & Markus Montola: “The Blockbuster Formula: Brute Force Design in The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry” in Nielsen & Raasted (eds.): The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book (2015) Johanna Koljonen: “The Dragon Was the Least of It: Dragonbane and Larp as Ephemera and Ruin” in Montola & Stenros (eds.): Playground Worlds (2008) Markus Montola: On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Understanding Role-Playing and Pervasive Games. (2012) Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola (eds.): Nordic Larp (2010) / 22 HOW REAL IS LARP? // Simo Järvelä Designing a larp is about constructing an artificial situation that is completely real. The players treat it as fictional – which it is – but it is also something fully embodied by the players. The larp designer needs to grasp this fundamental duality. Larp takes place in a specific social situation, within a social frame, that has social rules of its own within it. It is often called the magic circle. Besides game-like rules, it also applies to social rules – players can do many things in larp that would be frowned upon outside it. However, all the feelings, perceptions, actions etc. that take place during a larp are fully real. They have different meaning within the magic circle of the social frame of play, and consequently we can, for example, lie and cheat or be aggressive during a larp – that is, act in a manner that would have heavy social consequences outside it. In our larp communities we build that alibi through different larp design features, and through a selection of agreements and excuses that enable the non-standard behaviour. Of these the most classic is probably “it isn’t me but my character”; “the feelings aren’t real” and “it’s only fiction” are also in common use. This is a convenient shorthand to negotiate the consequences of actions within the frame of the fiction, but taken too literally, it creates a whole lot of confusion. The social framing and the alibi are tied to the concept of immersion, the subjective feeling of becoming one’s character and temporarily forgetting oneself. After larp ends, when the player still feel parts of “what their character felt” during the game, it is called bleed, and talked about it as though some feelings bleed from the character to the player, or vice versa. In the original research paper describing the bleed dynamic it was never meant to be psychologically accurate, but more like a metaphor, a description of what bleed subjectively feels like. More strictly speaking, there is no autonomous character; a larp character is a conceptual structure in the player’s (and co-players, etc.) minds. So, while bleed and immersion certainly are real in the sense that something clearly happens that gives us those experiences and you and the players can build your art around them, they are not real in the sense that there would be a process of literally becoming the character and the players’ identities changing to that of a fictive person, or that the character would really have feelings or thoughts, or that they would bleed into the player. All the feelings, thoughts, and actions are the players’. PART SECTION CHAPTER 1:1:2 / 23 Cognitively, immersion is primarily an attention process where the player strongly focuses on the fictive conceptual frame, its social rules and dynamics, and importantly, the character concept. Attention is a cognitive function that selects what the person’s current focus is. Focusing on something allocates more processing power to it in the brain and selective attention inhibits other influences from interfering. Attention also modulates what reaches consciousness and what fills it; that is, attention can bring content to a person’s consciousness that they would otherwise be unaware of, and completely block out other elements not relevant to their current interests. That selective quality is essential when a player focuses on the fictive frame and tries to ignore everything else, typically elements not consistent with the fictive frame, such as the green emergency exit lights in medieval castles or the challenging work meeting next week. Consequently, deep immersion takes place when the player is focused strongly enough on the larp so that it fills their consciousness, and everything around them that is not part of the fictive frame is blocked from their consciousness by attention processes. However, all that which they are not focusing on – including their everyday selves – does not disappear anywhere, it is there, even when the player is not momentarily aware of it. That creates the illusion of immersion. Different players seem to be immersing themselves in slightly different aspects of the fictive frame – from character immersion to narrative immersion – but even when the target varies, it is fundamentally the same attention-based brain process that cognitively explains the phenomenon. Entering and returning from the social frame of larp is not necessarily easy or automatic, nor is it a foolproof system; things are often messy around the edges. However, this is true for all social frames, not just larps. That’s why after the larp participants need to process their experiences and the emotions they felt during the larp, in a different social frame and meaning structures: “it was all real, it was me, it was you, and we did and felt all those things”. All of that just does not mean the same thing as they would in everyday life. This is what debriefs are for, and a common practice is to first switch frames and separate the character from the player. Indeed, how to strengthen the temporary social frame of larp, how to enter it efficiently, how to uphold it during the larp, and how to return from it and leave it behind in a purposeful manner, are at the core of larp design. These transitions are fundamental to larp as an art form. Designing them is essential, and there already are a selection of tools, such as different techniques for workshopping, debriefing and decompressing that help in creating, upholding, entering, and returning from the social frame. Viewing larp as a temporary social frame – while rather a theoretical approach – will help you to tie all these different techniques into a single framework, and supports your decision-making on what tools to use to achieve the desired outcome. Also, larp design is not only for designers; players utilize similar thinking when they for instance are preparing for a larp, or post-processing their experiences. For players, understanding the nature of tem- / 24 porary social frames and what happens when they fail, provides valuable insight into why they are feeling in a certain way and supports self-care and empathy towards fellow players. In conclusion, while it is essential to uphold and strengthen the social frame that fundamentally enables us to larp at all, and perhaps can be necessary to keep using excuses like “it wasn’t me, but my character” to uphold character alibi, it is counterproductive and confusing to take those too literally when processing them afterwards, or when designing a larp. Heavy experiences, life altering transformative experiences, confusing bleedy experiences, or unsuccessful experiences that leave us feeling like an outcast, all crave validation and to be handled as real – which they are. As a designer, you need efficient conceptual frameworks to support your thinking, and while metaphoric thinking can be incredibly powerful, it can also lead you astray. So, let’s support the frame by design, and acknowledge when it benefits from talking about characters as autonomous identities and larps as alternate realities, and when such metaphoric talk is just confusing and counterproductive. FURTHER READING: J. Tuomas Harviainen: “The multi-tier game immersion theory” in Gade, Thorup & Sander (eds) As Larp Grows Up (2003) Simo Järvelä & Karete Jacobsen Meland: “Beyond Play: functions and design of debriefs” in Svanevik, Andreassen, Brind, Nilsen & Strand (eds) Once Upon in Nordic Larp…: Twenty Years of Playing Stories (2017) Lauri Lukka: “The psychology of immersion” in Back (ed) The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp (2014) Markus Montola: “The positive negative experience in extreme role-playing” in Saitta, Holm-Andersen & Back (eds) The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (2014, originally published in 2010) / 25 AN INTRODUCTION TO BESPOKE LARP DESIGN // Johanna Koljonen Larp design in the Nordic tradition is centred on collaborative play and on larp as a design discipline. It is interested in new work, which means that even though larp campaigns (series of larps with many sequels) do figure in the discourse, its focus is on one-shots – larps that are standalone works. In this tradition, for reasons relating to its production contexts, one-shot larps are rarely designed with pre-existing rule systems. By definition then, the Knutepunkt tradition of Nordic-style larp has become focused on bespoke design. Bespoke design means that every time you make a larp, you will approach it as a new work and design it from scratch. You will decide what you wish to achieve, for instance what your larp is about and what you would like your participants to experience or feel. Then think through what your design parameters and available resources are; for instance, how much time you have, what participants are willing to pay, and how their cultural assumptions about play operate. Within this frame, you will make among the available design choices – those that best serve your design goals. A handbook in bespoke larp design, then, will include very few answers and quite a lot of questions, together with explanations of the design principles that should guide you when you make your choices. Another aspect that separates this type of larp design from others is its analysis of how the runtime experience is shaped by the whole participant process, the surrounding culture, and even events and discussions taking place long after the larp has been played. DESIGNING THE TOTAL LARP Over the years, larp designers would occasionally bump into problems whose solution did not seem to lie entirely within the field of game design. A Nordic example from way back in the 1990s was the so-called fishwife problem. Solving it took a long time – arguably it is still not fully achieved. The process can illustrate how most of the conceptual tools of Nordic larp developed over the years: not because the designers felt a burning need to write theory, but because a more nuanced understanding and more specific language was required to solve practical design problems. PART SECTION CHAPTER 1:1:3 / 32 larp. A great thing about having a similar idea to a previous larp is that you can get access to people with experience of making and executing that idea. Find out as much as you can about their implementation. Always seek out experience that can help you become better. This will save you time and save you from a lot of pitfalls and mistakes. If the idea has been done before, the follow-up question is: can you do it better? Larp theory and practice move fast and if you are up to date with the latest trends and methods the idea will be executed in a new and fresh way. You still have to be able to explain in detail why your version of the idea will be better. If you cannot, your idea is not clear enough. WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR IDEA? If you want your idea to be relevant, especially in an artistic context, your idea will need something fresh that contributes to the conversation in the design communities you belong to. You need to be able to articulate which elements of your idea are unique and why. This is super hard, as there are thousands of larps made before yours that you know nothing about. (This is also the reason you should be very cautious of saying that your larp is doing something “for the first time ever”. It is probably not). WHAT THEMES AND ACTIONS ARE EMBEDDED IN YOUR IDEA? Strong themes will make your larp better. From writing and design to production and communication, they will guide all of your decisions: whenever you need to make a design choice, you should pick one that supports your themes without weighing down the overall design. The focus that a theme gives your idea is invaluable in extracting what actions are available for your participants. Meaningful actions – that speak to the participants and directly connect the characters to the core themes – are what creates a good larp. The more time you spend locking down your themes, the easier the rest of the design process will be. The genre of the larp is not the same as its themes. For example, Star Wars and Blade Runner are both sci-fi, but very different in their major themes. Star Wars fits the subgenre of space opera and among its main themes are resistance and overcoming tyranny. Blade Runner can be positioned in the subgenre of future-noir, and its theme is the question of what is it to be human. The difference in themes radically affect what stories you can tell and what actions are available to the characters. A good example of a clear set of themes can be found in the larp Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011). The three main themes of the larp are love, desire and fear of death. From these themes, and the setting of gay America at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s, all the actions that the characters engage with / 33 were extrapolated. Sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, friendship and death would frame almost all actions through the larp. HOW MANY LAYERS DOES YOUR IDEA HAVE? For an idea to have wide appeal, it should be layered with many levels. If you only have one layer to your idea, your larp may come out as shallow and there will not be enough for your participants to explore. As you fine-tune and iterate your idea, try to expand it by adding layers that adhere to the themes of the larp. Try to make all the layers move in the same direction and intersect with each other fluidly in order to avoid interference and confusion. An example of several layers working in unison is from the larp Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) based on the play by Shakespeare. One of the main themes is indecision: Prince Hamlet cannot make up his mind about whether he should kill King Claudius or not. Because of this indecision he and his family are destroyed. All characters in the larp have the same inherent tension. In the written text of each character, there are suggestions for what actions to perform during the larp. There are some positive actions (“to be”) and some negative actions (“not to be”), and participants are recommended to steer back and forth between these suggestions, enacting indecision in their play. Another level is that all noble families are based on other works of fiction that are in turn based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. House Belar is based on the TV series Sons of Anarchy, House Cornelius on Michael Moorcock’s book The Eternal Champion and House Voltemand on House Harkonnen from Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. These are only some of the levels that intertwine and give the participants the possibility to approach the larp from a multitude of angles. WHO DO YOU EXCLUDE WITH YOUR IDEA? There is no way around it – all ideas will in some way exclude someone from participating. You need to know who you are excluding and be able to explain why that is the case, and why you have chosen to exclude them. Because you have. You should always own your design choices. Exclusion could happen because of many factors. If your larp idea is a post-apocalyptic larp where everybody drives cars, you will exclude people who cannot drive. If the participants have to bring their own tricked-out cars, you will exclude people who do not have the funds or skillset to make a car look like something out of Mad Max: Fury Road. As excluding people is inevitable, it is not necessarily a problem, but if you do not actively think about who you are excluding, you are likely to keep excluding the same groups every time – or excluding some simply out of laziness. If your idea has elements that explore for example racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism or fat-phobia, you will also need to be able to / 34 explain in what manner these themes are handled and why their presence is important for your idea. Even if you succeed in creating a respectful treatment that no one has objections to on principle (which is very hard to achieve), you should expect that some participants who whose lives are affected by these structures will still not be able to participate, and will therefore be effectively excluded. This can happen even if you yourself belong to the same group. This is not to say you should not make the aforementioned larp. You can make larps about anything, including the above themes, as long as you are able to stand by your work and explain why it is important to do so. CAN YOU MAKE YOUR IDEA UNDERSTANDABLE TO YOUR PEERS? When your idea has gone through several iterations, it is time to subject it to a sanity check. This means showing your idea to experienced larp designers and a few potential participants to see if they understand your vision and if they can imagine it working as a fully developed larp. The participants and designers you consult can have different artistic preferences and practices, and you should be able to explain to them why your approach to the specific idea is better for what you want to achieve. If your peers do not understand your idea, you need to go back and iterate some more to sharpen it. Every time you pitch your idea, you will understand it better and see where the weak points are. DOES YOUR EGO GET IN THE WAY OF THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR IDEA? Finally, you need take a critical look at your idea and remove all the elements that are in there only to stroke your own ego. Many potentially great larps have been ruined by unchecked egos. You need to remove, for example, any part of your idea where the top reason to include it would be that you think it is cool, badass, or edgy for the sake of being edgy. If one of your design goals is to make the best larp ever so that others will know you have, you should rethink. Especially if you are not getting paid for your work, being rewarded in fame can seem very appealing. Your ego will distort the focus of your larp and dilute the end result for your participants. Separating yourself from your work will make the end result better. / 35 Let me make two guesses: you wish you had the skills to make big larps? And you you wish more people could experience that really cool one you went to? I can tell you how to get started on both: why not rerun that larp you loved as a method to bootstrap your own learning? There are a ton of benefits. First, you know the larp will be awesome, you’ll probably get to work with the experienced designers who made it in the first place, and you get to see what makes a great larp tick. Most larpwrights are flattered and excited to have their larps run again and usually want to be involved in the reruns. Second, you don’t have to worry about impostor syndrome or the larp actually working, but will know it is a solid product from day one. And you can tap into the brand value of the original larp and not have to rely on your own charisma to lure players in. Mads Havshøj, Mads Delholm Holst and I started out wanting more people to have the intense experience we had had at the Norwegian run of Brudpris (Sweden, 2013, Eng. Bridal Price), a Swedish multi-day larp about a patriarchal village society. We assembled ourselves into an organizing group, decided on our core principles for the production – openness, attention to players, and a spacious schedule and budget – and laid out a plan. Then we nervously asked for permission from the designers, and thankfully got a yes. For our first run of Brudpris in Denmark in 2016 our focus was on learning player communication and practical production. We had a style of combining collective decision making with individual assignments that worked well with the different skill sets we brought in. Most decisions were made during bi-weekly conference calls, where we brought up the relevant tasks and made sure one of us was responsible for doing each job. From the original designers we got a lot of knowledge and design improvement ideas, but also leeway to take the larp in our own direction. In the end we kept the final product close to what we had tried as players. The result was a lot of happy players and a couple of mistakes to learn from. We studied the feedback emails we requested from the players and compared them to what we saw fail during runtime. From that we found solutions to rectify the issues, and realized we needed to run another big larp in order to implement our fixes and see if they were viable. We chose to do a rerun again, but to try a different larp. LEARN DESIGN BY RERUNNING LARPS // Oliver Skjødt Nøglebæk / 36 For our second rerun we picked up Lindängens Riksinternat (2013, Sweden, Eng. State Boarding School of Lindängen), later run by the same teams as as Lindängen International Boarding School, which we would bring to Denmark in 2017. Location factors required us to add 50% more characters, and having gotten practical matters down to a routine gave us the time we needed to learn how to actually design and write the characters. The original designers were skilled character writers, and we learned a lot when we asked them to collaborate with us on writing the new characters and integrating them into the existing cast. We were still not entirely satisfied that we had learned all we wanted, and chose to go back to Brudpris. For Brudpris – a few years later (2018, Denmark, Eng. Bridal Price – a Few Years Later) we only kept the story framework, wrote up a whole new cast of characters and tweaked the setting a bit. We added a fourth team member, Liv Lykke Schubert, and rebuilt the workshop and debrief from the ground up, to try a novel approach. It worked out pretty close to perfectly, and the only reasonable step from here would be doing a completely original larp. We learned a lot through this process, grew and honed our personal skill sets. While we may not individually have learned each and every skill of a larpwright, we now know enough to collaborate with or lead others in doing the things we haven’t done ourselves. We’ve made all the beginner’s mistakes at a pace that gave us time enough to solve them right, rather than being forced to move on. When picking a larp to rerun, make sure that you can transfer the core of the design to your own local conditions and team without losing the parts that makes playing it special. The design should be solid enough that the few beginner’s mistakes you’re likely to make won’t derail it. You should also pick a larp that most of your team members have actually played, so you have concrete elements to redesign, rather than vague ideas. How you structure your organizing group is a very individual choice. We suggest a flat collective structure where choices are discussed and everyone will have a chance to bring ideas and learn from each other. Make sure everyone feels okay with handing off assignments if they grow too big to handle or life gets in the way. Increase the challenge from larp to larp, start with the practical basis of logistics and player-facing interactions before opening up to core design elements. We also found it well worth our time and money to pay people for doing the jobs we didn’t want to do. We covered transport for all our kitchen helpers, paid a musician, a photographer and the cleaners. All of it well worth it for not burning out the team. Make sure to identify the places where you can make the process easier on yourself – the players will appreciate a smooth production and calm staff more than a little discount. We also made a very conservative budget, so we could afford to solve last minute problems easily and fast. Interacting with players was a constant, laborious task. We set out with principles about openness and hone- / 37 sty, which turned out to be quite the challenge to uphold. Especially having to tell people they couldn’t come to our larp was hard, as were cancellations. We learned quickly that at least a third of the people who accept characters the first time around will drop out before runtime, so we made sure late reserves got cheaper or free tickets. It is also vitally important to make sure communication is centralized. If every organizer tries to answer all the emails or Facebook posts, you’ll end up with a confused mess. And think ahead about how you’ll handle player problems and drama. For us, the player safety work starts the moment the players see our teasers. We got everything we wanted out of our process and then some, and made great larps live a new life or two. On a personal level it’s been an absolute pleasure being able to give the designers of great larps a chance to come to our reruns to play their own works. We all write larps we want to play. It feels good to give other designers the experience in return. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Brudpris nordiclarp.org/wiki/Brudpris_A_Few_ Years_Later nordiclarp.org/wiki/Lindängens_Riksinternat NAILED IT! / 38 PART 2 / 41 SECTION 2:1 HOW TO DESIGN THE PRE-LARP PROCESS Most of what happens during the runtime of your larp is shaped or determined by the decisions, choices, and experiences of your participants before it starts – often even before they arrive at the venue. From the moment you announce, a two-way process of player selection begins, in which you try to attract the players who would be the best fit for your larp, and the players are weighing their interest in the promised experience and your ability to actually deliver it. Many larps require participants to read, memorise, plan, co-create story (often with strangers), understand your aesthetics and prepare a costume, and stay on top of large amounts of logistical, play-related, and diegetic information. You are asking a lot, and their work is mission critical for your larp: the storyworld can only come alive if it already lives in the minds of the players. Showing respect for the participants’ investment of time, effort, and creativity will help you earn their respect in turn. All interactions with your project at this stage will affect not only the trust the participants have in you, but also the mindset with which they approach playing with each other. Design your participant culture with intention. If you encourage a warm, curious, and respectful tone, even participants who do not know / 48 at the Court of Claudius.” Taken together, the front page shows you not only that corruption is a central theme of the larp, and that you will be playing towards death and madness, but also that this adaptation is not set in the same era as the original play. The website goes on to elaborate on the experience and play style, including a basic explanation of what larp is. The subpage “Is this larp for me” discusses content, playstyle, and principles of playstyle calibration, as well as questions of access and ability. Inside Hamlet has been run six times at the time of this writing, but the communication is still being iterated. The production attracts many non-larpers (academics, Shakespeare super fans, performance professionals, immersive theatre enthusiasts) whose varying backgrounds and expectations all need to be responded to. At the same time, as more players have experienced the larp, the more its reputation in established larp communities changes, and communication needs to adapt in response to this as well. Since Inside Hamlet is based on a well-known play, its themes are easier to communicate clearly and swiftly than it might be for an event set in an original universe. Each time the same larp runs, the more players can be ambassadors and tell new potential players what to expect. Even so, teaching players how it is actually played still requires careful communication and on-site workshopping. Remember that you start curating the experience from the moment you announce the larp. Everything on your website, your teaser posts, and your communication with players should pull in the same direction. Larps with a high price point and ambitious production values are currently made by a few professional companies, a rapidly growing number of semi-professional organisations, and a few non-profits. This means that if the website looks very professional and the price is high, participants are likely to have expectations on delivery, consistency, and professionality that the organisation then needs to meet, regardless of whether anyone is getting paid. By creating a professional-looking website and booking a spectacular venue, you will signal to your potential player base that this is a semi-professional or even professional production. If the price point is high as well, your players will have a quite reasonable claim not just on production value, but also on your attention, since larp is participatory and they are co-creators of your event. For more detailed discussions on how to communicate what the actual experience of your larp will be like, see the chapters by Edman and Li & Townsner in this volume. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW FROM THE PLAYER Larps are physical, embodied experiences, invariably shaped by the players you bring to the event. Their expectations, their interpretations and their actions are / 49 what drives the event once it’s running. Knowing who they are, what they need, and what they are after, will help you manage expectations (and solve production challenges early, which it is usually easier and cheaper than reacting to problems during runtime). In order to design the best experiences for the players you have, you will need to know a few things about them. First off, think about the practical information you need. At minimum, you are likely to collect participant names and contact info. Be mindful to only ask for information you need. Do you need legal names for insurance reasons? Or do you only need it to be able to recognise who’s coming? Not everyone uses their legal names online, and might not be comfortable with you holding or sharing their legal name. Accessibility issues might impact the layout of the play space or the design of meals, spaces or events, so you will need to discuss with your players both what they require and what it is possible for you to resolve (which will not be everything for everyone). If you are serving food during the larp, you need to know players’ allergies and dietary requirements. You might need contact information of next of kin in case of emergencies. You need to know when they can be on site and how long they can stay, and you might need to know how much they can contribute and what they can bring. For international larps, you might have to advice them on travel, or even arrange it for them. You might also need to know a bit about what kind of play experience the participant is after. Do they wish to play their out of character gender? Are they willing to play on themes of for instance romance? Although your larp will have a theme and a direction, you will sometimes want players to tailor their experience to their preferences. It would also be good for you to know about the play culture they are from and what that implies for their limits and expectations. Think through all the practical info you need to know about your players and make sure you ask for it as efficiently as possible, ideally in one form only. The more times you ask people for information, the more todo tasks you stress your participants with, and the more of an administrative mess you will create for yourself. If you use a web form, make sure to make all the relevant fields in the form mandatory, to avoid having to chase people who’ve filled out nearly everything. PLAY CULTURE DESIGN Designing a culture of play – the collective norms, values and default behaviours of your participant group – is challenging, but important. Player groups are diverse and come with different sets of expectations, and you are unlikely to run a game for the same group of people twice. If you do not spend the time deciding what kind of play culture you want at your larp, the loudest group of players will end up designing it for you. / 50 Many different things influence player culture. The different communities your players are from, the style they are used to, the style you are used to, and the genre of larp you are making will influence what kind of play culture people expect from your larp. For instance, Nordic larp traditionally has had a collaborative play style, but this style is designed and grown through the community: it is not naturally inherent in larp as an artform. There are many collaborative-style larps made outside the Nordic countries that adhere to some but not all of the assumptions around play style and participant culture that are normative at the Nordic end of international larping. If you design collaborative larps, you may assume they’re much the same everywhere, but this is not the case and you do need to teach players how it works. [See Brown & Skirpan for one example of what that can look like. –Eds] People come with a set of expectations. You influence these expectations directly, through both tone, subtle cues, and explicit instruction. The more diverse your audience, the clearer you need to be in your communication of play style. The upcoming larp Tale of the North Wind (2019, Sweden) does this with a dedicated list of Dos and Don’ts. “Our larp is a place for collaborative storytelling. Rather than trying to best our co-players, we aim to engage in mutually fulfilling play” the website reads. “Do: ask before you touch someone. Do: state your boundaries. Don’t: steal other people’s belongings.” The explicit language leaves little room for interpretation, which should make the play style more homogenous. Your style of communication will influence the players too. You can teach some of the social rules of your larp through online communication before the larp. Another effective and engaging way to build player culture is through facilitated pre-play. PRE-PLAY AS A DESIGN CHOICE For some larps, where players are going to co-create the plot or a part of the story of the larp, it might be worth considering to invite players to try out their characters before the runtime of the larp. Pre-play is in-character interactions before arriving on location, typically in writing using text based role-play in for instance shared documents, Facebook groups or even handwritten letters. You might even provide an in-character social platform online, like for instance in the larps Avalon, Bunker 101 (Italy, 2018) and College of Wizardry (Poland, 2014). This form of pre-play allows players to prototype their characters and create a shared backstory before the larp begins. It creates a shared understanding of the setting and the themes of the larp, and creates relations that can feel more real due to the the collaborative way they have been built between the players. It puts more of the story creation in the hands of the people who are going to play it, and all of this allows players to start the larp at a sprint rather than a slow trot. Pre-play can provide a really powerful experience. It allows participants to try / 51 out behaviours and relations before the larp begins. It courts bleed – emotional spillover between characters and players – in an interesting way. But pre-play is labour intensive for players and, if you monitor it, for you as well. It requires hours online, which puts both social and economic pressures on participants. Although facilitated pre-play lets you seed plot before the larp begins, it is a lot of work that may only benefit a subset of your player group; those who can afford the time and have the language skills to be a part of it. This will tend to skew towards younger players, or those who are not working full time or parenting, and who are comfortable writing the language your larp is in. That leads us to the next problem: as usually only a part of the player group will engage with pre-play, any larp that opens up for pre-play tends to have a two-tiered larp experience. Some will engage with the pre-play and build really intense relations and plots. Others won’t touch it at all and will feel like they are less connected to the larp. This inherent power difference between those who pre-play and those who don’t might leave a significant part of your player base feeling short-changed. Pre-play can also allow experienced or particularly committed players to bring enough content to obscure problems with your core design. If enough participants participate, in essence writing their own larp to play, they will tell you afterwards your larp was great – because to them it was. This might drown out the voices of participants who believed you when you said the pre-play was optional, and then did not end up having much meaningful play. If you plan to use pre-play as part of your larp, be transparent about it during sign-up. That way, the players who sign up for your larp are aware that they will need to set aside time and spend effort building their character relations and playing out scenes in the months leading up to the event. Pre-play will work best for larps where you are handing over control of the story to players (such as sandbox larps, larps without set plots, or collectively organised larps where the participants build the whole experience together). In larps where the designers have a clear sense of where the story is headed and what will happen during runtime it might be counterproductive, as players will either play the storylines they have built together, rather than the one you designed, or be frustrated that their preparation was wasted. For campaigns, you will need to decide whether or not to permit role-playing between the larps. Narrative inequality problems based on which of the participants have time to play continuously will accumulate over time, potentially shutting some participants out of long-running plotlines. This alone is sufficient reason for many campaigns to discourage or outright ban online play between sessions. In addition, continuous play may – depending on your design – set you up for enormously time consuming additional gamemastering or arbitration. If your participants do not know each other out of character, play between sessions can also weaken the magic circle and thereby the character alibi. Encouraging participants to interact as themselves instead will create trust and a clear / 52 separation between the real relationship and the runtime interactions, and helps keep oppressive or hurtful social dynamics inside the fiction as they are clearly demarcated from real life. MANDATORY CO-CREATION It is of course a valid design choice to make pre-play mandatory, just like you might choose to make other kinds of co-creation mandatory. Many larp designs rely on players to prepare not just a costume but parts of their character background or even the storyworld together before arriving on location. [For cool examples of facilitated co-creation, check out Piancastelli and Giovannucci in this volume. –Eds.] In such designs, you will probably need to set deadlines for the co-creative work, and communicate clearly in advance how much time the participants should set aside in the weeks or months before the larp. However, requiring participants to do something on a deadline doesn’t solve the participants’ life logistics. The more time consuming the preparation is, the more it will exclude some participants from a good play experience, or indeed from the whole larp. Even highly motivated players who fully intend at signup to do the work promptly will sometimes find life getting in the way. This means you need time to chase them down, a system in place either to exclude them from the larp (at great social cost to yourself), or to produce the content in some other way (at some cost of emotional investment from the participants in question, and of time for your team). You will probably find that different participants find different parts of any mandatory preparation difficult. Text heavy collaborative work is especially labour intensive for players who are not playing in their first language. Chat or video calls at specific times are complicated to plan across time zones and a burden on participants with long hours and families. If your design requires people to create relationships or interesting shared backstories for their character it can easily begin to feel like a popularity contest, marginalising players who do not know the others or who might just be shy. Any design decision you make will have consequences not just on the larp, but on the players – who are always the co-creators of your larp. Keep in mind as you plan the journey through your larp that their work on the project starts at signup. Be respectful of their time and remember that information that may be very clear in your mind cannot be accessed telepathically. / 53 BEFORE YOU LAUNCH Before you launch your larp, you should usually have at least the following: • Have your team set up, with clear roles and responsibilities. • Core larp design, including any unusual mechanics or tools for playstyle calibration, as needed – players need to know what kind of thing they are signing up for, and this means you need to have decided it in advance. • A clear process for character creation, relation building, or any other part of your larp design that players will need to interact with before the runtime. • Enough detailed information about your venue to be able to make and communicate design decisions based on actual playability on site. This will also help you give clear information about accessibility of the venue and your design. • A plan for your outgoing communications. Ideally this is a spreadsheet scheduling any teasers or marketing, any project updates, and how all the materials required to understand and play the larp will be shared with the people who actually sign up. • A plan for your incoming data. Collect as much as you can already at signup. If you ask for it later, schedule reminders so people actually fill it out. Plan for and communicate what will happen if people do not (for instance, that you cannot then provide food for special diets). • A preliminary plan for how the logistics will work: setup, takedown, runtime. Use this to produce a preliminary schedule for the participants’ onsite experience. • Event safety plan – as with any event, you need to show you have a rational plan in place for handling emergencies or problems. If the specifics of your larp require additional support structures for your players, this too should be in place as you launch. FURTHER READING: Charlotte Ashby: “Playing Around the Event”, in Svanevik et. al (eds): Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories, (2017) Alma Elofsson & Mimmi Lundkvist, “Pre-larp communication”, in Svanevik et. al (eds): Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories, (2017) Johanna Koljonen: “What I Think About When I Think About Larp Design, Part I: The Total Larp”, in Safety in Larps, participationsafety.com (19.5. 2016) Martine Svanevik and Simon Brind, “Pre-Bleed is Totally a Thing”, in Särkijärvi, Loponen Kangas (eds): Larp Realia. Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp (2016) / 54 DESIGNING AHEAD OF PARTICIPANT NEEDS // Karin Edman A systematic approach for pre-larp communication on accessibility can make your larp smoother for participants with chronic or temporary pain, exhaustion and/or mobility issues. If you follow these four steps you will probably find that it benefits all your participants. Remember that not all needs can be met, no matter how well your design and adapt. Some needs are in conflict with each other, and you will sometimes have to make hard decisions. Finding the best solutions will be about building a relationship of trust. If the participant believes you are working to understand them and invested in enabling them to play, they will be more inclined to ask you for help. • Make an inventory of your larp design and venue • Inform about design and venue limitations • Map individual player needs • Revisit the design if possible and desired MAKING AN INVENTORY - LARP DESIGN AND VENUE The participants will need relevant information before the larp to be able to make the needed decisions about their participation. The only way to make that information available is if you yourself know the answers first. The questions below will divide this into two main groups: basic needs and playability needs. Basic needs are those of the physical body, for it to interfere as little as possible with participating in the larp. The playability needs, on the other hand, could be categorized as ‘wants’, but as you are likely to want all participants to enjoy and explore the larp, you should think of these wants as needs as well. You cannot be an expert on all physical variations and conditions, nor can you predict all needs. The only reasonable strategy is assuming participants know PART SECTION CHAPTER 2:1:2 / 55 their own body the best, and to tell them what the experience will be like – not deciding for them whether or not they can participate. That said, participants are only human and do not know everything about their own bodies. New issues might arise just prior to a larp, or during. A symptom that “should not manifest” can do so quite suddenly. That does not mean that the participant is not the expert on their own limits. If you have provided them with good information in advance, it will also help them understand how to deal with an unexpected situation during the larp. If they trust you have taken their needs seriously from the start, they will also be more understanding if additional accommodations during runtime are are not possible. BASIC NEEDS Sleep • Is the event so long the participants will have to sleep away from home? • Will the larp put them on another sleeping schedule than they are used to? • Will they share their sleeping quarters with others? • Is any of the sleeping done in character and does it mean different kinds of bedding than they are used to? • If the sleeping is done in character, can some participants still sleep in an out-of-character area, or is there a dedicated space that allows for out-of-character medication and devices being switched out/taken off applied? • Do you encourage participants to negotiate what rules will apply to their dorm/tent/bedroom with the people they co-sleep with, for instance whether or not the sleeping area will be out of character? Food and Water • Is the food at the larp different from what participants regularly eat? The things that might be different include be taste, smell, texture, food culture of origin and/or unusual spices. (If you have international participants, the answer is usually yes) • Does the larp’s design include a loss of control over food intake? Does the larp restrict energy intake in some way? (Vegan, no caffeine, no alcohol, bland food, mostly carbs/ mostly protein/ very high fat foods). Will players be able to bring, store and prepare their own food? • What kind of liquids are available for hydration, what alternatives are available? • Has the inclusion or exclusion of alcohol been considered and communicated? Even if it is a non-alcoholic event, think about what might be used as a replacement for ingame alcohol? • Are there situations where food or drink might be tampered with by other / 56 participants for diegetic reasons (for instance the resistance stealing the food of the occupants), or situations where a participant might be tricked into ingesting something unknowingly (for instance to simulate a poisoning)? If so, are these risks limited to certain substances? List them – participants can have intolerances or allergies you did not know exist. Shelter from the Elements • Does the larp drastically change how the participants normally dress, do the clothes feel, look or work differently? Are the clothes hard to get in or out off? Will some need assistance to get dressed? • Will everyone be able to dress according to the climate? What are the seasonal extremes of the local climate? If the larp is indoors, will there be a need to go or stay outside during play? • Nudity – are there ingame moments where some characters might be naked? This nakedness can both affect participants sensitive to cold but also those who have reason to not wish to make their body visible to others. Reasons can include that the character body and player body do not match (modern devices, genitals, prosthetics, scars, tattoos). • What will the weather be like? Will it be extreme weather? Will it be hot or cold? Do you have resources to warm or cool people? Some have difficulty regulating their own core temperature and this can become a problem. Hygiene and Medication • Will it be challenging for the participants to uphold their usual level of hygiene? • Will it be easy to take medication on a schedule? Can medicine be both stored cold and flexibly accessed? • How have you designed sanitation? Having quick and easy access to a toilet makes every event more pleasant for everyone. • Are participants expected to take care of their hygiene in character? If so, what are the standards? What is the level of privacy? Are there any alternatives? There is gain in not having to lose precious character play time even when your hygiene routine takes a while, but it can also be more relaxing to take care of yourself in a way more similar to your regular life (especially if your setting requires complex hair styling, makeup or prosthetics). You might not menstruate, but about half of players do. Some of them will use menstrual cups and expect to be able to wash these with running water in some privacy. Remember that not everyone who menstruates has full mobility or presents female. That said, all of your players will use toilets, and good hand hygiene / 57 is essential for everyone. Hand sanitizer is not a functional replacement for soap and water. Talking about bathrooms, another aspect arises: Allergies and scent sensitivity. If participants can be made to avoid perfumed products this will benefit players with allergies, asthma, scent sensitive migraines, etc. • Will bathrooms be inor offgame? • Does it take a while to get to the bathrooms from the larp area? • Is there running water? Is there hot water? • Are the bathrooms physically accessible? How is the lighting? • Is it easy for participants to know what time it is? • Are the bathrooms accommodating to non-binary participants? If the participants’ basic needs are met, they can exist at the larp without too high a cost to themself physically or mentally. If you have a good grasp of potential needs, and what the consequences can be of whether or not they are being met, your plan will be will be easier to communicate to the participants. As a result, participants will feel safer. Access • Is your venue physically accessible? Pay special attention to stairs, ramps, bathrooms, door widths. Consider whether there are conditions (poor lighting, constant background noise) that may affect for instance the partially sighted or the hard of hearing? • Is your written information accessible? Is your website legible to screen readers? If you are posting pdf files, will optical character recognition (OCR) work? Surprisingly many participants who might be able to play your larp have trouble reading or parsing big amounts of written information, for reasons ranging from dyslexia to being partially sighted or blind. If your players are international, not everyone’s first alphabet is necessarily the same as yours, which is an extra burden on the dyslexic. These players might be using tools such as screen readers; make sure your website is structured so that it is legible to those. PLAYABILITY NEEDS What will it take to really interact with play and enjoy your larp? Exercise and mobility What kind of demands does the larp make on the physical fitness of the individual participant? / 64 What dynamics might happen that may not be obvious and that players should be okay with? What expectations should players not have? Answers to these questions might overlap or be combined with an ingredients list, but include more abstract ideas like pacing, stylistic elements, and “anti-ingredients” - things definitely not included - that might not be included in a typical ingredients list. You can expect a slow start, with a story that slowly builds pace and clues to follow and unravel. Mare Incognitum is not a straight up railroaded larp, but will be guided at times, try to roll with it. Mare Incognitum (Sweden, 2014) Are you interested in EU policy? The characters in the larp will discuss EU policy on the level of actual, real issues. As a player you don’t have to be a politician or a lawyer, and we will do our best to make the issues approachable. However, you will end up reading EU policy documents and debating how they affect the interests of your masters. Parliament of Shadows (Belgium, 2017) Keep your eyes peeled and interact with as many people as possible, do not wait for ‘monsters’ to attack or for your named NPC to arrive. If you do this you will be disappointed. Tenement 67 (UK, 2017, ongoing) What types of creativity should players have easily, constantly, or spontaneously? More generally, what types of effort are involved? When the playing has started and we are inside the fiction, you will be portraying a character at all times. You will move, speak, act and often feel like your character would… When you choose your playing style, keep in mind that the experience is very long… Perhaps your character is unerringly polite. Perhaps they always need to tell someone else how they are feeling. Just one quality like that can help you perform the character consistently… Your character’s inner journey might be reflected in how they act. Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) Players must be up for full, continuous emotional immersion and continuity. It will not ‘break’ if you spend your entire time subtly emoting with other people. But it will ’break’ if you repeatedly break emotional immersion to be too goal-oriented. Mermaid (USA, 2018) / 65 It will be a successful experience if you flow with what happens to your character and lift the play of your coplayers. There are no objectives that will cause you to win or lose. The only thing we ask of you is to be in your character’s shoes, to connect with what they feel, to think the way they would think, and behave in the way they would behave, all the while allowing your character to make their own decisions. That’s what we call ‘flow’ or ‘letting go.’ Conscience (Spain, 2018) Some players perform ’meta songs’ during the larp. These are songs selected by the players, that reflect the character’s dramatic dilemma. Players can recruit friends to join into these scenes to create small musical numbers. All roles can be played with or without performing a meta-number. Cabaret (Sweden, 2017) Players should be comfortable performing their character and improvising dialogue in front of other participants. [hypothetical example] If players feel disconnected, what are actions they can engage in to get involved again? If you feel like nothing has changed for a while, it can often be because you have spent a long time in the same version of reality. Reveal a major conflicting fact about your past or another character’s, or pull one from the options on the wall. Fires of Emsi (USA, 2017) If you’re worried about your character becoming socially isolated, tell your closest co-players before play starts. This will give them the opportunity to include you in their plans even if your character is not always demanding their attention. Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) We will have two so called “consulting” organizers: NPC-like characters marching together with the players… go to them… when you want to do a major decision or take a step very different from what you have in your diary and you are perhaps unsure about the impacts on other players or timing; when you feel that another player has been ignoring you or underplaying you; when you feel bored and don’t know what to do; when you feel down about your game. Legie: Sibiřský příběh (Czech Republic, 2014, Eng. Legion - Siberian Story) / 66 You are encouraged to lash out in thoughtless action, physical or social, as acts of self-expression. Be spontaneous, don’t worry about consequences… Mermaid (USA, 2018) What actions can players take to enrich the game for others? All characters are unhappy, and all characters are complicit in each other’s pain, usually because of the way that they handle their unhappiness… You are not here to make friends. Act from your own wounds, and be casually mean to others. Create problematic circumstances freely: this will in turn create plot for others and allow them to pass on their own unhappiness. Mermaid (USA, 2018) Each player actively reacts to the other players’ characters in the way they want their characters to be portrayed. For example, if I want to play an intimidating and mysterious Seer, the characters of the other players will “lift my play” in their interactions with me, being fearful and respectful towards my character and believing in her prophecies. (Gouliou, Elina. Playing to Lift: Making Characters Shine. 2018: Pelgrane Press) Instead of barging around, blindly pursuing your own story, always take an interest in what journeys your co-players seem to be on. Their characters might invite yours in, making the experience richer for you both. Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) Help run the party while playing your character. For example, you might perform in a talent show, snap photographs of guests, lead a workshop, etc. Just A Little Lovin’, (USA, 2011) More broadly, a good way to go about thinking of the answers is by asking yourself, “What type of players would not enjoy my game? What types of actions might players attempt that would bring them away from the heart of the experience?” For example, the informational materials for Parliament of Shadows (Belgium, 2017) cited above provide an especially broad and clear description of what the concrete experience of gameplay is likely to be. Larp designer Juhana Pettersson, the creator of these materials, describes his thinking as follows: We knew that we were making an unusual larp in a setting that already had a rich larp tradition… We knew that our [Vampire: The Masquerade] larp would be different. It would be set in the same world and feature many of the same / 67 themes but a player who expected a familiar experience would be disappointed… We decided that we must be extremely clear in terms of what kind of activities happen in the larp, who you play, what kind of themes are prevalent, etc. We had an international player base so it would have been a bad idea to assume that people automatically understood something, since common assumptions about larp vary so much between different larp scenes. Retrospectively, I think all the worrying we did about being correctly understood made us do a pitch to participants that was clearer than in any other larp I’ve ever done. I think I also need to take a lesson from it!” How can you help players select themselves into or out of a given gameplay style? Designers sometimes shy away from giving clear descriptions about what’s common in gameplay, for fear that the audience will take example options as mandate and thereby cut off possibilities. However, by telling players what activities the larp best supports, you empower new participants to join on a more level playing field and to consent in advance to the activities most commonly necessary to be fully included. When you communicate what’s easiest, and what activities are the focus of the design, you are also telling people what to fall back on when they’re lost, unsure, or just tired. / 68 COSTUMES FOR REAL BODIES // Kerstin Örtberg // Anne Serup Grove It is common in larp to let the participants prepare their own costumes according to guidelines provided by the design team. But in some larps, it makes more sense for you to provide costumes or certain costume items for your participants, whether to maintain a specific aesthetic standard or because you need costumes to be visually consistent – for example to make sure soldier characters are in matching uniforms. Some high production-value larps provide large numbers of individually designed and sized costumes, like you would for a theatrical production. This requires professional staff who are likely to already know how to best organise their work. In the following we will discuss how to approach the more common option: purchasing costuming for your participants to use. To you, the designer, costuming is a practical matter; to the participant an emotional one. Realising this difference will help you make your costume vision a reality while keeping your larp open for players of all shapes and sizes. If you happen to fit a standard size, you might never have realized there are many players who will never sign up for a larp that promises to provide costumes for players; or who will sign up only with trepidation. A few players who upon arriving on location cannot find anything reasonable to wear will also not be top of mind for you when your larp is starting, but for those players it might quite practically make the larp a terrible or even unplayable experience. This is why you need to think ahead. Particularly anxiety-provoking aspects before signup include having to take measurements, maybe with the help from someone else; being confronted with the numbers and seeing what letter is assigned to it; and sharing those results with others. Anything that makes these things easier will be helpful to your players. PARTICIPANT CENTRED ASPECTS Size standardisations in the 1940s and 50s created new norms around the most common body types. At the same time a space outside of these was indirectly delineated as “not normal”. As living standards grew so did our bodies, but the standard sizes did not. Instead, as manufacturers understood the emotional diPART SECTION CHAPTER 2:1:4 / 69 stress it is created for their customers to be placed outside the norm, they started adjusting sizing independently. This phenomenon is called vanity sizing (size inflation) and each manufacturer did this differently. This process, in combination with the fact that standard sizes in different countries were different to begin with, left us with a confusing marketplace where the same sizing can mean very different things. In addition, anything touching on the topic of size and measurements is emotionally fraught for many people. WHEN WE TALK ABOUT BODIES The words you use have an impact on your participants. When discussing bodies, you should aim to be neutral in your language and stick to the facts. In terms of size you should use measurements instead of standard sizes whenever you can. Common pitfalls, to be avoided, are terms such as normal, typical, big, bigger, large, small. These are relative to the standardised scales and indirectly draw attention to what is considered flaws. In the attempt to be inclusive some production teams attempt to transfer terminology from other areas, but a useful term in other contexts may not necessarily be useful here. An example of this is able bodied; in the context of body size all sizes are able. HOW TO BUILD TRUST It will be calming for potential participants to understand not only that you will provide the costumes, but that you are aware of what this might mean to them. It will be beneficial to you both if you are also able to make visible your full plan for the costuming process. Should you not have had the time to gather all the information you need at the outset, be honest about where you are. If there are information gaps, it’s reassuring to know that they will be filled in later. Information to cover: • Vision for the costumes • Design choices and consequences • Your intentions to be inclusive and the knowledge of your limitations • What you will provide and what the participant should take care of • Measurements lists (don’t give sizes) • How you will guide the participant to find the right fit • Your plan to deal with non standard sizes • How and when the participant should contact you with questions When the participants start contacting you, remember they are not trying to frustrate you. Answer as truthfully as you can about your process, your plans and how you will help them. Update the information on your website to reflect questions you have received. This will save you emails from others and help participants who might be too embarrassed to even ask whether their size can be accommodated. / 70 PRACTICAL ASPECTS TO CONSIDER If at all possible you should order samples of the sizes in advance to sanity check the provider’s size charts and whether the materials and quality live up to what is promised. You don’t want to spend the nights in the week before the larp reattaching buttons. This will also give you a sense of whether the provider is reliable and easy to communicate with. Once you have the costume samples, you can also use them for promotional photos for your larp. When it comes to standard sizing you might encounter these issues: • Male fit is fixed on two points (chest, hip). Common issues with the fit in men’s sizes include length of arms, torso and legs, size of neck, shoulders and stomach. • Female fit is fixed to three point (chest, waist, hip) resulting in more variations. In addition to all of those mentioned for male sizes you might encounter issues regarding ratios between chest, waist and hip. Some women might also be pregnant, adding to the waist measurement. • Unisex fit is usually almost if not completely like male fit, with for instance wider shoulders. A body with wider hips and a narrow waist (many female bodies) will not fit in typical male/unisex pants even if the waist measurement is correct. • Will I look different: Even if you promise to cater to all sizes, participants outside the S-M-L scale can worry that their costumes will look different than those within. And indeed this tends to happen if you have to buy their costumes in a different place: those garments might be in other shades and have other details. Treat this worry with respect. Consider whether it is possible to add some visual variation to the standard sizes to make the outliers less apparent. MEASUREMENTS LISTS A size may differ in measurements depending on what brand, gender, country and garment type it refers to. You can for instance expect a French size to be two sizes smaller than the German size of the same letter. For this reason alone, getting a sizing chart based on measurements is vital. There are two types of measurement charts. The two types are body (measurements taken on the body) and garment (measurements of the finished garment). Be vigilant to note what type of chart you are looking at when doing research. The first is most common and will be easiest to understand. If you are buying clothes online, find a brand that has a wide set of sizes and caters for both male and female fit. Provide your participants with the measure- / 71 ment charts directly. Make sure the sizes available range from thin to fat and short to tall. Can you help the participants with adjustments on location to cater for height and fit differences? Tell them so in advance. When asking the participants to measure themselves you need to be very specific about HOW and WHERE. Should they measure on top of their clothes or underwear? On the bare skin? Show the specific places to measure with both pictures, not just words. Most people will for example place the waist not at natural waist, but much lower. Is it possible to make (or find online) a short video tutorial on measuring the body? Can you use a diversity of body types for your ”how to” measurement photos? If participants are between sizes you need to help them choose. If bust size is one size and waist another, ask them to pick the larger size. ORDER ONLINE When ordering clothing for participants online make sure you know the delivery times and add a few weeks as a buffer. Where does it ship from? Can it be stuck in customs? Will there be extra surprise VAT if ordered from abroad? Is it worth paying for express delivery? If something is delayed or wrong: contact the supplier and tell them to fix it or ask for economic compensation. Don’t be shy about making demands when you place a large order. COSTUME DESIGN PROCESS Start Launch Sign Up Participants Arrive Larp Starts Larp Ends Decide on costumes. Decide on how your costumes will influence participants practically and emotionally. Research options & measurement lists Research local possibilities Order sample clothing in advance Make plan of the process Produce visual measuring guide Prepare participant feedback form Present the costuming vision to the participants Communicate and answer questions Ask for participants’ measurements Help participants to decide on sizes Order clothing Reserve buffer time for delivery Plan B, C & D Last minute shopping Adjustments on site Emergency adjustments during runtime Return left over garments for money back Collect participants’ feedback / 72 PLAN B (AND C, AND D) Things will go wrong. Prepare. Participants may have given you wrong sizing, or misjudged measurements, or months have passed and their size has changed. Do you have enough clothes to be able to switch sizes around? A good rule is to order 5-10 % extra garments of each size. That way you have space for adjustments. It is better to provide participants with slightly too large clothes than too small, so consider whether you should order slightly more in the larger sizes. Extra unused clothes can sometimes be returned after the larp and give money back. Make space in your budget for panic shopping at the last minute and research the area around the larp location for suitable shops so you know where to go for supplies and additions. Will you have the possibility for clothing adjustment on site? Consider bringing a sewing machine and/or serger (and a responsible person) to the site for small adjustments during the pre-larp time. If your realise all your plans are failing, ask your players for help. Perhaps they are willing and able to bring backup items if you approach them with humility and respect. If you cannot deliver what you have promised, offer them a partial refund because they are helping you solve a problem, or as a last resort a full refund if they’d rather not play. Remember that while your problem might be with a pair of trousers, they might have taken out vacation time and paid for non-refundable airfare. Be worthy of that trust, and work together to find a solution that respects their investment and does not hurt their feelings. / 73 / 80 since you don’t want to forget stuff. You don’t want to have assumed someone else will say something really important only to realise no one planned for it or remembered, and you do not want to interrupt each other, because it looks unprofessional. Rehearsing what to say also allows you to fix things like the order of the information or find natural ways to lead from one topic or exercise into another. It is not common to test a workshop or briefing on actual humans, but if you are communicating something complex, it is a good idea. While you’re briefing or running a workshop your players will get confused and want to ask questions on every topic imaginable. This is not a failure on your part, it is just something that happens. Decide beforehand how to handle the questions. Can anyone ask questions at any time? Will you take questions at certain times or at the end of the workshop only? Will you direct all questions to specific team members during the breaks? If your participants all have access to the internet and charged devices, you can direct any workshop-time questions to, for instance, a specific thread on your larp’s Facebook page. (Remember to schedule a time for all participants to review the answers, in case something very important comes up). Most questions participants have during the workshop will likely be answered by what you have planned to say later during the workshop; for this reason letting the players interrupt at any time is not recommended. As you plan your briefing or workshop schedule, consider how the amount of questions is connected to your amount of participants. More people could mean more questions, but also possibly a higher threshold for asking certain types of questions. Consider whether some information could be handled in smaller groups instead. Try to anticipate your participants’ needs before they become questions. At the beginning of your briefing or workshop, if not earlier, you should tell them how long will they be workshopping, when they will get to eat, when they should change into their larp clothes, when will they have time to move their cars or move their stuff to their rooms or tents, and when to fix their hair and makeup. Imagine what you would want to know as a participant. WORKSHOP PRACTICALITIES The next chapter will discuss how to plan the content of your workshop. Regardless of activities, some things are generally true for every participant group. THEY WILL NEED TO EAT Unless the workshop is very short, taking breaks for food (or even snacks!) is important. Your participants’ brains are digesting huge amounts of information, and they will get hungry. If you provide the food for everyone, an hour’s break to eat might be enough, unless you have a huge amount of players, in which case they will need longer. If you let your players out of the play area to buy their own food, one and a half hours is the absolute minimum of time you can give them, assuming there are multiple restaurants and shops nearby. A single restaurant / 81 kitchen can be completely overwhelmed by even as few as 15 customers arriving at the same time. If your break is too short, some of your participants will not have been able to eat on time and will be late and cranky. If you have an international player base, communicate details about food and schedule very clearly in advance (this also applies to food at the larp itself). To Finns and Swedes, “lunch” is a hot meal; to Danes and Norwegians it’s sandwiches. Most Northern Europeans cannot function on sweets for breakfast, and think a 9pm dinner is hours too late. Communicating your local norms in advance allows them to take care of themselves by bringing extra snacks and so on. Some things it makes more sense for you to solve for them. If you have participants from the Nordic countries, you should plan for them needing coffee every three or four hours (this is not a joke!). THEY WILL NEED TO MOVE AROUND Your participants not being able to focus for more than about 30 minutes just standing or sitting still and listening. The participants will also have very different learning styles and ways in which they are able to take in information. A heavy emphasis on lecture style briefings isn’t recommended, even if it might be tempting and feel like less work for you and your team. Alternate between activities. If you need to talk for a while, make sure the next part will let your participants use their bodies, at least a little. This could be things like doing status line exercises, trying out the fighting mechanics, or taking a walk through your play area to show it to the players. THEY WILL NEED TO PEE Or smoke. Or eat a quick snack. If some of your activities are loosely structured and players understand they can move around when they’re done, you might not need to schedule planned breaks for this, but they will need a bio break at least once every two hours. Plan for at least ten minutes if there are plenty of toilets and the smoking area is nearby. If there are few toilets, a lot of participants, or a bit of a walk to the smoking area, the break needs to be longer. THEY WILL NEED TO SLEEP Past their normal bedtime, most people will not be able to focus as well on what you’re saying or what they’re doing. If people travel to your larp, many of them will have gotten up early, and probably stayed up late the previous evening. You should not brief or workshop later than 10pm or so, and probably not more than eight active and focused hours in a full day. FURTHER READING: Simon James Pettitt: “Waiting Before the Beginning”, Nordiclarp.org (26.2.2018) / 82 HOW TO DESIGN A WORKSHOP // Lizzie Stark There exists no foolproof method or procedure one can follow to generate a flawless workshop because a good workshop is tailored to both its larp and the participant group for that run. Most designers develop a feel for workshop design in the same way they develop a feel for larp design – by trying, failing, iterating, playing, and asking fellow designers for help and advice. Broadly speaking, the overarching goal of a workshop is to prepare participants for the larp or, to put it another way, to make the participants better participants of your particular larp. In order to achieve this goal, you have to think through (a) what skills and knowledge your larp requires and (b) what skills and knowledge your participants have. Then you design exercises that address the gap between (a) and (b). For example, if your larp prominently features basket weaving and your participants are experienced larpers with poor hand-eye coordination, you will have to spend a large swath of time teaching them how to weave baskets. On the other hand, if you are running your larp for a local basket weaving guild who are new to role-playing, you won’t need to teach them to weave baskets. But you might need to teach them how to use weaving baskets as a mode of character expression, and you will definitely need to teach them how to small-talk in character, a skill most new larpers struggle with. Of course, most groups of larp participants aren’t uniform. In this age of international travel, your participants will likely include some new larpers, some experienced larpers, and some larpers who are experienced but steeped in a completely different tradition. This requires you to design your workshop for several different audiences simultaneously. You can’t assume that everyone knows how to weave baskets; you equally can’t assume everyone knows how to talk in character, so it’s best to practice both. No matter what you’re running, it’s wise to start by covering the basics of how you want the participants to larp. This helps nervous new larpers while also providing an opportunity to make your desired norms of play explicit for larpers from other traditions, as well as anyone – local or otherwise – who struggles to understand unspoken social norms. These opening pitches to the players often include tips such as the following: PART SECTION CHAPTER 2:2:2 / 83 • “Say ‘yes and’ to build the fiction together” • “You don’t have to be eloquent. When in doubt, be obvious. Your obviousness is different from mine and therefore it is inherently interesting.” • “Sometimes it’s your moment in the spotlight; sometimes it’s your moment to reflect the light back onto other participants.” Depending on your play tradition, your opening pitch on how to larp might be different. Identifying the gap between the participants’ skills and what skills the larp requires takes practice. It’s also easier to identify gaps if you marshall your community resources: ask your community for help as a fresh set of eyes on your workshop content. If you know someone who has run a game with similar design or content, reach out and see whether they are willing to share their experiences. The aim of a workshop is to equip participants with the skills they need to have a good experience in the larp, but that doesn’t mean you will train them equally. Rather, it’s okay to rely on herd competence (p. TK). If most of the group has the required skill, they can carry those who don’t or who learn more slowly. You should aim for playability, not perfection – you needn’t drill the group in basket weaving until they can produce a professional product – something vaguely basket-shaped is likely serviceable enough for most experiences. Larp groups handle mixed levels of participant competence differently. For example, some US campaign boffer games simply separate the new participants out from the herd and give them special “new participant” training. The trend in multi-day one-shots is to keep all parties together, since no one has special knowledge of a brand-new experience, and workshopping everyone together can help break up pre-existing social structures. Upending pre-existing social structures can benefit play for everyone at the larp. If a clique of friends only talks to one another during the larp, then the rest of the participants might feel excluded; by the same token, the clique would miss out on the unique ideas and experiences offered by the rest of the participant base. WHAT A WORKSHOP DOES Designers can use workshops to accomplish many useful goals. For instance, a workshop may: • Get participants comfortable with one another • Generate alibi for participants to play and create without fear of being judged • Teach and practice game mechanics or other tools • Teach and practice safety rules and calibration mechanics / 84 • Generate fiction or reinforce mood/tone • Create characters, relationships, or factions • Elaborate on pre-written characters, factions, and relationships • Teach and practice a skill needed in the larp • Communicate information about the larp, site, etc. in a straightforward way That’s a list of goals that differs pretty widely. So do the means of accomplishing them. Just getting participants comfortable with one another might involve everything from social icebreakers, to name games, to sharing personal stories or even hugging workshops. The list of specific activities that larp designers have used in workshops would produce a near infinite scroll. A good workshop does not usually accomplish all of the above goals. Rather, designers have to be tactical about which functions are most vital in preparing participants for this larp. Perhaps, in the perfect world, you’d be able to hone each and every participant skill required for your larp, but in the actual world you will run up against two major constraints: time and the limits of human cognition. The workshop – and thus the design of your larp – must take these into account. Let’s take time first. Larp experiences, from workshop to debrief, have a specific duration. Maybe it’s a five-hour slot at a convention, or the timespan of your site rental. Let’s say that you’ve reserved the basket-weaving factory for two and a half days. Teaching your participants complex basket weaving requires two days, leaving only a half day for play. As a designer, you have to decide whether that is the best ratio. Perhaps you adjust the design for the larp to require only simple basket weaving that can be taught in half a day to extend the play time. Due to time limits, you must also prioritise the information the workshop conveys. Some information is more important. Communicating the themes and play style of the larp is more vital than teaching participants to remember the names of obscure trading posts in Middle Earth, and your informational design should reflect that. Top priority should go to anything that is directly necessary for the participants’ interaction with the fiction, for instance what their family members look like. You can, of course, save time by conveying information in writing to participants before the event begins. Whether this works will depend heavily on your participants’ skill at reading and remembering written information. Similarly, there are hard limits on how much participants can learn and retain on the day of your larp just through listening. When you design your workshop, divide the information you’re communicating into “must know,” “should know,” and “nice to know.” Try to figure out the minimum viable information that participants require to enjoy the larp. You should highlight and repeat the most important information. Focus on it first, when participant minds are fresh, and remind them of it verbally at the end of / 85 the workshop or just before play begins. Remember: you’re designing a workshop for humans and humans have cognitive limits. Your workshop is only as successful as the skills and information your participants retain, so prioritising what you want to convey is vital. Likewise, if it’s possible to shoehorn meaningful information into the practical exercises, do it! Participants that practice using information in an embodied fashion often retain it better, and doing so can help cater to differing cognitive capacities and learning styles among participants. In any case, if the players are only passively listening, it’s not a workshop, but a briefing. • Groups have an easier time remembering stuff they did, rather than the stuff they heard or read. Plus, it’s less work for you! • All workshops include some amount of talking, but try to break up speeches with activities to keep people awake and the information snackable. • Include unstructured breaks, not just for obvious reasons of human biology, but also so the participants can speak to each other before the game. As Norwegian designer Trine Lise Lindahl put it, “make sure they feel like that is their time to do what they need to do to be able to play the larp in an hour, half a day, or however long there is left.” • Start with simpler tasks and escalate to more complex ones. Simpler tasks build participant confidence and emotional buy-in. For example, you might like your participants to get comfortable with physical contact. Have them do a low-stakes task like shaking hands before asking them to negotiate a hugging mechanic. • Always look for opportunities to make one exercise do double or triple duty. If you want participants to practice a particular technique, have them do it as their characters during a scene that builds backstory. The participants get to practice the technique in situ, and you’re building backstory at the same time. WORKSHOP CONSIDERED AS REHEARSAL Upon learning about larp workshops, a professor of theater once exclaimed, “Ah! You mean a rehearsal. You rehearse before the final performance”. In some sense, she’s right. A workshop is a rehearsal, where the actors (participants) practice what they will do during the larp. Consider Nina Rune Essendrop’s blackbox larp Uskyld (Denmark, 2014, Eng. Innocence), a nonverbal experience for 15 participants about naïve creatures called clowns who are waiting for the circus to return. In this larp, the clowns communicate with clown noises, move jerkily, wear red noses, tie string to each other to make relationships, take periodic naps to lullaby music, sell aspects of their personality to a salesman, and have the opportunity to regain those aspects / 86 in turn. Every experience of the larp – even the participants’ experience of their own body language – is different from out of game life; participants can’t assume any knowledge of the fictional world. The gap between participant knowledge and what the larp requires is large. Essendrop’s rehearsal-oriented workshop design is ingenious. During the two hour workshop, the participants practice each element – many of them with lighting and sound cues – roughly in the order they will encounter them in the larp. After the workshop during one run, a participant exclaimed, “I feel like I just played the whole larp”. She felt quite prepared and delighted to play it now, for real – the rehearsal had given her a foretaste of the feast to come. Even if you don’t take it as far as Essendrop, considering the workshop through the lens of rehearsal can help focus on which actions and activities require practice, and on methods for delivering that practice that mimic the realtime play conditions. A WORD ON CO-CREATION Some larp runners use workshop time to help participants create elements of the fiction, including characters, relationships, cultures, factions, and more. Larp is, by its nature, a co-creative art form. Using workshops to co-create large swaths of fiction has benefits and drawbacks. Participants buy into the larp because they’ve put creative sweat equity into it. It’s also easier to remember the three people a participant has interacted with during the workshop than it is to remember a few pages of pre-written relationships. On the flip side, co-creation requires time, and often in significant amounts. Larp designers cannot control co-creation as tightly as they can, say, written materials, and they have to be comfortable with that. And co-creation doesn’t necessarily save designers all that much time. Even if you aren’t writing, say, characters or culture, you still have to design the process by which participants will arrive those elements. Designing the process of co-creation is vital if you want to avoid some common pitfalls. On an out-of-game level, designing co-creation is designing social interactions that foster creativity. That is complicated! You should figure out how to get people into and out of groups quickly, and in such a way that all participants feel included. Otherwise, you risk some nastier forms of social Darwinism, with folks who know each other clumping together and leaving newer folks out. Likewise, if your design requires large groups of participants speaking to one another, you may wish to introduce some conversational mechanics to ensure that the process remains one of co-creation, and not of a single person dominating the conversation. If the participants will design through physicality, put some ground rules for physical contact on the table first. On the level of the fiction, you must design the blank spaces in which the participants will insert their own vision – let’s call those “buckets.” The larger a bucket is, the more challenging it is to design – a blank page is harder to fill than a sentence with a few key words missing. Small specific buckets are easier for players to fill, and you also have more control over them. That control is impor- / 87 tant, because participants carry their own cultural narratives with them into play. Inventing things on the spot is hard, and the easiest way to fill a bucket is with low-hanging fruit – stereotypes and common tropes. This might work for some larps, but it can easily go awry, especially when dealing with material related to marginalisation. It’s very easy for all the 1950s housewives to end up as passive damsels, or the gay men as light-in-the-loafers stereotypes (or worse!). Giving participants structured choices (“Are you a nuclear physicist, radical feminist, or smart woman trapped in a dumb marriage?”) can help them reach beyond and subvert the most common narratives. Providing structure is also important because these participants have not yet played your larp. It will not be obvious to them what kinds of stories will be meaningfully playable – especially if they have not yet seen the play area – and they may not have the design skills to spontaneously invent, for instance, cultural traditions that resonate meaningfully with the theme of larp. You need to tell them what the metaphorical buckets will be used for so they can know what story elements and social dynamics to carry with them into the larp. You may also need a mechanism to limit the introduction of certain types of content, or to calibrate story during and after co-creation. You might, for instance, decide that incest or sexual violence cannot be introduced into character backstories. Perhaps it will be dissonant with the larp’s themes; perhaps such content is likely to become the emotional focus for the characters’ journeys, blocking the players from experiencing other kinds of stories, stories that they do not yet know the larp can offer. In addition, being accidentally confronted with such content in a larp where it was not communicated in advance might be very triggering for other participants. For all of these reasons, carefully design the frame you are asking participants to co-create within. Remember: if all you want to do is make participants feel like they have some skin in the game, even a small amount of choice or co-creation can go a long way. A WORD ON REALTIME ADAPTATIONS Expert workshop designers frequently tweak their workshops on the fly. Many create a detailed bulleted list of activities, along with approximate times for each one, but can adjust to individual groups of participants spontaneously. If this group already knows each other really well, maybe you can cut an introductory game. If participants seem tired, perhaps you move up the break a little bit. If participants figure out how to create inter-family conflict more quickly than you anticipated, perhaps you cut an activity and spend more time on moving as your character. Calibrating as you go is normal, and it helps you tailor your workshop to this particular audience. FURTHER READING: Lizzie Stark: “How to Plan a basic Pre-larp Workshop”, Leavingmundania.com The Workshop Handbook https://workshophandbook.wordpress.com/ / 88 HOW TO RUN YOUR WORKSHOP // Markus Montola In order to promote great play, your workshop has to be focused and safe. This requires the people facilitating the workshop to be focused, relaxed, in control, and demonstrating good, safe, and egalitarian community leadership. • Have a solid plan, with backup plans for inevitable scheduling errors. If organisers have to negotiate in front of the workshop audience, they will fail to maintain focus. Workshop time is a very scarce and precious resource for a larp organiser. • Start by rehearsing the following technique: when the workshop organiser raises their hand up all the way, everyone needs look at them, raise their hand, and stop talking. It is much easier to maintain focus if participants shut up voluntarily, compared to a situation where the organiser needs to raise their voice to proceed with the workshop. • Running a workshop is a performance, and in all performances you should muster all the charisma you can. Many larp teams invite a person specifically to run their workshops to ensure ideal results. This is particularly useful if core team members are likely to be busy with last minute production tasks as the larp is beginning. (If you are not very experienced, you should probably expect this to be the case). • Prioritise the needs of the workshop over the needs of an individual. If you have unhappy or confused individuals in your workshop, make sure they understand that you will attend to their needs after the workshop. If you can, assign a person to be present in the room to attend to their needs as the overall workshop progresses. • Workshops are often more uncomfortable than the larp itself. Make sure you acknowledge this to the participants: “In this workshop we are doing less comfortable things now in order to feel comfortable when we larp.” You can literally say “If this feels awkward, you are doing it right.” • Make sure all your participants understand that they can opt out of any exercise without needing to justify the decision. Player comfort is more important to your larp than any individual workshop exercise. PART 3 / 96 gangs, and inside the gangs, there was a conflict between the more aggressive characters and those who wanted peace. Moreover, some characters experienced internal conflict when they had to decide whether to flee dishonourably or risk their lives in the fight. The Mesopotamia larp Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa had many character-based design elements. An adopted son wanted to find a clay tablet where his deceased father had declared him his heir (goal). He was in love with a slave and had a plan to buy her freedom and marry her once he would get the inheritance. Moreover, one of the judges wanted to investigate his cases in greater detail than was usual in ancient Mesopotamia (motivation). The larp also had scripted events and fates. For example, one character was scripted to accuse his wife of adultery; she was scripted to confess; and the judges were instructed not to pardon her. The adulterous wife and her lover were sentenced to death. After the last court hearing, there was a scripted scene where they were drowned in the river. You can even include past events in the schedule. After the student dies in Halat hisar, the runtime gamemaster takes her friends to the blackbox to play flashback scenes. A larp does not have to proceed in chronological order. Delirium (Denmark, 2010) was set in a mental institution. The idea was to make the players experience aspects of what insanity might feel like, instead of asking them to pretend to be insane. Since the characters had disjointed perceptions of time, the larp was played achronologically. For example, the patients might have dinner after having slept, the same dinner again at the next meal and breakfast at night; or they had to clean up the mess after the psychologist’s birthday party before the party had been played. To keep things on track, the players were told the very broadest strokes of the larp’s plot in advance (but not what would happen at the scene level), and the runtime team followed a production timeline scheduled in 15 minute increments to ensure the right props, NPCs, food and mess were in the right space at the right time. FOCUS A key function of structure is to avoid aimlessness and boredom by bringing focus. People tend to have a sense of purpose if they have a clear plan or goal and the means to move forward (“I want to find the clay tablet and get my share of the inheritance”) or if they are acting within a timeframe (“There is about an hour before the drag show starts”). A rule of thumb is that the less goals and conflicts the characters have, the more the larp needs a schedule. In KoiKoi (Norway, 2014), players spent five days at a hunter-gatherer festival. The character texts consisted of nothing but a couple of attributes (e.g. “good at drumming”, “accidentally scares the animals away when hunting”), and no / 97 conflicts were built into the setting. The focus was on the community, not the individual. If the larp had not been carefully structured with rituals, players would probably have got bored. However, various rites of passage paced the play and made for interesting content. Having a fuller schedule and/or more scripted events gives the designer more control over the larp and makes it easier to manage. However, if you base the design too heavily on scripted events, there is a danger that the larp will feel like a rollercoaster ride where players have no say in what will happen. Most people find it more interesting to play a larp where their actions and choices have consequences. Scripted events are not the only tool to control a larp. In fact, it is easier to affect the players and their mood during a break. Many larps have calibration breaks to discuss whether play is going to a direction that players and/or gamemasters find meaningful. In larps with an act structure, there is often a break between acts. It makes sense especially in larps with significant time jumps between the acts. Whether you base your design on scripted events or player actions, you need to balance between having too little and too much content. You do not want the players to get bored, but if they have too many things to do, there might not be enough room to express the character’s personality through play on their relationships, personal business or emergent stories. Estimating the right amount of activities can be difficult, and you will develop a “feeling” for it with experience. It is also largely a matter of taste. Some players want to have clear goals and packed schedules, others prefer a more relaxed larp where they can create content for themselves – and luckily different characters can have varying paces. Where your larp will lie on this continuum is a design choice, which you have to communicate to your potential players. / 98 TRANSPARENCY IN LARP // Evan Torner Information distribution both about a larp and in a larp are critical design considerations. As a designer, you must consider what players know, what characters “know,” and how that knowledge filters into the larp. To complicate matters, character knowledge does not match player knowledge. Sometimes a player will know more than a character, but will pretend to not know that information. Other times, a character will know more than a player, and the latter must be brought up to speed with the former. In their Mixing Desk of Larp model, Martin Andresen and Martin Nielsen dedicate an entire fader to “Openness.” This juxtaposes transparency – or making known as much information about the experience, the characters, and the world as possible – with secrecy, or the concealment of said information. There is much contention over the role of revealing and concealing player and character information in larp design. Hidden information, according to Greg Costikyan, ”fosters a desire for exploration … and experimentation” in games. Yet over a decade ago, the creators of jeepform and others rejected the prevalent larp design practice of dispersing secrets among the gathered players. Jeepform designer Tobias Wrigstad’s recommendation was as follows: ”Start out with the game being completely transparent, and only hide things if you think it will be an improvement.” Both transparency and secrecy, write the authors of the Mixing Desk paper, “require trust. Transparency requires that the larp designers trust the players to not abuse the power given to them over the overall design. … Secrecy requires that the players trust the larp designers’ judgment that they do not do anything too drastic or ill fitting by surprise.” A PRIMER ON TRANSPARENCY AND SECRETS Most larps are multi-layered databases of interlaced content, thick with presumptions of player knowledge. How much diegetic and non-diegetic information should you make known, and at what times? Choosing which information to give to players and which to leave out affects not only the basic design but the very genre of the larp. Your mystery larp contains many secrets and requires players to spend time fact-gathering and corroborating basic details about everyone; it will likely mean players will have very little diegetic information at the start of the PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:1:2 / 99 larp. Your collaborative sandbox larp, on the contrary, may emphasise emergent plotlines rather than pre-planned trails of clues, and you will likely try to give out as much information to the players as possible so they can act immediately on what they already know and steer towards the results and challenges they want to experience. Limiting player information lets players get into a larp quickly and effectively, but secrets also restrict what a player can expect to accomplish. Some secrets are never revealed in a larp. If a satisfying resolution to the plot of the larp requires all secrets to have entered play, you will need to design multiple ways for players to find and reveal them, since players will never do exactly what you, the designer, expects. Granting players open access to information gives them control over how that information affects their characters’ arcs – but large amounts of data can also be overwhelming or boring, making it entirely unpredictable which information will actually enter play. Larps that have little character, plot, and rules information presented up front are, due to the light cognitive load, often accessible to beginning players. On the other hand, they run the risk of springing experiences on players for which they are not prepared. Players may be confronted with themes to which they have not consented, or not have enough cues to play the larp according to designer expectation. In this model, veteran players frequently resort to their culturally established ways of dealing with information scarcity, and the herd competence tends to carry novice players along. For example, if you give players their characters and stick them in a room full of objects with little oversight, players will follow the veterans who begin searching through drawers, taking down paintings, etc. To ensure a satisfying narrative arc for all players, you will need to ensure that the progression of play and runtime events are paced to reveal information at a steady rate. If finding out information is at the heart of the larp experience, you will also need to make sure all character groups are able to engage with this process. Larps that have a lot of information presented, in static materials on the website and dynamic materials in the workshops, can be overwhelming unless the players are given tools to sort this information – prioritising based on their understanding of how the information will be used in play. It may help you to think of it as two broad categories: 1. diegetic knowledge that the characters would know but the players might not have the bandwidth for (e.g., all of the ingredients and preparations for your herbalist’s healing remedy; the ancient and deadly Seven Horrors sword technique that only your warrior knows, etc.) 2. meta-level knowledge that players would want or need to know, but the characters would not (e.g., a dark secret held dearly by another character; the time until an act break occurs, etc.) / 100 Your larp design implicitly directs players toward various forms of these two kinds of information. Being totally transparent and giving players every bit of information possible means that the designer expects pro-active players to generate interesting storylines, relying on the participants’ sense of meta-level knowledge to make sure that what the player knows enhances what the character knows, but does not compromise it. Keep in mind that making all information available does not necessarily mean players will be less confused; sometimes having too much overall knowledge about the larp and the storyworld may prompt even veteran players to ask your team even more questions, as every line of the larp is potentially important but can also be subject to ambiguity and interpretation. In low-transparency larps, players sometimes end up reacting, more than acting; a “surprise and shock” design promotes this feeling. High-transparency larps presume pro-active players, and also make it possible to steer towards a greater range of emotions, assuming players know how to use their meta-level knowledge to drive their in-character experiences. But if a player already knows what is coming up ahead, their narrative expectations can greatly diminish. In the tabletop role-playing community, this is called the Czege Principle: “Creating your own adversity and its resolution is boring.” Subdividing between transparency of expectations and transparency of information is useful in at least calibrating one’s larp design with respect to player culture. TRANSPARENCY OF EXPECTATIONS Transparency of expectations about a larp is clear framing of what can and cannot be introduced into play. It is the horizon of expectations of a larp, leaning heavily on everyone’s collective knowledge of a specific genre. Structuring this well will require a certain meta-level reflection about the range of activities one can expect within a larp [See Li and Towser! –Eds], as well as the kind of hidden information that might be expected as well. Players will be able to perform well in your larp if they feel safe and understand where the larp is heading, which often relies on shared understandings of a given genre. Fantasy larps will often contain some sort of opposing supernatural threat that is defeatable. If it is not defeatable, then the larp is, in fact, likely a horror larp. If players know in advance that the threat is not defeatable, they can choose storylines that grapple with death and fate. If they do not know, they will likely opt for storylines around heroism or ambition, and may be disappointed that their character’s plans could not pan out. Science-fiction larps set on a “frontier” planet likely involve exploration and environmental storytelling, or inferring plot from suggestive bits of scenery, props, and/or lighting. Science-fiction larps set in a dystopian city are more likely to involve political intrigue or social justice questions. Characters on the “fron- / 101 tier” planet will seek secrets in the spaces around them; characters in the dystopian city from the city’s other denizens around them. If the former group found a room caked in blood, they would infer violence caused by a planetary inhabitant that may do them further harm. If the latter group found the same room, they would infer violence caused by some powerful lone actor or group, and would ask around to see who knows more. Period historical dramas promise social relations that resemble representations of the time period that players are accustomed to consuming. Players will expect the revelation of secrets and plotlines akin to the novels and dramas set in the period with which they are familiar. If you include a cyborg alien among the possible characters, the larp’s genre dissolves. Of course designers can and do experiment with this horizon of expectations regarding genre, but only thanks to their players’ generosity and patience. Players naturally want to play the larp well, and random cyborg aliens might very well upend their efforts. Transparency of expectation modulates transparency of information. The entire information economy of a larp depends on hitting the basics of the genre and the players’ understandings thereof. Clearly delineating what the larp will and won’t be means that players can already begin to imagine the character arcs they might experience, and thus the fiction they’ll be collaboratively telling. TRANSPARENCY OF INFORMATION Transparency of information in a larp is the level to which actual diegetic plot and character information is available to players. It is the “facts” of the scenario, preferably written somewhere in materials that eventually reach certain players. Structuring this well means confronting the predicted emergence of a larp: what secrets will come out in which order? Which facts will dramatically alter the character experiences of other players? The so-called Secrets & Powers style of larp has made an artform out of this, with Nat Budin arguing that “secrets are typically the coin of the realm in such a larp. Most characters’ goals are un-achievable without information the character does not start the larp knowing, so working within the information economy to trade secrets is a major part of [such larps.]” When one creates any diegetic secret that a specific player or gamemaster must conceal, one is creating a kind of currency. A secret has value if (A) the larp is still in session and (B) those who would be most damaged by its revelation (including the player themselves) have not yet heard about it and/or have not yet felt the consequences of it being released. Affirmational secrets, such as the fact that a character has a rich uncle who left them a fortune, etc., are possible but rare. Negative secrets, such as the fact a character has had an affair with the wrong nymph, etc., are much more common. You control transparency of information by dividing between player knowledge (extra-diegetic or meta-level knowledge) and character knowledge (diege- / 102 tic knowledge). Then the whole experience of the larp from beginning to end should be considered with respect to varying levels of player information. Ideally, a player will receive only the necessary information they need to feel agency over the larp, but will feel by the end like they’ve learned new diegetic facts and have watched their character’s arc shift in various thematically appropriate, yet unexpected ways. One effective model of designing for secrets in a larp is to create a three-layered diegesis. The first layer is the knowledge that the players receive about their character and the other characters and/or world at the beginning of the larp. The second layer is the knowledge that the players will uncover over the course of the larp, some of it confusing and/or misleading. The final layer is the “true” story underlying all of that information, put in as simple terms as possible. This tripartite structure allows larpwrights to establish certain “truths” for playercharacters at the start of a larp, complicate that picture over the course of the larp, and nevertheless lead them to a comprehensible plotline they can take with them at the end of the larp. Leaving certain layers open allows players to have increased agency over story content and deviate from an overarching designer conception of the larp. On the other hand, the designer keeping initial knowledge vague will lead the players to be cautious about their decisions. Caution and vagueness mean that the players may or may not ever arrive at the final layer, the hidden “true” story of a larp. If the larp experience is centred on engaging with your imposed plotlines, this is unfortunate. But if the heart of the expected play involves engaging more with thematic questions posed by the larp – such as “Are your passions or your life more important?” or “How are you responsible for all of the evil of the world?” – it could be a good thing. That said, for misinformation or confusion to be playable and enjoyable, players like to know that some diegetic way existed for the characters to find out what was real – whether they have chosen to pursue those answers or not. Most importantly, you need to know what is true, even when you choose not to give the players that information. [More on this under “Metaphysics” in Brind. –Eds] PUT IT ALL TOGETHER If one considers transparency of expectation and transparency of information as two poles of a graph, then one might find something like this: A larp high on both transparency of expectation and information is “collaborative emergence”. Players have almost absolute knowledge over the plotline of the game and the other characters, which means that they can steer their play and story quite consciously from very early in the larp. “Surprises” in emergent play come primarily from the collision of each of these players’ consciously steered larps. You set characters on their consciously chosen trajectories, and trust / 103 that the players will surprise themselves with what they come up with. If you are designing for conflict, you will be setting multiple characters and groups on paths in which one or more parties will not reach their goals. This means designing for ways for players to gracefully play to lose and to be encouraged to steer toward the negative (but narratively and emotionally interesting) consequences of certain information coming to light or certain events coming to pass. Narrative arcs come from the collision of characters’ goals with the difficulties and consequences that come with those goals. A larp low on transparency of information but high on transparency of expectation is considered in the American context Standard Secrets & Powers or Theatre-Style. Budin describes this in his article “Decoding the Default” as prioritising “character goals and inter-character relationships” without giving too much away on either front, so as to give the players something to discover over the course of the larp. This is probably the most common form of larp design around the world. You clearly broadcast the kind of larp you will offer, but you also do not give away all of the plot and character information in advance. The designer retains the tightest control over the players’ agency and what might come out of the play session. Nevertheless, the players also know the kind of story arcs they can expect from the genre, and will likely play with all of the twists as they come. A larp low on transparency of expectation but high on transparency of information equates with basic improv theater: silly, in-the-moment, and surreal. In this case, the players would have a lot of information about the plot and characters, but little about what to expect of the experience. The most prominent manifestation of this form of transparency is Matthijs Holter and Emily Care Boss’ Play With Intent framework, a meta-level design toolkit that conceals little while also not being entirely clear as to where the experience is likely to head. Improv is usually the outcome of such design. A larp low on transparency of expectation and information is a Genre Plot Twist larp, or one in which not only character truths but also player expectations will likely be upended during play. These are the larps that start off as films noirs but are actually set on a spaceship (see the film Dark City), the summer tourist larp that is actually High Standard Secrets & Powers or Theatre-Style (transparency of expectation) Collaborative Emergence Low (transparency of information) Genre Plot Twist Low High (transparency of information) Experimental Surrealism (transparency of expectation) / 104 about occult possession, or the vampire politicking larp that is actually about late 19th-Century troop placement. Players not only have little information about other characters or the plotline, but also information as revealed will completely change their play experience and what they can further expect from the rest of the larp. Failing to design a competent genre switch can create major breaches of trust. You must tread lightly with this form of transparency. [See Ebbehøj & Friis Hansen for how this can fail. –Eds.] FINAL THOUGHTS Pre-written or player-generated secrets are a wonderful way to encourage players to engage with the information economy of a larp – the who-knows-what-aboutwhom-at-which-times. Many larpwrights consider this the most fundamental part of a given larp’s design. Indeed, even video game designers frequently interpret the word “design” to mean hiding various things at various intervals. Consider instead why certain information is withheld. If transparency of information is not dominant, then how much do players know? If transparency of expectation is not dominant, then how can players steer their play correctly? What happens to the flow of any given larp if a secret comes out too early, or never comes out at all? All of these basics must be considered. As of the time of this writing, many Nordic larps such as Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) or Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011) give the players the choice of reading all of the character descriptions, but few players read more than their own and those of their closest contacts. College of Wizardry (Poland, 2014) or Demeter (Germany, 2015) by contrast conceal much of the overall player-character information so that participants – beginning and experienced – can be delightfully surprised by the asymmetrical revelation of various bits of information throughout the larp. It is assumed that no one will ever know the “full story” of what happened in those larps, and expectations are set around that. No unified design philosophy around transparency of information is to be found, because the design philosophy around transparency of expectations in the Nordic larp community is so absolute. Nordic larp design must be intentional, explicit, insightful, and a little ambitious. You must broadcast this ethos in player-facing materials, from websites to logistics briefings to character sheets. Not broadcasting it risks not eliciting the best play from your players, or even driving some away. Designing larps well means harnessing the power of the secret, on the one hand, while being wary of what behaviors it might create. Just giving away information to your players, on the other hand, can harness other unexpected forces. Surprise yourself. / 105 FURTHER READING Emily Care Boss and Matthijs Holter. “Play with Intent.” (2015) Nat Budin: “Decoding the Default: Secrets and Powers Larp.” Bowman (ed): 2015 Wyrd ConCompanion Book. (2015) Greg Costikyan: Uncertainty in Games (2013). Jaakko Stenros, Martin Andresen, and Martin Nielsen: “The Mixing Desk of Larp: History and Current State of a Design Theory” in Analog Game Studies III (2016) Torner, Evan. ”Transparency and Safety in Role-Playing Games.” in Bowman & Vanek (eds): WyrdCon Companion Book 2013 (2013) Tobias Wrigstad: “The Nuts and Bolts of Jeepform” in Montola & Stenros (eds): Playground Worlds (2008) / 112 WORLDBUILDING In Nina Essendrop’s No Island Is an Island (Denmark, 2017), the storyworld only exists inside the heads of the individual players. They create soundscapes together and then explore them – blindfolded – using touch and hearing only. At no point do they discuss or agree on a single interpretation of the storyworld. The players know the characters are a part of a tribe travelling to different islands, and they know that being alone and out of physical contact with others is frightening: everything else in the story is their individual reality. This is enough to build a shared space in which stories can unfold. Most larps provide much more detail. A rich and complex history can add a great deal to a campaign setting, and some players seem to love to read and assimilate vast swathes of information. However, it should be presented like a pyramid. Only the topmost layer of information should be required for the storyworld to be understood; otherwise you risk privileging players who are able and willing to assimilate the details, and by extension making your larp less accessible to those who cannot. A pyramid approach means providing the necessary detail first, at the top of the pyramid. Players can stop reading at any point, and still have the information they need to play the larp. Those who want the extra levels of detail can then continue reading. For example in Tenement 67 (UK, 2017, ongoing), designer Rob Williams adopted a “sketch-based-design” approach, with the descriptions of the world released via a serial of very short fictional snippets. This approach means that players do not have to remember all the details of a world, but are introduced to the shape of it in manageable chunks and can extrapolate the rest. There is just enough backstory for the world to be defined, and the result is an immediately accessible fiction in which to play. With any of these approaches, you need to ensure that the kinds of improvisations players are likely to need do not create incoherence or irresolvable diegetic conflicts. You will need a high resolution of detail in the areas where characters will be performing actions that have consequences for other characters. In a non-verbal larp, players cannot establish detailed and conflicting histories, and it does not matter in play that their takes on the world are different. In a larp about political strategy, it is helpful if everyone broadly agrees on how the economy of the nation is structured. BACKSTORY Backstory bridges the gap between the storyworld and the characters in it. For many larps it takes the form of pieces of shared history that help the player understand their character’s starting situation and direction in the larp. It can also be used as a means of seeding plot events. In a novel, backstory tends to be for the purpose of exposition, or because the author wishes to do interesting things with / 113 time. Backstory in larp performs much the same function, but it should come with an inherent offer of action, or resolution. Otherwise it will not enter play, or have meaning only for atmospheric reasons. METAPHYSICS The metaphysics is the inherent logic of the storyworld created by the larp designers. Metaphysics are the diegetic rules of the storyworld; they can encompass vast philosophical concepts like being, knowing, identity, time, and magic. The key difference between worldbuilding and metaphysics is visibility. For example, Avalon was a larp formally set in the College of Wizardry universe, a traditionally sandbox space where nothing is canon, as the larp rejects a coherent world design in favour of letting players tell their own stories. This is an extreme example, and arguably it ends up causing more conflicts that it solves. But the narrative design specifically for Avalon defined what magic actually was, how it worked, and what the constraints and limits of that magic were. This was necessary for the writers of the larp to understand the true nature of the storyworld. The information was never published to players, but was used by the gamemasters to inform and constrain their activity during the larp. In a novel, the metaphysics inform and constrain the author; in larp it has a similarly direct effect upon what can happen in the story, but it constrains players, NPCs, and gamemasters equally. In an online conversation in 2017, larp designer Juhana Pettersson argued that “using larp as a storytelling tool privileges the position of the organiser in terms of the participant, to the detriment of the actual larp experience.” One solution to this challenge is to ensure that organisers play by the same rules as participants. Coherent metaphysics enables this. Your narrative design should always strive for diegetic consistency. Your NPCs (if you use them) should operate within the same constraints as everyone else, and your plots should avoid Deus ex machina solutions (where a plot problem is resolved by an unexpected external occurrence). If you chose to include NPCs, active runtime gamemasters, or organiser intervention, do this in a way that privileges co-creation with the players; you do not own the story. SITUATION This is where you frame the larp and describe what has gone before in order to prelude what is to come, and to give the players a starting point for the story. Whether you share the situation with the players in advance, develop it collectively in workshops, or read an introduction before an act begins, is up to you. / 114 TO WHAT EXTENT IS PLOT A PART OF THE LARP? WHAT STRUCTURE WILL IT HAVE? HOW MUCH AGENCY WILL THE PLAYERS HAVE? There is a problem with having one central “big plot,” particularly at larps that run at scale; building a larp around access to a single plot risks excluding the players who do not have that access. Some designers try to get around this by running many plots in parallel, but this approach can lead to confusion as players sometimes try to tie multiple unrelated plots together into a coherent whole. If there is plot which appears to be on rails, players may find this frustrating: railroading is often seen as a pejorative term, rather than a structural insistence that the larp arrives at its destination; no one is going to complain if a murder mystery larp ends up with a big reveal. The solution here is to make it clear to the players that their characters’ fates are pre-determined. Plot Structure. If you do want to have a balance between plot and agency, the design challenge is to produce plot that is coherent, affectable, and accessible, whilst designing a narrative space where players are still free to tell their character’s story. Linear Plot. Many early larps were based on tabletop RPGs. An adventure party would progress through a ‘dungeon’ and have a number of ‘encounters.’ This structure – a portal-quest fantasy – involved a journey through a strange and perilous world. This is what Ben Mars calls a “sequential plotline.” Linear plot also encompasses larps which rely heavily on fate-play or instructed play, and those with a pre-determined ending. For example, certain aspects of the plot of Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) are on rails; most of the characters are going to die, and some of the characters from the original play are fated to do so at specific points during the larp. Whilst the players are aware of the restricted nature of their agency, from the character’s perspective, however, there is an illusion of hope. Linear plot should not be taken to imply a lack of complexity or finesse. The stories of the characters in the larp – within that linear structure – are tremendously powerful and complex. But when the larp has a sequential structure, and where there is no agency for the players to affect the story of the larp (nor a requirement for the organisers to intervene except to keep it on the rails), then it is linear. Branching Plot. Branching plot design has much in common with the chooseyour-own adventure stories. It acknowledges some agency on the part of the players to select a direction for the story to take at specific nodal points during the larp. These may be set piece encounters, significant conflicts, political decisions, or points at which the players’ resolution of plot events turns the story in a specific direction. An example of this is Black Friday (Italy, 2014), in which the players took on the roles of miners, scientists, law enforcement officers, and special forces soldiers during the outbreak of a virulent plague. The epilogue of / 115 the larp depended on the outcome of a handful of key events and led to one of three different predetermined endings. Responsive Plot. A larp with a responsive plot is a system of opportunities and events which may or may not happen depending entirely upon player action and inaction. This approach to plot design – thinking of it as a system rather than a series – builds player agency into the design as the writers have no intention as to how the story will unfold. Responsive plot is risky – players might ruin everything – and tends to be resource heavy, either requiring NPCs or runtime gamemastering. Avalon was a responsive larp. Whilst a few specific events were predetermined and had restricted player agency, in most cases the story that emerged was created in direct reaction to player action. The larp contained two separate NPC factions who the players were able to meet and interact with. These factions had their own cultures, objectives, and characters. When they were in play, they were player characters, as the design team relinquished extradiegetic control over NPC storylines. Sandbox and playground larps also fit into this category to a degree. They typically mitigate the risk of player agency having unforeseen and far-reaching impacts by designing away the possibility and/or severity of such consequences. In his 2018 article in The Peckforton Papers, Harry Harold asks what levers a player must pull so that their decision has consequences. For both branching and responsive plots, these levers could be points of interaction or moments of decision. Understanding what these levers are, and deciding how to make them available to the players, are key parts of the narrative design process. Do not assume that your players know how to pull these levers, make it clear in the design document and in the workshops. TEMPORAL DESIGN One approach to the structural design of plot is to make a timeline. You can decide that a specific event will take place at a specific time, particularly if it is an event over which the characters have no plausible influence, or which requires a significant logistical effort from your side. But remember that these time specific plans are prone to failure, particularly at scale. A timeline that makes sense on paper before a larp can quickly fall apart during runtime as the players make choices, or perform actions, that mean your planned plot events make no narrative sense. Design with approximation and redundancy in mind, with a flexibility that allows plot events to be triggered at the most appropriate time. This could be a wounded messenger stumbling into camp (Washing of Three Tides, UK, 2001) or phone calls coming in to a besieged castle (Inside Hamlet). You also need to consider how the passage of time will work in your larp. Will it be 1:1 (real time) or will you manipulate it during the larp so that it passes differently? Moving time during act breaks is an elegant way to absolve the players of having to react to setbacks, and provides plausible workarounds for the / 116 effects of any calibrations decided in the break. If your plot is linear, an act break can also allow for refocusing plot towards one of your predetermined outcomes. By taking them as an opportunity to railroad the plot if you need to, it removes some of the friction where players feel their agency has been suppressed by the gamemaster. What you should do with narrative design during an act break is rather dependent on the amount of time that has passed. If you want to make a change to interpersonal relationships, big changes can happen in three hours or three days as the narrative consequences are immediate. For political consequences or any kind of systems change or power over anything not immediately present, a longer time scale allows for the ultimate consequences to unfold in play. EVENTS, NPCS, AND ITEMS These are the things that the narrative designer writes that either will happen, or might happen, during the course of the larp, or which are characters or objects that are a part of the plot (literally things that exist). These could be events that happen during the runtime of the larp, like the arrival of an NPC, an assassination attempt, or the delivery of a letter. Or they could be events that happen outside of the runtime – for example during act breaks where time has moved forwards, and you tell the players that “the harvest this year has failed and everyone is starving.” Some plot-heavy larps will have a lot of events. This is particularly common where the narrative design uses NPCs as the primary antagonists. (In collaborative-style larps, where having fun does not require your character to win, it is more common to design for conflict between player characters, and for interesting situations between them to arise organically in play). Remember, NPCs are characters too, and whilst their function may be more limited than that of a player’s character, they are of equal importance when it comes to their plot. For example, the NPC character of the younger sibling who dies in the snow in the opening act of a larp is designed to have an impact on the rest of the plot. You may also want to think about any specific items that form a part of the plot, for example statuette of the Maltese Falcon in a noir larp based on the film. If your plot hinges on a specific item, consider how the players will acquire it, what will happen if they do not, or what will happen if it is not used, stolen, or traded away. If an NPC or an item has a plotted purpose, give them a backstory, a history, and plot hooks into the characters so that they do not arrive as a clumsy surprise. Consider also the final event of the larp, the conclusion. Think about possible closing scenes and decide how the larp will end, and how the ending will be communicated to the players. / 117 EXPOSITION Exposition is giving a reader (or a player) information about the plot. How will your players find out about plot events during the larp? With larp participants increasingly hailing from different countries and play cultures, a homogenous playstyle can never be assumed. Some larpers are taught to keep secrets, others to ensure that they come to light in the most dramatic way. The same is true for other information pertaining to the larp’s plot; some play cultures reward people who hoard information. Unless your design discourages this behaviour, important exposition may end up in the possession of only a few players. How to ensure that key ingame information reaches the players is a design question that can be resolved on different levels of your larp, from specifically instructing players not to hoard information, to making gossip a diegetic social currency, or making sure important plot information only has value if it reaches specific stakeholders inside the fiction. However you resolve it, your design should involve a certain amount of redundancy: never provide exposition via a single channel if the information it contains is important. WHO ARE THE CHARACTERS IN THE LARP? WHAT WILL THEY BE DOING? WHY? Character writing is covered at length in the section of this book called “How to Write Playable Characters,” but you need to understand who the characters are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it. After all, larpers tell their stories through the embodied actions of their characters. Who Who is this character and where do they come from? Function What is the purpose of the character within the plot and story of the larp? Desire What or who does the character desire? A character who does not want anything is malformed. Action/Activity What will the character do during the larp? Lack What does the character lack? This is not necessarily the same as a desire; a lack may be something they are unaware of, or something external. Trajectory What is the plot trajectory for the character at the start of the larp? A character who does not change, or who is not offered the opportunity to be changed by the events of a larp, is a de facto NPC. / 118 When troubleshooting plot, you should be looking for issues with the interaction dynamics between characters, for example whether the characters who are written to be antagonists have so much in common that it seems possible peace may break out between them. You should also check that characters are written in a way so that they have an interest in (some of) the plots, and access to them – a plot involving letters sent between barons is not accessible to an illiterate servant in a feudal household. The designer also needs to consider whether there are opportunities to connect characters in such a way as to seed a story. Are there events from the character’s backstory that can be made a part of the larp that is to be played? You should consider Chekhov’s gun – if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired – if there is a significant event in a character’s backstory, it should enter play during the larp to have meaning. You also need to think about the story that would emerge from your plot if the players were not involved – as if you were writing it as a television show or novel. This forms the baseline. This baseline story should be satisfying. This is a subjective measure, but if the baseline is confusing, or not interesting, then your plot needs work. Depending on your design for agency (see below), the outcome of the story will be either slightly different or entirely different from this baseline. The baseline is useful when you come to test the narrative design, because it enables you to identify how player action can influence the story. AGENCY: HOW MUCH WILL THERE BE? You need to decide how much control, if any, you want to give to players to determine the story outcomes of the larp. Are you planning a sandbox where they can do whatever they like, but in the end can only impact their own stories? Or something where the actions of the players will have an impact on the story? For plot driven larps, with lots of events, player agency to affect these events is important. For larps that revolve more around the interactions between player characters, the players probably need agency to affect these relationships. As with all of these design questions, it is also okay to restrict the player agency, as long as you know why you are restricting it. Furthermore, if you choose to have NPCs, one of the design decisions you need to make is how much agency you want to give them. Do you want to include them as useful cannon fodder, as just antagonists or monsters, or allow them the same privilege to contribute to the story as player characters have. HOW TO TEST YOUR WORK In practice, a larp has a lot of moving pieces, and inevitably things will happen that will have an impact on the design. These four tests will help to identify structural weaknesses in the narrative design. It will not identify all of them, and in some cases those weaknesses will enable drama and / 119 create story, and can be left alone. Striving for perfection here is problematic, because you are not the author of the story that will be told. Agency test. For larps where your design privileges player agency, consider what choices the players can make. Are they able to affect the plot you have written and thus change course of the story in a meaningful way, or is their agency focussed solely on their character’s internal choices? NPC test. For any plot interaction that involves more than one NPC, check to make sure that you have not accidentally written a cut scene: two or more NPCs talking to each other is a play, not a larp. If you come across an event that fails this test, consider redesigning it to allow players back into the scene. Playstyle tests. As larping becomes more international and intercultural, it becomes more important to consider a range of different play styles and how they might affect your design. Different categorisations of player types may be useful in this thought experiment. A familiar example is GNS, which suggests that there are three player goals in role-playing games. These correspond to the player’s primary motivation, and are gamism, narrativism, and simulation. For example, if you consider how a play-to-win (gamist) player might interact with your plot, you may find structural weaknesses that would not be there if you were designing for players who are less interested in coming out on top. Dark Lord test. This is a favorite playstyle test from UK larp design discourse. The behaviour of larpers is difficult to predict. There is a type of player who will always test the limits of your narrative design. This is a playful act rather than a malicious one, but it can have catastrophic implications for narrative design. For example, in the UK campaign larp Odyssey (UK, 2010-2016), an NPC who was designed to be present throughout all of the events over seven years was killed when a player’s character wrote his name into the Book of the Dead in the Underworld. This meant a great deal of plot involving that NPC was suddenly made obsolete. A solution to this could have been to diegetically limit access to the Book of the Dead. No such restriction was in place. The NPC died. The Dark Lord test would be this: for every available plot interaction, consider what a fictional super-villain would do? The purpose of the test is to consider the edge cases and to understand what kind of story your plots will generate when they encounter extreme behaviour from the characters and players within the larp. WHAT TO DO WHEN IT GOES WRONG? There is a truism that says “a plot never survives first contact with the players,” but nor should it, because once the plot of a larp meets the players, it transforms into story. This is the point at which your players will do something unexpected. Your plans will lie in ruins, and the carefully scheduled events that you had lined / 120 up and ready to go will be obsolete. There is sometimes a temptation to ‘retcon’ (from the term retrospective continuity), which in larp is telling players that actions they have played ‘did not happen.’ This breaks the implicit contract between gamemaster and players when it comes to agency, and should be avoided at all costs. It is relatively easy as an organiser to diegetically nudge the story back onto the rails, and it may be that the best thing you can do for the larp is to gently find a way to do that. Ideally, you should not need to; a well designed narrative system accepts damage as diegetic and can assimilate it. Story tends to adhere to known cultural structures – players will create coherent alternatives to what you may have envisioned. In most cases you can get away with rolling with the events and letting the larp deal with them. If you do feel you need to get involved, remember that runtime gamemastering is a form of authorial intervention, but as you are bound by the same metaphysical and story making rules as the players, it is also a way for you as the designer to play the larp. Trust your design, react diegetically, and let the story that wants to be told, get told. It will be fine. FURTHER READING: Ron Edwards: “GNS and Other Matters of Role-playing Theory” (2001) Eirik Fatland: “Incentives as Tools of Larp Dramaturgy” in Fedoseev, Harviainen & Vorobyeva: Nordic-Russian Larp Dialog (2015) Harry Harrold: “Immersive, interactive, in-character: larp edges into the mainstream”, in Brind et al (eds): The Peckforton Papers – Essays from four decades of live action roleplaying in the UK (2018) Ben Mars, 2017, ”Don’t let the vampire get away – designing linear games and mistakes I’ve made when doing so”. In Brind et al (eds) The Peckforton Papers – Essays from four decades of live action roleplaying in the UK / 121 EMERGENT STORIES AND DIRECTED NARRATIVES // Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo // Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn Many stories happen simultaneously within a larp when characters interact with each other and the fictional world. Stories emerge from the interactions and are only experienced by the involved players – both through their characters and as players. Every player is the first-person audience of their character’s journey. The larger and more decentralised the larp is, the more the experiences of the players can differ from each other’s. But if they portray characters that exist in the same fictional world, they still relate to each other and influence each other’s experiences. Larps are told collectively, but experienced individually. Traditional storytelling in books and film is based on the narrative arc, where there is a beginning, middle, and an end: a familiar progression from exposition, to conflict, to rising action, and to the climax, followed by falling action and, finally, a resolution. Almost all events in the story are causal and relevant for the further development of the story. In larp, players will often use, deliberately or unconsciously, this culturally familiar narrative structure as a guideline – and so might you in your design. This can easily lead to a collision of several climaxes, and dissatisfied players, as the climax of their character’s storyline is suddenly sidetracked by the climax of other storylines. Imagine a long-planned wedding interrupted by a horde of invading demons. Stories are experienced as satisfying when they seem coherent, causal, and the characters’ actions stay within the expected framework and genres. The story of a romantic comedy stops feeling satisfying if one of the competing romantic interests suddenly murders the other in cold blood. You need to consider how you design your larp to let players experience coherent stories and enable the players to collectively tell the same stories. Narrative can be viewed through different lenses, and what they enable us to focus on depends on how the topic is approached. The bulk of this chapter concentrates on two particular approaches, seeing stories as emergent and approaching narratives as directed. PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:1:4 / 128 An example of a more complex directed narrative system is fateplay. A fate in this context is a short instruction for an action that the character shall carry out at a specific time or within a limited time frame. Compared to character goals, fates describe specific actions that must be taken. Typically, they are linked together in complicated fate webs, where one player’s action triggers another’s fate. A parallel to the instructions used in fateplay is gamemaster instruction during runtime. A player may receive suggestions, or even commands, from a director, NPC, or instructed player. The words “you should go and show the letter to your sister” may unlock complicated and rewarding drama that would not emerge if the instruction is not followed. Depending on local aesthetic norms, and in particular how embedded the instruction is in the diegesis, such outright instructions can be experienced by the players as very intrusive. Another method for heavily directed narratives is actual directed plots on the character level. The core of this method is simply that plotlines for some or all characters have been planned before the larp, and usually organised into a set of scripted scenes or required story beats that the players must perform during the larp. This method has been applied in larps in many different ways. In Agerlund (Denmark, 2009), the players were instructed at a pre-larp workshop to concoct a story inspired from American folklore with at least five scenes that they would then play out during the larp. In En stilla middag med familjen (Sweden, 2007, Eng. A Nice Evening with the Family), the players were required to play out the plots of well known Nordic stage plays about bourgeois families falling apart. The players had to hit specific, predetermined turning points, but around them they were free to interpret the stories and play them out as they chose. In Hell on Wheels (Czech Republic, 2015), the players were given booklets with instructions for scripted scenes and goals to follow in each act. COMBINING FORCES Both of these approaches, emergent stories and directed narratives, can be used to create coherent and collective stories within a larp. Neither of the approaches should feel particularly alien to an experienced larper. The two approaches can be combined and, indeed, most larps use both. For some larps you will want to focus most on the emergent stories; in other larps you need them to be more directed. For some larps you want your players to not think about stories at all, even while they themselves are making interesting things happen. For other larps you want to pull your players straight through a gut-wrenching story, with them having no choice in the matter. All are viable design choices, and making that choice informed is what makes it design. At the end of the day, whether the story potential emerges organically during runtime from within a carefully designed sandbox, or from a web of plots painstakingly woven by the design team months in advance, the stories will be / 129 made by the players. How do you as a designer get the players to be the drivers of narratives? The answer is by giving them ownership and trust. When you have finally designed the narrative system of your larp and are ready to present it all to your players, whatever form it takes, you must accept that you will lose some – or even all – control over your work. If you want your players to drive the narrative, they must be given ownership of their stories – within the parameters of your design. FURTHER READING: Eirik Fatland: “Incentives as tools of larp dramaturgy”, in Bøckman & Hutchison (eds): Dissecting Larp (2005) Eirik Fatland: “Interaction Codes – Understanding and Establishing Patterns in Player Improvisation” in Fritzon & Wrigstad (eds): Role, Play, Art. Collected Experiences of Role-Playing (2006) Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo: “Levelling the Playing Field and Designing Interaction” in Stenros & Montola (eds): Playground Worlds (2008) Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn: “The Narrative Experience”, in Waern & Axner (eds): Shuffling the Deck (2018) Jaakko Stenros, Martin Eckhoff Andresen, and Martin Nielsen: “The Mixing Desk of Larp: History and Current State of a Design Theory.” Analog Game Studies. (2016) / 130 HOW TO MAKE YOUR SANDBOX A PLAYGROUND //Mo Holkar Many larps are described by their organizers as having a sandbox design. Although this is an imprecise term which can be interpreted in a number of different ways, the concept generally involves a playspace in which players are free to create their own stories, rather than having plot imposed upon them by the larp design. There will usually still be some events provided to take part in or witness, optional activities to undertake, people to interact with; but the general pattern is that the designers and organizers provide a world, and the players make story within it. This does not always provide a satisfying experience for players. They may become bored; they may fall back on playing with people whom they already know; they may spend much of the time effectively out of character; they may feel unsupported, as though too much of the burden of story-creation has been placed upon them. Perhaps they feel they have to prepare large chunks of story in advance to bring into the larp and enact. As the sandbox offers a lot of freedom, it also requires a lot of player initiative, familiarity with this type of larp, and skill. A rather more structured take on the sandbox is the playground. Where a sandbox provides raw materials for players to create story with, a playground provides interactive tools that they can use directly to explore and build on story as they go. It can allow players to develop rich and deep storylines during play, over which they can feel they have ownership. Designing-in story-creation tools, suited to the larp’s structure, theme, and setting – whether diegetic or not – gives your players explicit permission to take control of large or small aspects of their story, without fear from either side that it will ‘break’ the larp. PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:1:5 / 131 This is not an exhaustive list, but a help to categorise the tools discussed. Storymaking Diegetic Large-scale Small-scale Non-diegetic Self Other players Gamemasters Activities Tasks Scheduled Flexible ‘Things to do’ Solo In groups Figure 1 Types of playground equipment STORYMAKING AND STEERING The concept of ‘steering’ refers to “the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons”, for instance to maximize their fun or to be able to interact with specific players. The article in which the term was originally introduced discussed design for steering in a ‘macro’ sense such as players whose characters have many in-fiction responsibilities being expected to steer so as to provide play for their juniors. Storymaking in play is when players use their out-of-character ideas, preferences, and understanding of narrative structure to influence their in-character decisions; it can be seen as another goal which players navigate towards using steering. If having players actively steer in this particular way is desirable in your larp, how can it be designed so as to encourage and facilitate this? In the playground metaphor, this would be about designing playground equipment and toys. The designer can provide play elements empowering players to take control of and shape their characters’ stories as they go, and so to co-create the overall shape and story of the larp without having to step out of character. When a player decides to steer, the actual decision necessarily takes place outside the frame of the fiction. But the act that the player performs in order to steer can be either diegetic or not, as preferred by the design. Gamemasters are commonly used as a non-diegetic steering aid. For example, in A Nice Evening with the Family (Sweden, 2007), each group of players has an out-of-character runtime gamemaster or director [See Hultman and Westerling on / 132 directors. –Eds]. This gamemaster is deeply familiar with the details of those characters and available on demand for offgame discussion and help. This can include advice about steering, pacing, and other aspects of the character’s story arc. At its simplest and most abstract, a meta room – a blackbox inserted into another type of larp – is a non-diegetic storymaking tool. In A Nice Evening with the Family, players can at any point drop out of the diegesis and go to the meta room: to first discuss out of character, then play a scene from a character’s past or in a potential future. These new story elements will then inform and shape their further play when they return to the diegesis. For example, suppose a player is seeking motivation for their character’s dangerous risk-taking behaviour. They might use the meta room to play out a flashback to childhood, in which it becomes apparent that the behaviour pattern arose in response to stifling parenting. They can then take this new understanding back into the larp and direct their character’s story accordingly. A Nice Evening with the Family also has a meta hour, in recent runs called Hour of Scenes; it is a calibration break between acts during which players check in with their groups and play meta scenes with their dedicated gamemaster as needed. In On Location (UK, 2017) the halfway act break includes a steering workshop – after the first half is complete, players can consult with a specialist gamemaster and with each other, over how to shape the direction of their play during the remainder of the larp. At Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015), such consultancy is available throughout the larp, in the out-of-character room. Fellow-players can organize their own act-break calibration as well. Players may get together to decide how to move forward with a particular plot thread that concerns their characters together; or simply to help each other with ideas and advice. And they don’t have to wait for an act break: at Brudpris (Sweden, 2013, Eng. Bridal Price), for example, players can at any point during the larp ask to calibrate using the code phrase “a walk in the woods”, and briefly move away from the others, step out of character, and discuss the direction of the story (and, as needed, the intensity of play). The converse solution is a design element that can be used while staying in character, with the steering taking place invisibly. An example is the “green drink” in Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011). This is an unspecified drug which is brewed up nightly by some of the characters. Any character can drink it, and that player decides the effects: it might intensify an existing feeling; or it might reverse it; or it might have no effect. So, for example, a player might decide to use the green drink to have their character suddenly fall out of love with their partner; or to devote themselves fanatically to their creative work; or to renounce capitalism and become an activist. It’s an unquestioned opportunity to reshape the character’s story, without having to drop out of character to do so. A similar tool is the Waters Divine, in La Sirena Varada (Spain, 2015, Eng. The Stranded Mermaid). A character can at any time choose to immerse themselves in the water of the Arabic hammam, with or without the help of other / 133 players, ritual, etc. This is a diegetic act of ‘rebirth’ – the impact and details of which can be interpreted and enacted as the player wishes. The rebirth might give clarity of purpose; it might give a distinct change in personality or direction; in the extreme, it might be replacing the character altogether with a completely new one. Smaller-scale story tools can also be effective. In On Location, set in Europe in 1932, players had the opportunity during play to step out of character to create news events from the world outside the larp setting, which were then released into the gamespace by the gamemasters. So, for example, the player of a Jewish character might create an article about persecutions occurring in their home area. When this article appears in the ingame newspaper, the other characters – their friends and enemies – can react accordingly, and take one part of the story in a new direction. Similarly in Wing and a Prayer (UK, 2018), set during the WWII Blitz, players could invent for example details of friends or relatives killed in airraids during the course of play, to add an extra dimension of pathos or poignancy to their stories. ACTIVITIES Another important type of playground equipment that designers can provide is the opportunity for players to participate in activities. These can be broken down into two types. TASKS These might be formally scheduled, and implemented by gamemasters or NPCs (“You will go to a Necromancy lesson at 1100 on Saturday”), or left more loose (“The characters are expected to write and rehearse a play, which they can perform on Friday evening if they wish”). Planned task activities are a great opportunity for co-creation, in two different ways: 1. Play can emerge spontaneously from the activity itself: perhaps some characters turn out to be the naughty pupils, and bond together; perhaps a social incident will be triggered by someone shooting a clay-pigeon that was intended for someone else; perhaps a theatrical performance that the characters create might include an exposé causing a scandal when performed; and so on. 2. The designer can include active triggers for further story. For instance, the teacher might instruct pupils to find and bring back certain ingredients for the next class: if obtaining them is not straightforward, players may have to team up and invent plans, which will have knock-on effects. Or there / 134 might be a dance, which means that people have to find partners: players can build a new romance thread off such a requirement. Note that just including ‘tasks’ like this won’t necessarily encourage co-creation. The designer has to think about what the players might actually be able to do while carrying out the task; i.e. what are the affordances of the physical setting, the larp’s overall schedule, the dominant play culture, and the characters inside the fiction? ‘THINGS TO DO’ When a larp is set in an inhabited space, designers don’t always remember that such spaces in real life usually have a fairly wide selection of ‘things to do’ – items or tasks with which the occupants can occupy themselves, individually or in groups, whenever they might wish to. For example, an 18th-century European house might include musical instruments, books, sewing materials, gardening equipment, children’s toys, playing-cards, scientific curiosities, and any amount of other bits and pieces. Even if the core interaction between the characters is designed to be “conversation”, just sitting around talking to each other can feel stilted and quickly become boring. Over a task, talk will flow more naturally, and the experience of solving problems, playing games, or making something together will develop the character relationships in subtle ways. These potential diversions give further opportunities for players to create material separately or together, in the same sort of way that they can from planned activities; but with the extra control that players can choose to engage with them when it fits their larp. So for example, any time they wish to introduce a new story element into their play, one character might invite another to a game of croquet, or to hunt goblins together, or to cook a meal, or to research summoning spells in the secret library. The activity may then allow creation of new story directions together in a spontaneous way, without the need for steering towards an out-of-character goal or for pausing the diegesis. With thanks to Simon James Pettitt FURTHER READING: Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros & Eleanor Saitta: “The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together” in Nielsen & Raasted (Eds): The Knudepunkt Companion Book (2015) / 135 AMUSEMENT PARK DESIGN // Johanna Koljonen At the opposite extreme of the sandbox is the amusement park design, where most story elements of the larp are organised as units – metaphorically ‘rides’ – for the players to experience. So called mods (story modules run by NPCs in US boffer larps) would be examples of such rides. In amusement park designs, moments between such adventure units would often be considered downtime, and the downtime interactions between player characters viewed as having lesser narrative importance than the interactions between player characters and the world. In most Nordic style larps, with their focus on character emotions and relationships, that time for organic character interactions is instead considered the heart of the experience. In fact, Nordic players will often complain that an excess of plot or story events is getting in the way of their role-play. Given a choice only between the sandbox and the amusement park, they would generally choose the sandbox. / 136 THE BEGINNING AND THE END //Kaisa Kangas The beginning and the end of a larp deserve specific attention. Some larps use a ritualistic process for entering and leaving the reality of the larp, to emphasise that the players are stepping in and out of the magic circle. This reinforces the alibi provided by the fiction and the characters, and clarifies the structure of the larp. Such a meta ritual is part of the overall design of the opening and closing of the larp. This is easier if the larp has a collective beginning and ending. Sometimes they come naturally as part of the setup. KoiKoi (Norway, 2014), a five-day larp about a biannual hunter-gatherer festival, started with an ingame opening ritual and finished with different tribes parting ways in a farewell ritual. However, collective endings and beginnings do not suit every larp. If the design is open-ended, you might not know where the players take the larp, and it could make sense to let each player stop playing when they feel they have finished. This is easy if the characters are free to leave the larp location when there is nothing left to do (e.g. if it is set in a tavern, at a party or market place, etc.). In a conflict-oriented larp, a player might end the larp when their character dies. This happened to many players in the third run of Monitor Celestra (Sweden, 2013), a science fiction larp set on a spaceship in the Battlestar Galactica universe. Some larps begin or end with a transition phase when players slowly move in or out of character. In End of the Line (Finland, 2015), a World of Darkness larp set in an illegal rave that vampires frequented, the players spent the first and last fifteen minutes of the larp on the dance floor, raving themselves in and out of the larp. Vihan itkuvirsi (Finland, 2018, Eng. Requiem for Hatred) told the story of prison camps established after the Finnish civil war of 1918. The characters were prisoners at one such camp. The two last runs, in November 2018, introduced a design where the guards walked the players one by one through a dark corridor into the play area at the start of the larp. Each player was encouraged to use this transition period to reflect on their character’s past and the events that led to imprisonment. One way to mark the edge of the magic circle is to play a theme song as the players enter or leave play. When they listen to the music, they have a few minutes to adjust themselves. E.g. Mad About the Boy (Norway, 2010), an all female larp where almost all men had died of an inexplicable disease, and Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011), a larp about the spread of HIV in the New York gay scene in PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:1:6 / 137 the 1980s, employed this technique, using the titular soul classics as their theme songs. The 2018 run of Häxorna på Ästad gård (Sweden, 2016, Eng. Witches of Ästad Farm) and Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) are examples of larps that have used specially commissioned music for this purpose; Forbidden History (Poland, 2018) had commissioned a song that was used at the end. Choose the music to support the themes and tone of your larp. GETTING THE PLAYERS STARTED Players often feel awkward at the beginning of a larp, as the new social reality has yet to start to feel real. A way to avoid this is to place the characters in a situation with a social script that is familiar to the players (e.g. being a guest at a wedding). This way, they can use familiar social cues as shortcuts into being their characters. You can also give your players something to react to (e.g. suggest a conversation topic at the workshop, or kickstart the larp with a scripted event). It is best to use something that does not turn everything upside down – unless that is what your design requires; Ground Zero (Finland, 1998), a larp about an alternative history where the Cuban Missile Crisis led to full-scale nuclear war, started with the blare of air-raid sirens. Players need time to establish the normal state of affairs and get acquainted with their characters. Halat hisar (Finland, 2013, Eng. State of Siege), set at a university in an alternative reality where Finland is under similar occupation as real-world Palestine, began with a meta scene where players queued at a checkpoint to enter the campus and the larp. To most of the players, this was a new social situation, but it had familiar elements they could relate to: standing in a line, being late for work or school, interacting with bureaucracy. At the same time, it established what was normal in the fiction. When a player reached the checkpoint, a soldier replaced their ID card with a new one that had religious affiliation on it. There were mistakes on some cards (spelling errors, wrong religion). It gave the characters a topic to talk about and created low-level conflict when they complained to the soldiers. CLOSING IT UP Some larps are set to end at a predetermined time. In others, runtime gamemasters circle the play area trying to “feel” when the larp has run its course. The former suits larps with a linear design, such as Pelageya: Laika (Finland 2005), a science fiction larp about a disastrous accident that led to the destruction of an undersea research crawler and the deaths of most of its crew. The latter fits open-ended larps where storylines emerge from character actions. Tinderbox (Finland, 1996) was a cyberpunk larp about two street gangs on the brink of war, and it would not have made sense to end it before the gangs had either fought or agreed on peace. / 144 DOING IT FOR REAL The most obvious approach in creating meaningfully playable action is to make players do things for real, or to design simulation methods that give them an idea of how it feels to do those things. The key here is to think about how the processes the characters are involved in work, and how something similar could be designed for the players. To make a magic ritual feel meaningful, you need to have an idea about how magic in your storyworld works, either as a social or a metaphysical process. KoiKoi (Norway, 2014), a five-day larp about a hunter-gatherer festival, had rituals that lasted for several hours, and players did not find them dull. One of the reasons was that the designers had done research on magical practices in various cultures and developed a coherent system on which the hunter-gatherers believed magic was based. For example, masks were an important element, and it was believed that a mask contains a spirit that will possess whoever wears it. Moreover, a ritual was always a communal process in which many people took part. Sometimes it could provide alibis for interactions that might not have been otherwise possible within the societal framework – things a character did while wearing a mask were not viewed culturally as their actions, but as those of the spirit who inhabited the mask. Rough outlines of the main rituals had been given to the players beforehand, and they could use props like drums, masks, and body paint. Larger rituals had leaders, carefully cast with players who knew how to inspire others. There are many examples of larps where players do things for real. Mr & Mrs Unscripted (Sweden, 2018) was a multi-day larp about producing a reality TV show where couples compete for a mansion and a dream wedding. In the larp, the production team was actually filming the contestants with real camera equipment. In the College of Wizardry larps (Poland, 2014), inspired by the Harry Potter universe, teachers prepare real classes that students attend. In the 2017 reruns of 1942 – Noen å stole på (Norway, 2000, Eng. 1942 – Someone to Trust), a larp set in Norway under German occupation, players ran a whole functioning village that had e.g. a school, a church, and phone lines that were operated through a switchboard. In many of these cases, players were doing things that required some skill. This issue can be addressed in either casting or workshops. When you are choosing a player for a teacher, it is a good idea to pick someone who feels comfortable planning and giving a lecture (and can pull it off). Another alternative is to teach your players the skills they need. In Mr & Mrs Unscripted, the players of the production team arrived to the site a day earlier to learn how to use cameras and other equipment. / 145 SIMULATION Larp characters often do things that players cannot do for real, either for safety reasons or because they do not have the skills needed. However, you can design mechanics or processes to simulate those actions. The key questions are how you want the simulation to feel, and what function it will have in the larp. Once you have those answers, you can start thinking about how it will actually work. Krusadis: Punainen Aurinko (Finland, 2018, Eng. Krusadis: Red Sun) was a space opera larp about an encounter between two cultures. The players were playing the crews of two starships that would eventually meet. A software called Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator was used to operate them. The system resembles the bridge from Star Trek: there is a captain, a weapons officer, a science officer, a communication officer, a sensor operator, destroyer pilots, and an engine room. The players could pick a destination on a stellar map and navigate their ship towards it. Before they arrived, the runtime game masters would build the planet inside a large meta room. The place could become a friendly space station with a bar, a bazaar and an embassy, or a planet where the characters would face an enemy ambush. Perhaps the most interesting part is how engineering and repairs were simulated. In the engine room, there was a screen with the Artemis engineering simulator. However, each control had a physical counterpart that the players had to adjust before they were allowed to touch the Artemis controls. There were levers you had to physically pull, cords that you needed to connect, and a container where you poured “liquid coolant”. Sometimes you would have to crawl into a maintenance tunnel to do repairs by changing worn-out glow sticks into fresh ones. According to players, this created pressure in space battles, since you needed to react fast and at the same time keep maintenance operations going on. The players on the bridge could directly adjust relevant Artemis controls, since that resembled what their characters were doing. The function of the bridge was to make decisions (where to go, how to react to sensor data, what to do in battle, etc.) and give orders. Their play was focused on the responsibility you carry when you are part of a military command. They got a feeling of what it is like to make decisions that could have dire consequences for the whole ship and its crew. On the other hand, the function of engineering was to keep the ship operational at all times, and the work was hands on. Since it did not suffice to adjust controls on a computer, but you needed to do manual tasks, maintenance and repairs took some time. As player performance determined how long, it created a feeling of pressure. Moreover, the players got an idea of how it physically feels for a mechanic to perform maintenance operations. A simpler example of a simulation that captures a physical feeling can be / 146 found from Työhaastattelu (Finland, 2004, Eng. Job Interview). It was a larp about petty criminals, and the characters were hired to clean up an apartment where a drug dealer had been murdered. They were given a tight timeframe since the police was going to check the place. The cleaning included sawing the body into small pieces and carrying it out in plastic bags. Obviously, the players could not do this to the person who was lying in a puddle of fake blood and pretending to be a corpse. To simulate the process, the designers had placed some logs in the apartment. The players sawed the logs and carried the pieces out in the bags to get a physical feeling of what the characters were doing. When you are making a larp, one factor to decide is the level of detail on which different activities will be played. A related question is how much information should be available on a given subject. A good rule of thumb is that the more central something is for the themes of the larp, the more detailed treatment it requires. If a character happens to be a stock market dealer in a larp about family drama, the player can probably bypass professional issues with improvisation. However, if the larp is set on Wall Street, some finance simulation mechanics will be needed. Sometimes functionality requires detail. Proteus: Sotakarjujen synty (Finland, 2018, Eng. Proteus: Origin of the Warhogs) was a political satire about a top-secret project to create human-pig hybrids for military purposes. The setting was a military base where bioengineers and brain scientists worked on the hybrids while PR consultants brainstormed how to market the project to the voting population. During the larp, a military-political delegation came to visit the base in order to make a decision about whether to purchase the hybrids for the army. There was an elaborate process for the acquisition, and the politicians needed reports from various committees that met during the larp. The Ministry of Defence kept tabs on the budget, and there were detailed prices for different kinds of hybrids and their equipment. Many board games and computer games are designed to simulate something, and sometimes it can be useful to look at those mechanics for inspiration. For example, in resource management games, you often need to balance between useful attributes that you cannot maximise at the same time (e.g. speed vs. strength). A similar idea was used in Proteus when the bio-scientists were trying to adjust the hormonal balance of the hybrids. The scientists had three scales on which they could operate: cautiousness vs. curiosity, aggression vs. playfulness, and reaction speed vs. impulse control. First, they would choose a number between one and ten for each scale and feed it into a computer. They would then have to mix a serum that would match a colour given by the program. Finally, the serum would be “injected” into a hybrid (these were NPCs), and its player would take the new hormonal calibration into account while playing. The scales concretised the technical choices of the characters, and mixing the serum gave a feeling of the precise endeavour of lab work. / 147 FUNCTIONING AND CONSISTENT WORLDS Many of the examples discussed so far are related to the idea of creating an illusion of a functional world around the larp, a wider context for the players to interact with and explore. In Krusadis, they could travel within a given sector in space, and in 1942, the village was a kind of miniature world in itself. If you simulate a functioning world, the larp will feel more real to the players. In settings where the characters are trapped inside a confined area, the possibility to interact with an outside world can create a contrast that makes them feel even more isolated. Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015), a larp adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is set in an aristocratic 1930s Denmark on the verge of revolution, and the participants play the court of King Claudius that is trapped inside a castle surrounded by red rebels. The players can use phones to instruct their troops in the fight against the revolutionaries or to talk to their contacts outside the castle; the outside world will call back to report on consequences of the characters’ actions. Halat hisar (Finland, 2013) was set in an alternate reality where Finland was under similar occupation as real-world Palestine. The characters were students and staff at a university campus that was placed under curfew by the occupation authorities. If the characters wanted to reach the outside world, players could call a runtime gamemaster on the phone. During the larp, they phoned e.g. newspapers, embassies, family members, political contacts, and for an ambulance. Moreover, the outside world reacted to their actions and contacted them; reporters wanted interviews, and political decision makers put pressure on university administrators. A notice board placed centrally in the play area provided a media simulation, with organisers and players writing news headlines, blog posts and tweets (very rapidly and simply, with pen and paper, but to great in-fiction effect). If you want your storyworld to appear consistent, you might need to make decisions about what is happening behind the scenes and invent fictional events that will not be directly visible to the players. In Halat hisar, the occupation soldiers interrogated some of the characters, since in the larp’s backstory, a soldier had recently been killed. Some characters had been selected for interrogation already before the larp, but often the decisions on who would be next or what the soldiers would do were based on diegetic events, such as what other characters had said as they were interrogated, or how much international attention player character actions had generated in the media simulation. The runtime gamemasters were also attempting to read the flow of the larp and balance the action so that the outcome would create play that was interesting at a given moment. But even when decisions were made based on extradiegetic factors, the NPC players needed to know why the military command would make a given decision inside the fiction. / 148 After the larp, the NPC player who had been the leader of the interrogations was able to give players detailed explanations on what happened behind the scenes and why. Sometimes discussions like this lead to endless philosophical debates about what is “real” in a larp. One viewpoint is that in a larp the whole world is fictional, and each player’s interpretation of the “truth” has an equal value. Many people also think that only things that players witness happening during the larp are part of its reality. In this thinking, e.g. a backstory or explanations given by designers are not “real” in the same sense as player actions. A larp like College of Wizardry (Poland, 2014) from its fourth run redesign onwards has taken this viewpoint to its logical extreme, with player storymaking able to overrule storyworld background. At most larps, however, players automatically expect the present of the fiction to be a coherent consequence of its past, and the non-player parts of the storyworld to operate in accordance with some internal logic. In reality, the present contains many traces from the past, hints about what might have been going on. If you are creating a world, why not design those traces also? In this case, functionality means that players can use physical items and character or NPC actions as logical clues to find out what happened in the past. It is probably impossible to create those traces without first generating a coherent backstory. It is (usually) not a good idea to give players a treasure map if there is no actual treasure. The same goes for lab science, spaceship maintenance, or detective work. If the characters are investigating a missing person, you need to know what happened to her (unless she went missing during the larp). There has to be something to find out. It might be tempting to just scatter random “clues” around and trust that the players will come up with a coherent story to explain them. However, if you have not thought it out, your clues will become like a map to an inexistent treasure. In Ghost Express (Finland, 2001-2002), an occult-themed city larp campaign inspired by the role-playing game Kult (Sweden, 1991), players once explored the scene of a recent murder. The victim’s apartment was decorated to reflect her personality. As she had been associating with vampires, her bedside table was equipped with jars of iron supplements to indicate that she suffered from iron deficiency caused by blood loss. But it was also important that she had not been killed by a vampire. As this information needed to be available for the investigators, her wounds were of a kind a vampire would have been unlikely to cause. A practical way to study the past in character was created for Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (Finland, 2018, Eng. So That the Strong Should Not Harm the Weak). This was a larp about the judicial system in ancient Mesopotamia. In that culture, contracts and verdicts were finalised by writing them on clay tablets. In the larp, the temple had archives of all the tablets written in the town, and players could go there to gather information about various deals that had been made in / 149 the past. At one point, judges were solving an inheritance case and wanted to know whether the deceased had officially adopted a certain character as his son. When the organisers realised there was no tablet about the adoption in the archive, they went the extra mile and produced one during runtime – to maintain both the coherence of the fiction, and the functionality of its design. IS IT PLAYABLE? Actions that are doable and have meaningful narrative consequences are still not automatically well-designed. Many players value character interactions and relationship play, and in many larps those things are where the fun lies, or the engine that drives the story forward. Even if you’ve designed a cool and functional process, it does not necessarily enable interesting play. Writing a program code feels pretty much the same whether you do it ingame or offgame – unless your character is much worse at coding than you are, and then it might be just boring. Moreover, it is usually something that you do alone. Soldiers in trenches typically stood guard too far apart to be able to talk to each other. There are good reasons for this, but it does pose a playability challenge. For most players, larp is a social activity, and it is the interactions that make a larp. Playing a psychologist, a spaceship commander, or mechanic who gets to chat with colleagues in the engine room, can provide more interesting play around realistic work than playing a computer programmer will. In Proteus, laboratory technicians worked hard at adjusting the hormonal balance of human-pig hybrids. The hybrids would be presented to the militarypolitical delegation, and the scientists needed to decide how to optimise the hormones for the demonstration. This is an example of meaningful work: there was a wider social context for the process, it was connected to the main themes of the larp, and there were clear deliverables with immediate consequences for the outcome of the plot. To ensure playability, the most complicated work processes were not only described in written text provided before the game and rehearsed in the workshops, but also printed out as diegetic checklists and process diagrams available in the play area. As you weigh playability against plausibility, remember that your design goal is probably not to teach how something is done in the real world, but to create a thematically relevant feeling or experience. Perhaps your technical process can require constant collaboration between small groups of characters. Perhaps soldiers can be stood two and two to allow them to express in play how homesick, terrified and bored they are. You can design a coherent, functional narrative system where actions have meaning for the larp’s plot, themes and outcomes. Whether players will then find these actions meaningful to do ultimately depends on their personal preferen- / 150 ces. Some people will be very happy tinkering with code, others would rather play a romance. One player appreciates coherence and plausibility, while to another, high drama is more important. Some people prefer comfort and others want to test their limits in extreme physical conditions. It is your responsibility as a designer to make choices and to communicate them clearly to your players. What kinds of functionality your larp needs depends on your design choices as a whole. FURTHER READING Katherine C. Jones, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner: “Playing at Work” in Kangas, Loponen & Särkijärvi: Larp Politics (2016) / 151 CREATING OR CONVEYING CULTURES // Martin Nielsen // Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand It’s the beginning of a larp, but the player doesn’t really know how to behave. And it’s not about their character, it’s about the norms and behaviors surrounding them. “Oh, this doesn’t feel right, I’m doing it all wrong. How was I supposed to greet my character’s neighbour again?” The beginning of a larp can be nerve wracking in itself. Navigating a fictional culture in which one’s character is supposed to have a lifetime of experience doesn’t make it any easier. Especially if it’s a culture that the player only knows from reading about it. Cultures are complex systems that guide the ideas, customs and behaviour of a people or group: what they believe, what they value, how they construct identities individually and in groups – all expressed through how they go about their lives. In a larp, there are often one or several diegetic cultures that are important for how the characters interact. Poor communication of these cultures can lead to misunderstandings, less bold play and unintended reproduction of real-world cultures and/or stereotypes. This chapter looks at how larpmakers can convey the culture they have designed to the players, or help the players develop the diegetic culture themselves. COMMUNICATING CULTURE How do you choose which medium to use when communicating your vision to the players? For a long time, written text was the communication channel of choice for most larpmakers. But in the past decade or so, using workshops before a larp to convey information to the players has become increasingly common. Different media are differently suited to communicate culture, depending on their capacities for participation (how much the players are involved), and resolution (the detail and quality in the communication about the diegetic culture). Written text can pinpoint details precisely, but is still a very low-resolution way of describing something. All readers of the same book will draw up different ideas and images. This is a beautiful characteristic of written fiction, but not so PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:2:2 / 152 convenient when you want several people to understand a complex system and how they have lived in it for a long time. Writing is a good way of conveying abstract ideas, for instance communicating a culture’s dominant ideologies. It is less efficient at communicating for instance the nuances in interpretations of such ideologies, or concrete actions, like a choreography, or the subtle ways in which people in a hierarchy convey status with their bodies. In less top-down designs with more player involvement, many larpmakers ask the players to co-creatively design parts of their play experience. This can involve meeting up in person to talk, but increasingly often players resort to online planning, either in writing or at meetings using video link. While players designing their culture together allows for player participation, it shares some of the resolution problems with pre-written text. People will have different interpretations of chat conversations, and even more so the outcome of a chaotic Skype meeting with too many participants. There will also often be an imbalance regarding how much time a player can devote to this kind of planning, which in turn might lead to information gaps between players in the same groups. Furthermore, unless the larpmakers are present, it can be hard to ensure that the innovations of such meetings support the overall vision of the larp – although providing the players with instructions for pre-larp meetings may be helpful in this regard. Even so, informal meetups or online planning in a player group is better than no interaction at all. It is a good addition to written materials, especially for small groups of participants who need to check that their interpretations are similar. Using a more complex medium such as video to communicate comes with its own costs and benefits. While video is much better at conveying high-resolution information like body postures and gestures, it’s typically one-way and top-down. It can be effectively used for inspiration or to lock down one or two core cultural concepts, and then combined with co-creative methods for player involvement. Used on its own, video will mostly communicate how the sought after behaviour is supposed to look. CULTURE CREATION LARP IN WORKSHOPS To achieve both a high resolution and a level of co-creation, larpmakers have an obvious tool at their disposal: larp. Role-playing exercises as part of a pre-larp workshop will allow high-resolution communication, and for the players to take ownership over the process, both of which will help retention of information and support its use in actual play. While rehearsal is an obvious part of the preparation for most kinds of performance, it is still not that common as part of larp preparations. Rehearsal larping allows players to get a coherent understanding of a culture and to calibrate their understanding of it through play. / 153 Rehearsal larping is playing scenes just as one would in the larp, then stepping back to observe and discuss them. Using this method to create or calibrate a diegetic culture, the larpmaker gives away some control, but in return will have a player group with a more coherent and higher resolution understanding of the world they will play in. Fig 1. Different approaches for how the larpmakers can convey the diegetic culture to the players. The player knows it in theory. They’ve read the material, a while ago. But they have never practiced it, and culture is complex. They spend the first part of the larp being acquainted with it, and only after several hours of playing do they have a sense of the cultural dynamics. By then, the mistakes they’ve made have already affected their character’s position in the fiction. By implementing an iterative process – playing, observing and evaluating – you can get better, more playable larps, just like rehearsal is part of bringing a written play alive for the stageplays. You can let the players create the diegetic culture from scratch, or based on a predetermined framework of values and behaviors that fit the theme and location of the larp. Or you can pre-determine quite a lot and use the method to let the players calibrate their understanding of what you have created, and how to translate it into playable actions. The basic structure of all rehearsal larping is the same in both cases: let the players try test scenes, step out of play and describe what happened in the scene, and finally evaluate whether the scene is a good representation of how you would like the culture to be when playing the actual larp. Then repeat the cycle if necessary. Fig 2. The iterative process of rehearsal larping Resolution Video Rehearsal larping Participation Pre-written text from the larp makers Co-creatively written or verbal planning PLAY EVALUATE DESCRIBE / 256 pants with their experience. The characters used the notebook throughout the larp, referring back to what they had written earlier. Reflecting on their character, and writing different options for what direction to take next, helped participants map their journey through the larp. It enabled them to make choices during runtime and to build a nuanced character on the basic foundation they had made during the workshop. Especially people new to larp commented that the notebook mechanic was a great help in understanding their function throughout the performance piece. The first run of the larp also taught us that the mechanic worked best when we scheduled undisturbed time for writing in the notebook. We really nailed what we set out to do: to have a clear and simple tool used by all participants, that met our design challenges and enhanced their experience significantly. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Levelfive NAILED IT! / 257 Tuhannen viillon kuolema (Finland, 2018, Eng. Death by a Thousand Cuts) was a larp by Juhana Pettersson (designer) and Massi Hannula (producer) about class war. I was in charge of the prelarp workshop. There were three types of characters: the poor, the middle class, and the rich. The basic idea was that towards the end of the larp, the poor would become so frustrated with inequality that they would start killing the rich. CHALLENGE We first ran a small test larp at Ropecon, the biggest role-playing convention in Finland. The test larp had only poor and rich characters, no middle class, and ended with an event where the poor served champagne to the rich. In the workshop, we played various scenes from the characters’ pasts to drive home the point that the rich characters had acted like assholes towards the poor. For example, some of them had hired a couple of poor characters to renovate a villa and then refused to pay them properly. We instructed the players that in the last scene of the larp, the poor characters would be so wound up they would start stabbing the rich. After the playtest, players complained that it had been difficult to escalate the situation so that physical violence would emerge. The rich felt they had no reason even to speak to the poor since you usually ignore waiters; and the poor felt there weren’t enough in-fiction reasons to act violently, as the rich didn’t provoke them. One of the players of the poor said stabbing the rich felt forced and artificial, and that they only did it because they had been instructed to. DESIGN CHOICE As a solution, I suggested a mechanic for class privilege. When a rich character holds the palm of their hand up in a rejecting gesture while speaking, the poor characters cannot speak, unless they physically touch the rich character. Middle-class characters were allowed to ignore the mechanic, but were told that it would require a lot of psychological effort from their character to do so. The idea was that in order to have their voice heard, a poor characCLASS PRIVILEGE AND CONFLICT ESCALATION // Kaisa Kangas / 258 ter would have to cross the boundary of touching the other person (which in Finland, where the larp was set, is a clear transgression), and this would lead to escalation. OUTCOME The mechanic was used a lot in the larp and players seemed to like it. It was a great help to less outgoing players to allow them to take up space, and it did lead to scenes where it served to escalate the situation as intended. However, most of the time, the players of poor characters seemed to treat the mechanic as an absolute rule instead of one you were expected to sometimes break by touching the other person. This meant that the mechanic created less escalation than I had hoped and expected. The problem could perhaps be remedied by practising the mechanic more in the pre-larp workshop, especially by playing scenes where the poor person would touch the rich one to interrupt them. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Tuhannen_viillon_kuolema NAILED IT! / 259 For our noir-themed larp Valley of Shadow (Czech Republic, 2018) we decided that half of the larp would be set within the characters’ dreams, and that these sequences would use dancing as the primary mode of interaction. We also wanted the larp to be accessible to everyone, meaning we needed a dance we could teach from scratch in a weekend. Our design challenge was finding one that would also allow equal in-character communication for everyone, and be suitable for people of varying abilities. In larp we generally want all players to have an equal ability to contribute with their own ideas. However, most couples’ dances have two unequal roles: leader and follower. If one imagines a dance as a conversation, many dance styles frame the roles as the leader ‘speaking’ all the time (proposing most moves), while the follower mostly listens (carries out moves proposed by the leader). The follower’s agency can be limited by many practical matters. In tango or ballroom dances, humans are squished onto other humans very tightly just to perform the basic connection, limiting the possibility of independent movement. Charleston or boogie woogie require dancers to perform complicated, high-speed step sequences before even getting to creativity. In most dances we knew, the built-in options for follower agency were usually limited to optional styling, purely aesthetic in purpose and to be added once the follower has mastered everything else. Naturally, one can ‘hack’ a dance to make it more suitable for larping. But hacking has limits and would require more labour and more valuable workshopping time. We knew our players would include both avid dancers and complete beginners. If the style was difficult to learn and one partner’s dance skill determined the quality of the dance, our larp would suffer from the good dancer flocking paradigm: where if for the dance (and larp) to work, people need to do difficult things well, then better dancers will automatically gravitate towards better dancers, effectively creating several “castes” of player. Other demands for our platform included having a lot of versatile options for emotional expression (most dance styles gravitate heavily towards expressing one emotion dominantly, whether it is “joy” in swing, or “bittersweet drama” in tango); where even LARPING THE BLUES // Iva Vávrová // Kateřina Holendová / 260 not very physically fit players would manage several songs in a row without dying; and where intense physical contact was purely opt-in, not the main basis for the dance. We slowly eliminated most of the dances we’d collected in our combined decades of studying and teaching dance. Fortunately, our last and most beloved stop on the road of dance ticked all the boxes. Blues is an American vernacular dance, stemming from the Western African dance tradition. It became widely popular in the USA in the Jazz Age, and today has a passionate global fan base. Most importantly, it addressed most of our needs through its inherent features! Blues started as a solo dance, only developing into a coupled form gradually. Subsequently, follower agency is not an afterthought or a tentatively offered “as long as you don’t disturb the lead”. That both partners have an equal ability to contribute to the dance is one of the most central concepts of blues dancing. As soon as beginners are taught to connect in a couple and perform a simple under-arm turn, they are taught follower agency. Therefore, introducing blues as a larping platform where players have equal voices required much less tinkering with the fundament of the dance. We did not need a separate workshop to teach the players to move within the dance, with its rigid leaderand follower-shaped spaces, and another one saying “now forget what we taught you; this is how we work with it for this larp”. We could smoothly transfer from teaching agency and content-creation within the dance for all dancers, to teaching agency and content-creation within the larp for all larpers. Blues also has an extremely low entry barrier. If you can transfer weight from one leg to another while bending your knees or lowering your hips in a certain rhythm, you can blues (a bit). Naturally, learning blues well is difficult and time-consuming, but starting is quite easy. The connection is also relatively loose, starting with just holding hands, which allows everybody a lot of space to dance in, and significantly limits frustration in dances with less skilled partners. If one player cannot really do much and the other can, they can move within their bodies and have fun nevertheless, allowing players with different dance skills to interact freely. Thanks to that, after around four hours of workshops, a group ranging from complete non-dancers to people entrenched in “men lead; women follow” stereotypes, spent the night pulsing and grooving in the rhythm of blues and creating together, regardless of dance role, raw skill, or gender. The emotional range of blues allowed players to express love, hate, remorse, and reconciliation through dancing. The options it offered beyond the couple, including solo and group dancing possibilities, let us create safe mechanics for aggression within the dance, by including group dance-offs, solitary reflection, and dancing in groups of three or four with varying connection. Its affinity for slower tempos meant that players with different bodies and different levels of physical fitness could manage a workshop weekend and two hours of dancing in / 261 the game. And finally, we could offer the players many options of physical contact: from none, to holding hands, to tight embraces, and ways to navigate between them, for diversity of both expression and playstyle intensity. By the end, blues empowered our players to perform a rounded storyline, rage, flirt, steal partners, interact with NPCs, express a range of moods, and accept that (almost) anyone can dance with (almost) anyone and feel good about it. It led us through the Valley of Shadow, and we’d be quick to recommend it as an excellent path for dance larps, to those ready to respect it and embrace it in its entirety. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Valley_of_Shadow NAILED IT! / 262 METATECHNIQUES // Anna Westerling // Anders Hultman A metatechnique is a mechanic enabling player-to-player communication during runtime without pausing play to talk out of character. Metatechniques are used in order to create a broader experience. If you design a larp about social surface, you may want to include some technique to let the players reveal their characters’ inner thoughts and motivations, while at the same time keeping up that social facade. If you design a larp about people going crazy as society collapses, you may want a metatechnique that allows players to calibrate play intensity between each other; and so on. Below are examples of three types of metatechniques: metacommunication inserted into play by one player; words or objects containing or activating meta information for the players; and meta scenes played by two or more players. [Meta scenes are the odd bird out on this list, because the actual role-playing of the scenes can be normal character interaction. Here the metatechnique more specifically is the initiation and negotiation of the scene. This is a theoretical distinction: in everyday speech, meta scenes commonly belong amongst the metatechniques. –Eds.] Depending on what story you as a designer want to enable with your larp, you can add, redesign, adjust, and invent new metatechniques to fit the vision and themes of your particular larp. Not all mechanics work at all larps; you need to find the type of tool that works for your design. INNER MONOLOGUE Metacommunication inserted into the play by one player A character may lie, tell half truths, and keep secrets. As this could be something only the player knows about, in order to bring the character’s thoughts into play the metatechnique inner monologue can be used, permitting a player to verbalize the character’s thoughts and feelings. The inner monologue is audible to the other players, but not to the other characters. This can be done in a number of different ways, but there needs to be a clear distinction between when the character is speaking, and when the character’s inner thoughts are being expressed. That means an inner monologue needs to have a clear beginning and end. If a character is thinking about revolution, for example, it’s not truly expressed in play until the character tells another character, or acts on it in an obvious way – but some characters never would. The inner monologue metatechnique allows the players to formulate and express character thoughts externally, PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:4:3 / 263 without their character needing to reveal them diegetically. This is done in part to guide the player towards a deeper understanding and a more developed story of their own character, and in part for the benefit of the other players and everyone’s collective storymaking. Knowing what a character is really thinking reframes and changes the meaning of their actions, creating dramatic irony, which makes witnessing the actions more interesting. When the other players understand a character’s inner motivation and thoughts, they can also collaboratively create a more focused, meaningful,and emotional story arc through playing against the tensions that they are now aware of. They can make a more informed decision about where to take the larp next, or choose what theme or scene would be interesting to play, than if they just need to guess where the character is. For example, a scene can be made a lot more interesting if both players know one character secretly loves the other character. The unknowing character can play on believing that she is unlovable, or on being in love with someone else, to give more emotional impact to the scene. This metatechnique is helpful in a larp that focuses on the characters’ story and emotional experiences. It is especially useful in larps where characters can’t say what they mean: for example, in settings with lots of social control or oppression. On the other hand it is an intrusive metatechnique: it forces everyone close by to listen to information their characters would not have. Particularly if the larp is quite big this can be problematic, since players in a larp are usually focussed on their own story and their closest relations. If a player has never met a character it can be uninteresting to listen to their inner thoughts. Hence the use of techniques that force everyone to listen should be limited to smaller groups of preferably a maximum of eight persons. Below are a few examples of what the inner monologue metatechnique might look like in practice. DIRECTOR INSTRUCTION Some larps have so called directors in the larp. A director is a runtime gamemaster present in the larp to actively enable play, and is visible to the players, but not to the characters. [See Westerling & Hultman on Runtime Directors. –Eds]. If your larp uses this type of function, a director can simply ask a player to do an inner monologue during a scene, and say thank you when it’s over. The director can use an agreed-upon phrase like “What are you thinking?” or “Please do an inner monologue” to clearly communicate that the metatechnique is being used. This mechanic was used at En stilla middag med familjen (Sweden, 2007, Eng. A Nice Evening with the Family). For clarity it was combined with a gesture called gamemaster’s touch. The director put their hand lightly on the player to signal a meta level interaction and asked, for example, what the character felt. The player could then tell the director what their character was thinking. It also finished clearly / 264 when the director said thank you and removed their hand. ZONING In the room a special area or position is marked, and when someone stands there and speaks they are understood to be doing an inner monologue. The downside with this is that there needs to be someone around who wants to listen, so that the player is not speaking to an empty room. This works best in spaces where small groups play together, and when the rest of the group is willing to listen to an inner monologue. A SPECIAL GESTURE To start an inner monologue you do a special gesture to mark that it is a monologue. For instance, Mad About the Boy (Norway, 2010) used forming the shape of a TV screen with your hands around your head to start and finish your monologue. The downside is that someone entering in the middle may have missed the gesture, and so uncertainty can arise about whether what is said is audible to other characters or not. In other larps, alternatives have been developed where you for instance touch your heart, or a specific object throughout the monologue instead. For example, in some larp it might be elegant to agree that if a player is touching the Bible, it means the player is monologuing about the character’s soul. A SPECIAL RITUAL In some settings there are certain rituals that can be adopted for the use of metatechniques. For example at a dinner party giving speeches, or in Jane Austen’s time reading poems together. You can establish in your design that while the characters will hear a speech or poem, the players will give an inner monologue instead. In the larp Joakim (Sweden, 2011) the player signalled the start of an inner monologue by pinging their glass and getting up as though to to hold a cheerful speech, but really to perform an inner monologue. At Fortune & Felicity (Sweden, 2017) the poetry mechanic for inner monologues required the player to say the first line of a real poem, then the character’s thoughts or emotions, and end with a line of real poetry. The listeners then applauded as though they had just heard an emotional poem read. A ritual like this can also provide a convenient code word for inner monologue, with the advantage that the players can ask someone to read a poem knowing that what they will really receive is an inner monologue. A monologue also requires a listener and focus, which the social scripts around both poems and speeches offer. / 265 WORD AND OBJECTS Words or objects containing or activating meta information for the players You can introduce keywords or objects that have a special meaning to the players but not the characters. The character will interact with them normally, but the player can use them to direct their play or story choices. A larp that used objects in this way was Delirium (2010, Denmark), which was set in a stylized mental asylum. One design goal of the larp was to allow the participants not to have to pretend to be suffering from mental illness, but to experience the frustrating and sometimes terrifying social reality of their reality not matching that of others. In the setting, any red objects would be treated by the characters as perfectly normal – except for the person interacting with it. For example, one of the spoons at the table would be red and have holes in it. The player who ended up with the red spoon would be unable to eat soup without spilling, but everyone else would punish them, socially or actually, for being messy and creating problems. Complaining that the spoon has holes in it will, of course, make the character seem even more insane. In BAPHOMET (Denmark, 2015) the characters possessed by Baphomet and Pan would be wearing necklaces depicting the deities. The necklaces do not diegetically exist, or represent neutral jewellery if interacted with physically. The players know that to their character, the person wearing the necklace is now the most interesting in the room, and they would do anything to please them. The wearer of the necklace is given a specific goal to guide their interactions with the others. In the jeepform scenario Fyllo (Sweden, 2008, Eng. Drunk) players will attach cues for flashback scenes to a real bottle from which the one of the characters will physically drink during scenes set in the present. As the level of the liquid reaches a scene marker, that scene is played. You can also load words with meta information to allow participants to communicate out of character without pausing play. Common uses for meta language are magic systems and playstyle calibration. Using certain words in a spell can describe to other players what the effect is intended to be. In Dragonbane (Sweden, 2006), the word “Veritas” implied that the sentence that followed was a spell, and that the player should pay attention, because it would include an instruction about how to react appropriately. The code word and spell were diegetically real, and the instruction was to be followed absolutely – with possible wiggle room provided by any unintentional vagueness on the magic user’s side. In Inside Hamlet (2015, Denmark) the thematically appropriate words “rotten” and “pure” were used in a sentence to increase or decrease intensity in an ongoing interaction. The character’s opinion and the playstyle instruction could / 272 to the players experiencing more physical immersion, but probably also lead to more larp crushes and bleed. Players experience emotions with their bodies, and the body does not understand that its stomach butterflies and pupil dilations are caused by a person that does not really exist. If you don’t want your players to experience romantic bleed, you can enhance the feeling of alibi and distance. You can also make sure your players have more cognitive and emotional resources to cope with the experience by making sure they are well-rested and relaxed. In what kind of physical environment will the larp take place? Is there an abundance of soft, horizontal surfaces with a high hygienic standard? Or is it a cold, dusty gravel pit with no light after the sun’s gone down? How do you want to prioritize the players’ comfort vs every other factor, like the setting or the purpose of the larp? Does the lack or abundance of comfortable or available places to have sex in create interesting play on a story level? What’s the larp’s setting and aesthetic? If the larp is theatrical and decadent, the sex mechanic might also need to be. If the larp’s setting is based on some kind of innocent romanticism, where the most erotic event would be someone looking at you from across the room, then the sex mechanic might also need to be a bit more restricted (unless you are intentionally aiming for a contrast). If the larp is based on an already established storyworld, how is sex portrayed there? Is it something that’s just alluded to, or a detailed affair with physical descriptions? Do the players need a way to communicate or negotiate before and after the scene? If the larp has darker themes, the need to check in out of character with a co-player might be higher than in a more easygoing larp. It is a good idea to establish how the players should communicate to check whether their co-player is okay with moving the scene in a more sexual direction, and how they feel after the scene. You can use non-intrusive consent calibration mechanics, or encourage players going completely offgame to negotiate. [For more detailed suggestions about how to teach physical consent negotiation, see Mutsaers in the next chapter. –Eds.] Is the communication between the characters, before and after, interesting play? In a larp where most characters do not speak about their inner lives, it might be interesting for the players to hear characters express their real feelings and thoughts before and after sex. A metatechnique, like a preor post-sex monologue or meta scene, might do the trick. After the hard parameters of your design have been established, the most important questions need to be revisited: Why is it important to portray sex in this larp at all, and what is the narrative purpose of the sexual content? / 273 Is it because having sex has important social consequences for the characters? In that case focusing on the emotions and decisions before, during, and after sex makes sense. Or is the exact nature of the sexual acts, or the power dynamics of the interaction, narratively important? Then a simulation mechanic in which details of the sexual act are somehow represented could work better. If the story potentially involves non-consensual interactions or sexual violence, how will that be represented? EXAMPLES OF SEX SIMULATION MECHANICS One advantage of using an already existing simulation mechanic is that it’ll save precious time in your design process. A disadvantage is that as the mechanic isn’t specifically designed for your larp, the players, or the environment, it may not suit the purpose. To save time and sanity, you might still want to adapt an already existing mechanic instead of designing a brand new one. In any case, familiarizing yourself with some of the available choices will help you think about the design choices involved, and will give some idea of what kinds of mechanics players might have encountered before. STORYTELLING SEX Summer Lovin’ (Norway/Sweden, 2012), a freeform scenario about friends telling stories about hookups, used storytelling as the simulation mechanic. After a scene where the sexual encounter is talked about, it is played out as a flashback to explore what really happened. Two people sit in front of each other, holding hands. As is common in freeform scenarios, the other players will not be portraying characters while not in focus, and will just sit by the others as an audience. One of the players holding hands says, from a character perspective, what they do to the other character. The other player answers with how their character reacts and what they do in response. They then take turns describing the sex act until one of them lets go of the hands. The mechanic is focused more on co-creating a story about sex than on experiencing the sex physically, which may be experienced as easier to play. Just describing what the character does may be easier than actually doing it with one’s body. The mechanic demands of the players to be quite verbally creative in front of an audience, which for some players might feel quite embarrassing or difficult. An alternative in your larp could be to use the same mechanic without an audience, or to decide at the start of the scene broadly what’s going to happen in it. If you want the mechanic to feel more immersive, the players can stand/sit closer to each other, or maybe even whisper into the other person’s ear what their character does and feels. In Fortune & Felicity (Sweden, 2017), a Jane Austen-inspired 360° larp, the sex simulation was a similar metatechnique, but focused on what the act meant for / 274 the characters. The larp’s handbook described it as a three-step process: Foreplay – hold both hands, and take turns telling each other what your characters are thinking about before the sex. Nervous, horny, confused, etc. Use both reason and emotion. Sex – continue holding hands, but lean forwards and touch your right cheek to the other player’s right cheek. Then you take turns saying single words that describe the character’s emotions during the act. When you feel you are done, you can lean back. But keep holding hands. Afterthought – while holding hands, tell the other about what this will mean for you, your family, and your future. Let both reason and emotion play their parts. When done, release hands. Nothing of what is said is heard by the other character. This is just your character’s thoughts as they have sex, shared with the other player. If your character wishes to talk to the other character ingame, you can do so when you have let go of the hands. ARS AMANDI Designed for Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden, 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea), Ars Amandi is one of the best known sex simulation mechanics in Nordic larp. The core of the mechanic involves the players touching each other’s hands, arms, shoulders, and part of the neck (but nowhere else on the body) while working with eye contact, breathing, moans and intensity of touch as appropriate. In the original larp, set in a fictional culture on a distant planet, this was how characters diegetically had sex – the actions represented themselves and were not symbolic replacements for other actions. In later use, Ars Amandi has become a replacement mechanic. One way to adapt Ars Amandi is to change the limits of the touching, from only hands to arms and everything above the breasts. To get comfortable with the mechanic, all players try it out in a workshop many times with a lot of different people. A common positive reaction to the mechanic is that it feels safe and sexy at the same time. A common critique is that it feels weird and uncomfortable to practise the mechanic with so many people in the workshop, especially with moans and breathing. Depending on how comfortable the players are with the mechanic, you might need to tone down the intensity during the workshop, or only try out the mechanic in smaller groups, and save the moaning and heavy breathing for the larp. Some players might also more generally feel that touching each other’s arms while maintaining eye contact is too intimate to do with strangers. The mechanic is rather straightforward, it has specific phases, and you can start and end it without having to think about props or clothes. If you want a more realistic representation of pre-sex and post-sex behaviours, you can think / 275 about how to symbolize condoms, lube and the like. Another question is how to handle clothes – will they stay on, or does the potential shedding of clothing serve a purpose? In a cold/dirty environment one might prioritize comfort and leave the clothes on: or one might decide that it will create a sharp and immersive contrast when everyone’s huddled in layers of clothes, and one sees a flash of naked arm in an intimate scene. Narratively, the mechanic may be a bit confusing for onlookers. It can be hard to see whether a soft stroke of the shoulder should suggest gentle penetrative sex or an intimate caress. If you want other people to be able to really read the actions, then Ars Amandi might not be the best fit. THE PHALLUS METHOD The Phallus Method, designed for Just a Little Lovin’, has three steps: the negotiation, the sex simulation, and the monologues. The larp is about love, AIDS history, and gay sexual culture in the early 1980s; and the simulation mechanic needs to be very explicit to allow for nuanced storytelling around sex-related content. In the first step, a player will offer another player a pink feather as an invitation to play or escalate to a sex scene. The player has the choice to pass; if they want to play, they take the feather and then negotiate the approximate content and physical intensity of the scene with their co-player(s). Playing out the sex involves using a phallus prop to symbolize sexual actions. The phallus is aesthetically suitable to the larp’s focus on male gay experience, and is understood by the players to be a gender-neutral symbol for assertiveness and penetrative sex.How to specifically use the phallus prop is open for players to decide, depending on their comfort level in the specific situation. They can for instance choose to touch each others’ arms with the phallus, to suck it, or to use it for “dry humping” (theatre sex). The rules do instruct the players to keep at least some clothes on, and that any actual sex involving genitals is not permitted. After the sex scene has been played, the players stand side by side, without eye contact, and hold monologues of one or a few sentences from their character’s perspective about their thoughts and feelings about what has just transpired. This is a meta-technique; the monologues can be heard by the players, but not the characters. Since the mechanic is so open to interpretation, you would have to establish what range of behaviours is intended and allowed in your take on it: there’s quite a jump in realism between touching each others’ wrists with the phallus and deepthroating the prop. Especially if you’ll be in a dirty environment, think about hygiene. How are the phalluses supposed to be cleaned and stored? If you for some reason can’t fix specific props, or the players do not have one at hand, would anything with a phallus shape be fine? Of course the symbolic object you choose does not have to be phallus-shaped. / 276 ARS IMPERIO Designed for the 2018 reruns of En stilla middag med familjen (Sweden, 2007, Eng. A Nice Evening with the Family), Ars Imperio is focused on the larp’s themes: power, potency and control. It combines elements from Ars Amandi and storytelling sex with a more physical interaction. The player who judges their character to be more submissive will lie down; or, if the scene has an element of force, be asked by the other player to lie down. Either player can opt out at any time, and the larp offered the option of finding a gamemaster to play out the scene in a more abstract way in the meta room. The player of the more dominant character sits down on the other person’s stomach. Then they touch each others’ hands, arms and face, to simulate kisses and sex, and take turns saying one word that describes what the character is thinking or feeling. The larp’s materials state: This is not a competition and you can spend many seconds choosing your words. When the act goes towards a climax these words might be repeated over and over in a more ecstatic way. […] It is okay to make very short sentences or noises to complement the words if it feels right for you. […] If you want a rhythm and movement you can use your hands together and combine this with repeating the words. Please do not add pelvic motion or other very sexually coded elements during the act. You should also refrain from touching anywhere else than hands and face on your partner. The power dynamics may shift, with the dominant character’s player lying down, and the previously submissive one choosing to get on top. The sex is over when the dominant person stands up. Ars Imperio places a lot of focus on a physical representation of power and control, which can have a great effect, but will be less relevant in settings where not all relationships are a site of conflict and competition. The mechanic is also meant for just two people: so if you want to portray some form of group sex, you might need to think about how to symbolize the power dynamics and the physical control of the submissive/s. On a practical level, not everyone is able to lie down on the floor or sit on top of another person, or comfortable with doing so. You can always adapt the mechanic to a sitting or standing position where you use your hands or arms to signal the physical control. TEACHING THE SIMULATION MECHANIC The simulation mechanic you select or design needs to be described before signup on a general level, after signup in more detail, and then be practised on site to ensure everyone knows it, and to help counter a sense of embarrassment or confusion while using it. One of the most important things to do before trying / 277 out the mechanic is to build trust. If the players don’t trust each other, they won’t be comfortable playing on stories involving sex. Your workshop will need a trust-building progression and exercises. And don’t rush it. Stress won’t help to soothe anxiety. Practising these mechanics, without the alibi of character and in a room full of people, is often more awkward than playing them in context, where the character and the magic circle provide more alibi. If the mechanic is more immersive and realistic, you might want to instruct the players to try it out more mechanically in workshop, without much feeling. You can verbalize the emotions to help normalize them: “this will feel awkward, so if you think this is a little weird at first you’re doing it right.” In any case, but especially if the mechanic involves close physical proximity, it’s a good idea to remind participants that the body might have automatic mechanical responses, including erections, and to not make a big deal about it. If you are too embarrassed to say the word “erection” to your players you should select a less physical representation mechanic. If you choose to allow the players to play on sexual themes in the larp, you have to be prepared to talk about sexual things with your players. Make sure you know why you have made your choices by reflecting on the different questions above. Communicate your design clearly to the participants, and make sure they always know how to take responsibility for their own limits. FURTHER READING: Charles Bo Nielsen: “Playing in love” in Nielsen (ed): Once Upon a Nordic Larp. (2017) Mo Holkar & Monica Hjort Traxl, “What Does it Mean When Sex is Sexy?” nordiclarp.org, (3.2. 2017) Ars Amandi http://www.ars-amandi.se/resources/the-ars-amandi-method/ Summer Lovin’ (full text) https://scenariofestival.se/archive/scenarios-2015/summer-lovin/ Jaakko Stenros: “Amorous Bodies in Play. Sexuality in Nordic Live Action Role-Playing Games.” Grenzfurthner, Johannes, Friesinger, Günther & Fabry, Daniel (eds.): Screw The System – Explorations of Spaces, Games and Politics through Sexuality and Technology. Arse Elektronika Anthology #4. (2013) Nynne Rasmussen: “Fucking Around”. Playground #7 (2012) / 278 THE LANGUAGE OF CONSENT PRACTICAL CONSENT NEGOTIATIONS FOR PHYSICAL PLAY // Susan Mutsaers Most larps define in their design what kind and intensity of physical interaction between participants is acceptable and permitted. Some larps make this a range, leaving space for playstyle calibration between individual participants. These negotiations between participants can happen through either informal structures or formalized measures of communication. An often used type of structured playstyle calibration is the formalized prompt, for example “How would you like to play this?” The other person answers, and asks the same question, after which both parties select a level both are comfortable with. This kind of calibration is called a consent negotiation. Knowing and choosing the right words to use when talking about one’s physical boundaries is instrumental to successful consent negotiations. Like any kind of social skill, this one is not inherent and must be learned. Most humans have very little practice in negotiating boundaries in their daily lives. If your larp design requires the participants to negotiate how physical interactions in different scenes are played, you should therefore teach them how. Giving them the questions that need to be asked is not enough; you should also make participants consider and practice potential answers to be given. Words to use when negotiating consent for physical play can be roughly divided into three categories: • Locations on the body – used to indicate where the participant wants to be touched (or not to be touched). • Adjectives and intentions – adjectives describe the way a participant wants to be touched (or not be touched). This category also includes movements one can make. • Situations – Used to describe external circumstances that might change the given consent. PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:4:5 / 279 Locations on the body Adjectives & intentions Situations - Face - Neck - Hand - Legs - Breast/chest area - Below the belt - Tender - Harsh - Rough - Stroking - Sudden - Not when we are alone - Only in spaces with light - Not when certain people are present In order to make participants aware of the wide range of language they can use, it is instrumental that complete examples are given during workshops. This is especially relevant for workshops where larpers who are inexperienced with consent negotiations are participating, or where there is a language barrier. Workshop designers often tend to use extreme situations as examples when teaching consent mechanics. But complete examples would include words not just from all the above categories, but also all intensity levels. The consent ladder can help you choose examples from a broad range of situations as you are designing your workshop. Making it available to the players will help them think about their limits. The range represented on the list is also of vital importance in framing what behaviours are acceptable and encouraged at your larp. This helps manage the participants’ expectations. Violence Intimacy - Screaming/yelling without touch - Grabbing/pushing - Threatening - Light slapping - Stage violence - Full contact, low impact violence - Violence with real force (hitting, pushing, etc.) - Verbal without touch - Soft and gentle touch on arms - Soft and gentle touch on face/body - Soft and gentle touch in private areas - Harsh touch on any body part - Sex simulation mechanics (e.g. Ars Amandi) - Simulated sexual action (stage kissing, etc.) - Non-simulated sexual interaction (actual kissing, touching, etc.) It is important to remember that any list like this will not be exhaustive and cannot apply for every participant. A situation which is high on your ladder might be low for another individual. Or the other way around. There are also cultural variations. Some larp cultures will rate real kissing as a medium-intensity activity, but employ very physical sex simulation mechanics that might have a higher threshold. Using a wide variety of examples helps to validate the boundaries of participants who are looking for lower-intensity interactions in certain situations. / 280 Remind your participants that their limits are likely to be different with different individuals, and might change day to day or hour to hour. This will help normalize renegotiation between the same two players at different points in the larp. The use of a diverse range of specific examples helps participants evaluate their own boundaries, as they apply the newly-learned words to their personal limits. A participant might for example never even have considered the external situation as something that could affect their boundaries. Specific vocabulary will also help those initiating consent negotiations to communicate clear intent. A shared language raises awareness of boundaries in both individuals and the participant community, and can help you ensure that anyone new to consent negotiations in larp starts with a vocabulary level closer to that of more experienced participants. / 281 PORTRAYING VIOLENCE IN LARPS // Martine Helene Svanevik For anyone who comes from a tabletop systems or boffer larp tradition, simulating violence in larp might seem inevitable. Combat systems, rules, and hit points would be a part of the design of almost any role-playing game. But simulating violence is, as everything else, a design choice. Some larps might need a complex method for this, some might need a simple one, some might not portray any physical conflict at all. If violence (or the threat of it) fits the theme, genre, setting, and aesthetic goals of your larp, you should first ask yourself what your players will otherwise be doing during play. Are their actions represented realistically or abstractly? Will the body and abilities of the player represent the body and abilities of the character? The answers to these questions will inform whether you need to add game mechanics to simulate violence. Violence mechanics address two separate issues: how to determine the outcome of a violent interaction (i.e. which character will win), and how the violence between the characters will be represented by the players during play. In the collaborative-style larps discussed in this book, the players are not in competition with each other even when their characters are. Many Nordic-style larps allow the players in the scene to determine the outcome of the conflict based on what makes the most narrative sense to the parties. Others involve light mechanics. Once you’ve decided that players will be simulating violence at your larp, the next thing to think about is what you want the violence simulation to make the players feel. What is it that you want to gain from portraying violence at your larp? And what style of larp are you making? When you design or select a violence mechanic, think about the benefits and the drawbacks of the system you are choosing. If you choose very light mechanics in a larp with a very physical style, you will need to put effort into designing and practising trust within the player group, opt-out mechanics, and playstyle calibration. If you go for a higher simulation level, that will enable characters to do things that their players are not able to do or are not comfortable doing. If you go all the way to a numbers-based system for controlling the outcomes of PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:4:6 / 288 to each other to agree on how they would like their character’s story to end. There is one final component to make this design choice work flawlessly, and that is that there is a clear communication from even before signup that this will happen. Making the design choice transparent is a very important element to ensure that all participants are onboard with it, and that how character death is handled becomes part of why participants sign up for the larp. Suspense is created from the beginning by not knowing what will finally kill your character. Other larps have used similar design in other genres, e.g. Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015). Here, the Shakespearean tragedy is fostered by tensions between the characters and, ultimately, their end. For the gothic horror experience we want to create in Demeter, the focus is on internal conflict. The inevitability of death and the desperation this results in creates the internal conflict and drives the characters to their breaking point. This knowledge about the characters’ approaching end can be used actively by participants during the course of the larp to develop their own character stories. Foreshadowing remarks or wilful ignorance gain a deeper meaning during the earlier stages of the larp, as all participants are well aware of the final outcome. Even though you know that your character cannot be killed before the end of the larp, you also know they most definitely will be killed, making all their actions both futile and immensely important at the same time – being as they are the characters’ final choices. From within their characters, participants watch these fates unravel: knowing that just like in a horror movie, there is nothing they can do to stop it. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Demeter NAILED IT! / 289 / 290 / 291 SECTION 3:5 All experience design is fundamentally about the design of physical and social spaces. These always interact. If you want people to dance at your party, it helps to turn up the music so they can feel it in their bodies, but also to turn down the lights, which will make them feel less awkward about being watched. If you want people to talk at your party, the music should not be as loud, and the light should be better so they can see each other’s faces. It also helps if people are forced by the shape of the space to stand or sit no further than about a metre apart, and if they have some kind of practical task to do at the same time. This is why the best conversations at parties are often in the kitchen. Larp design is experience design with the extra layer of fiction transposed onto the runtime. The characters may have invented histories, and the cultures to which they belong may differ in values and practices from the players’. But the players are still humans, in physical bodies with predictable psychological reactions and deeply seated cultural assumptions about what kinds of behaviours are possible or desired in different spaces or situations. If you design for this, it can support your goals; if you ignore it, it can undermine your work. In the following chapter, Søren Lyng Ebbehøj, Signe Løndahl HOW TO DESIGN A PLAYABLE ENVIRONMENT / 292 Hertel and Jonas Trier Knudsen draft the fundamentals of spatial design for larp. J Li follows with a detailed look on how physical distance affects the social dynamics of conversations. Examples illustrate the use of spatial design to create different story possibilities, and remind you not to forget to reserve some space for yourself. Finally, Anni Tolvanen writes about how you are already making sound design decisions for your larps, and suggests practical approaches for making them intentional. In the concluding example, sound becomes completely central as all light is removed from the play space. / 293 SPATIAL DESIGN FOR LARPS // Søren Ebbehøj // Signe Løndahl Hertel // Jonas Trierr-Knudsen Spatial design is shaping or planning the physical space of a larp in order to facilitate desired interactions and behaviour among participants. Larps are set in physical spaces. Most larps are physical experiences where a player’s movement in space equals a character’s movement in a fictional world. This statement may seem banal, but it is one of few characteristics that really makes larp stand out from its tabletop sibling. Considering that the interaction between the players makes the larp, surprisingly little larp design discourse has engaged with designing play spaces. Like the painted set of a theater stage, many larp designers tend to use locations as passive backgrounds. But using scenography to superficially represent the diegetic world is a missed opportunity. Just like clever characters or meta-techniques, spatial design can play a huge role in shaping our experience. Though we rarely think about it, most have already encountered this in our daily lives. Consider for instance how romantic restaurants often have dimmed lights. This creates a feeling of privacy (though the neighboring couple is a metre away), which makes it easier to be intimate. Or, take courtrooms, where the symmetrical layout is centred on the judge who sits in an elevated position. This forces both plaintiffs and attorneys to look up at her. The space is designed to make others feel small and to amplify the authority of the judge. In terms of larp organising, spatial design is related to disciplines like scenography, prop design, logistics, and costuming. It also draws on fields like architecture, interior design, and the recent surge in behavioral “nudging” used to shape everything from airports to coffee shops. Spatial design is much more than dressing something up to look right. Fundamentally it cares about function: what is the expected social effect of a space? Which types of interaction does it facilitate? How will layout X drive the players towards interaction Y? Physical and social spaces always interact, with the shape of the space affecting social affordances – what people are able and willing to do. This means that your intentional design of spaces, or the lack of it, will interact directly with other parts of your larp’s design, and will either support or counteract them. Spatial design is a way of enhancing certain experiences and nudging players more seamPART SECTION CHAPTER 3:5:1 / 294 lessly towards certain types of interaction. It is part of the equation, but only rarely the full solution. Everyday spaces such as homes, streets and airports are designed to promote many different types of behaviour and interactions. Good airports aim for frictionless efficiency, living rooms are designed to be cosy, and urban spaces are often intentionally hostile to the homeless. You can learn from the real world, but when designing spaces for larps it is important to keep in mind that a realistic looking space might not support the type of interaction you need. Look for functional similarities rather than visual ones. TOOLBOX The following design tools will help you make sure the physical space supports your design goals just as much as your characters, setting and workshops do. The toolbox is divided into five concepts: function, distance, movement, line of sight, and separation. FUNCTION Creating places of significance in a larp requires programming the spaces with functions. If players are supposed to stay in a certain space, they need something to do there. Vice versa, if players are supposed to do something in particular, they need a place to do it. Most larps have a list of functions required by practical necessity or by other parts of the larp design. This can include everything from sleeping quarters and a mess hall to places for the players to perform rituals, traditions or other activities. All objects and spaces have certain affordances – actions suggested by the design of the object. For example: a softball has just the right shape, weight and size for humans to throw it. Affordances are not universal however, but depend on cultural context, previous experience, physical ability, etc. Spaces too have affordances governed by the objects in them and by their ambience, size, delineation, etc. Affordances are communicated subconsciously by which actions we perceive as possible and appropriate, but also overtly, for example by signs. Designing clear functional spaces usually takes a bit of both. Consider designing a bar for your larp. Hang a sign over the door that says “bar”, and people will know what actions are possible and desirable there. Leave the room without chairs and glasses however, and players will probably go elsewhere for beverages and letting loose. If you try to force them to be there anyway, they might take it upon themselves to equip the room properly, whether or not that makes sense for their characters, or rebel against the larp in other ways. Equip the room as a bar but leave out the sign, and most players will probably act as though they were in a bar (assuming that they can find it). If you do not provide places for the activities you want your players to be / 295 doing, they will improvise such places themselves, if at all possible. Designing specific spaces to support specific functions will focus the larp on the actions most relevant to its themes and your vision, and will let you guide how, where and when these actions are played out. Function tool 1: What is this place? Create functional spaces by equipping them for actions and interaction Place objects in each space with clear affordances supporting the type of actions and play that the players are supposed to perform there. If a location is supposed to be for lovers to come and watch the sunset, provide a comfortable bench. If you want soldiers to hang out somewhere during their free time, give them comfortable sitting arrangements and props like a deck of cards, free weights or letter writing equipment. And if a place is meant for secrets to be shared, make sure it feels private, as privacy affords secrecy (whether or not it actually is private is another question; see Transition tool 2 below). Another example of this is to program the level of formality of the interaction in a space by designing the seating arrangements. Think of this as a scale from pillows on the floor instead of comfortable lounge chairs, to a boardroom arrangement of straight-backed throne-like chairs. Function tool 2: Activating boring functions through location Integrate potentially boring functions into the larp by placing them next to social hotspots or in plain sight of interesting interactions Many larps involve tedious functional tasks such as cooking or dishwashing. These tasks tend to be removed from areas of social interaction. Often this is done for practical purposes (such as access to a kitchen) or for diegetic purposes, as these functions often have low status and are therefore hidden away in many real and fictional cultures. This tends to remove players – often of low status characters – from the play for varying amounts of time. One way to avoid this is to place these functions next to hubs of social interaction, or in the midst of them. For example, the dishwashing station of a tavern could be placed in the middle of the bar, enabling interaction between the dishwasher and the patrons sitting at the bar. Another way of solving this is co-locating several functions. For example, the kitchen could have other functions such as resting station, a place for trading rumours, or a place to send people to work for punishment. Function tool 3: One man’s trash Create conflict by assigning different values to the same function Different functions have different value to different groups of characters. A ceremonial ground will be important to the religious characters whose daily routine is filled with rituals, while the marketplace is important for the merchants. Programming the same spaces with different functions for different groups / 296 can create conflict or interesting cultural encounters between them. If a room is a common resting area to one group of characters, and a bar to others, conflict will certainly arise. The same effect can be achieved by designing movement. If one group’s natural path through the larp interferes with a place of significance for another player group, it will create a feeling of trespassing and thereby conflict. Imagine, for instance, that the local townspeople have to move across a firing range of occupying military forces in order to get to their ritual ground. DISTANCE The distance between two people governs how they can interact. Simply put, the closer we are, the more emotional we (can) get. This effect is wholly subconscious. It is something we intuitively understand and act upon, making it a great tool for nudging your players towards specific behaviours. Imagine that you are walking down a street as you see another person approaching. At about 75 metres you assess the person. You can see whether they are young or old and have the first notions of bodily characteristics. Closing in to under 50 metres, you enter recognizing distance. If you know the person, you will see who they are. You can still barely interact. Even waving would be out of the ordinary. This changes at 20 metres where you enter interest distance. You can start to read crude emotions like anger or happiness. This is also where you would start to nod, smile or otherwise acknowledge your relation. Within 7 metres, real contact begins. It can be verbal, though that would mean awkward shouting. Conversation is still out of the question. Gradually, from 7 down to 3 metres, we start to interact. This is the public distance where many power-dominated interactions takes place – the teacher in front of her students, the judge facing the courtroom. From 3 to 1.5 metres we are within the common social distance. This is where the bulk of our interactions with strangers play out. But especially towards the 3 metre mark, conversations will still feel formal. This brings us to the closest distances. At 1.5 metres, we are within personal space where we start to get a fuller sensory impression of the other person. How they smell, how minor facial expressions influence the meaning of words. The final metre is our intimate distance which is reserved for people we have a close connection to. And this is an oddly accurate distance. Ask two people to move slowly towards each other until they feel close. Move them back 10 cm and get out the measuring tape. Odds are, it will say 1 metre. Of course, people often move temporarily into intimate distance, e.g. for a hug, but staying within that distance feels very intimate. Another example of distances at play is looking at a house party. If a crowd of 10 occupy the living room, they will often form a circle with a diameter of around 3 metres. This places everyone within the public or social distance, but / 297 outside the personal distance of almost everyone else in the circle. Conversations in these settings tend to turn into series of monologues in slightly raised voices, which are anything but intimate. Sometimes the circle will break up, with neighbours turning toward each other (closing the distance to below 1 metre), forming smaller intimate spaces for quieter more personal conversation. Note that the research this is based on is from a Western perspective, and even within that it varies depending on context. Naturally, you should always consider your players’ cultural starting point when you design. Distance tool 1: The magic metre Limiting space to create intensity, intimacy and aggression Within the intimate 1 metre, humans interact emotionally with the person in front of them. This means that the layout of a room can have a significant effect on the intensity of interaction. By shaping rooms or passages so that players must move or stay within one metre of one another, you can increase friction between already opposing characters or support the formation of intimate relations. Having only narrow passages forces players to negotiate who gets the right to go first, which can create tension between them. A way of avoiding the circle of monologues described above is arrange larger rooms with furniture in smaller circles, room to sit on the floor, etc. This will create smaller, more intimate spaces for personal interaction. Distance tool 2: Cut room size in half Enhance intensity by cramming your players closer together Nordic style larps often focus on intimate relations and interpersonal conflict, and designers want them to be intense. If this is your goal, cramming your players together in small spaces – often smaller than what seems reasonable – is generally a good design choice as it will catalyse tension. As a rule of thumb, make rooms about half as big as they would be for actually living in. The same goes for tents that can be pitched closer together, and walkways, which can be half as broad. It seems simple, but it is disproportionately effective. And you won’t have to rent as large a location. Distance tool 3: US vs. THEM Establish teams by managing distances between player groups Many larps build on an “us vs. them” dynamic. If this is your goal, distance is your friend. The closer we are, the more nuanced our mutual impressions will be. Using this idea, you can divide your location into sections that place clear distance between factions. Distance prevents people from being able to read one another’s emotions, which discourages sympathy. This can support the generic image of / 304 Similarly, a large room with a high ceiling can be made to support a more intimate atmosphere if the light sources hang low. The low hanging light will take focus from the ceiling above, thus creating the illusion of a smaller room. Transition tool 2: Secrecy or “secrecy” Screen spaces for intimate play by using opaque materials that let sound travel to enhance transparency In order to make people feel comfortable playing intimate scenes or sharing secrets, it can be effective to provide small spaces and block lines of sight to screen them from prying eyes. This, however, will usually also obstruct the flow of diegetic information between characters and/or narrative input between players, which might be in conflict with other design goals. Using thin materials that block line of sight but let sound pass unhindered will increase transparency without ruining the sense of privacy for the people in the screened space. Think for example how some people will act inside camping or festival tents when, for a moment, they forget that even though no one can see them, everyone can hear them. This is used to great effect in many larps with varying kinds of symbolic scenography, such as the Androids trilogy (Sweden, 2017-2018). In the first of these larps, Do Androids Dream?, the brothel of the Blade Runner-inspired city had rooms only screened by paper walls allowing everyone nearby to hear what was going on inside, and who was in there. Transition tool 3: Respect my authority! Make powerful characters seem dominant by giving them elevated positions to interact from The association of power and status with physical elevation is so ingrained that it can be utilised to underscore the status or power position of some through literally putting them on a pedestal. Elevating the throne above floor level will increase the perceived status of the queen in a fantasy larp; raising the floor behind the bar will empower people in service positions, such as the bartenders, in relation to their rowdy customers. On the other hand, if the queen is to come off as weak, you can decrease her perceived status by placing her at level height with her subjects. Another effect of putting people in power positions on higher ground could be to supply them with a better overview of the immediate situation, not only raising their perceived status but actually providing the player with an advantage. Separation tool 4: The tree house Sitting at different heights than others provides distance to create intimate spaces or seclusion of players Elevation can be used to create spaces as well as distance and screens. Think about how people at a party will drop out of the general conversation and start their own when they sit down on the floor. This happens because they are no / 305 longer in the immediate field of vision of people otherwise inside their personal distance. People climbing a tree, a ladder or just sitting on top of a fence will enter their own secluded semi space. These tools were used to great effect in Totem (Denmark, 2007) about two tribes of hunter gatherers in a future stone age meeting for a transition ritual. While most of the play took place sitting around a campfire, the players could climb a wooden structure like scaffolding outside the circle around the fire. This would allow more people to gather around the fire, but also allowed the players to use elevation, distance and sight lines to play with status and seclusion. FURTHER READING: Steen Eiler Rasmussen: Experiencing Architecture (1957) Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) Jan Gehl: Life Between Buildings (1971) / 306 GEOMETRY OF CONVERSATIONS // J Li The essential unit of social interaction is the conversation. A designer can shape the conversations that take place in a game not only by supplying content, but also through crafting the physical form that conversations take on. Environment and context are major factors in shaping social behavior. Although it’s not possible to control what happens in any given interaction, physical conversation design can shape the overall social trends in a game. Thus, the art of physical setup can go far beyond conveying content or representing realism: it is also as an opportunity to create subtle guardrails that enhance design intent through directing unconscious player behavior down paths of least resistance. HOW MANY PEOPLE PARTICIPATE IN A CONVERSATION? The average number of participants in a conversation (“conversation size”) will affect the tenor and subtlety of the content that gets transacted and shaped among players. Smaller conversation sizes lead to content that is more complex and nuanced, and larger sizes lead to content that is more simplified and generalized. In other words: the more people, the narrower the common ground. As an example of this principle, consider the sophistication of a real-life debate between two engaged individuals, compared to one within a group, compared to a broad public discourse. The following are some rules of thumb for average conversation sizes. Two People Good for driving empathy and emotion. Here you have a deep, high-bandwidth direct channel connecting both participants. A lot of truly new experiences, reactions, and possibilities can be born when a connection between two individuals has space to bear fruit on its own terms, without constantly having to negotiate understanding and direction with additional people. Because ideas are transferred and reacted to in single steps instead of at scale, taking meaningful action is quick, but consequences – actions in the larp – may not travel far very quickly. This is great for relational games or games that emphasize individual experiences. PART SECTION CHAPTER 3:5:2 / 307 Three People Good for driving momentum and activity. While bandwidth is still pretty high, there is also a quick, dynamic diversity of responses to any given thought. At the same time, work gets done because three people can focus naturally with minimal distraction, and consequences can spread quickly. This is great for games driven by player action and plot, and is a good default size. Four People Good for driving exploration of ideas and differences. If two people present contrasting viewpoints, a difference of interpretations and responses is immediately available from the other two participants. However, players are much slower to action because bystander apathy becomes a factor: if one person introduces an idea and another person is moved to react, that person is by default automatically outnumbered by the two other people who are not acting. This is great for philosophical, discursive, and faction-building games where the act of raising buy-in – getting people to agree with you – is an intended component of gameplay. Five or More People Average conversation sizes of five or higher will generally slow a game down with inertia. Individual moments or scenes with larger numbers of participants will play a crucial role in almost every game. However, it is rare for a game that is not explicitly about committees to need five or more people participating in most conversations. Larps are about participation: scenes where many players become an audience will drag them down. FORMING CONVERSATION SIZE Many techniques can be used to shape average conversation size. The most direct approach is simply a literal game rule that regulates how many people can participate in a conversation. a) “Only two people can be involved in a given conversation after 5pm. If you want to talk to someone who is occupied in a conversation, signal to them and wait your turn.” b) “All conversations must either have no more than three people or be a part of a scene that involves everyone,” c) “In this culture, men cannot join an existing conversation, they may only approach individuals.” Passive encouragement through arrangement of physical environment is another great way to shape conversation size. / 308 d) All seating is explicitly arranged in groups of four e) Wind-sheltered alcoves will only fit two people, or three poorly f) There is a large central area for everyone to gather, and then a range of smaller private lounge areas only comfortable for three THE GEOMETRIC SHAPE OF A CONVERSATION How does the conversation occupy space? Where are participants in a conversation located relative to one another? The physical layout of the conversation affects what participants most easily bring to it. In every conversation there is a common social zone, created in the middle of all participants. In a public announcement or ritual, the social zone might fill the entire room; in a whispered confession, it might only be the size of a beach ball. The social zone is often an uneven shape, like an amoeba: its center might be located closer to a louder and more energetic person. It might thin near the person who doesn’t speak the language well. If the play space is such that more participants are located toward one end (like an uneven campfire ring), the social zone might skew toward that side. But if characters with higher status are clustered on the far side like in a throne room, perhaps it will skew to that side even though fewer people or there, or perhaps it will stretch out into an awkward long thin shape. At the same time, each player also has a personal social bubble, the space around them that they socially occupy. In order to participate in an interaction, people must extend their own social bubbles to intersect with the common social zone. (To picture this, imagine the act of socially reaching that takes place when trying to join a conversation located inconveniently on the other side of a large table, such as at a wedding reception or a conference.) Social bubbles vary widely in size both on an individual basis and a cultural basis. Most find it hard to keep their social bubbles extended for a protracted period of time; many also find it hard to retract and hold it back. Here are some techniques for creating specific interaction dynamics using social bubbles and zone shaping: Participation Does the shape of the social zone facilitate the participation of some people over others? Consider if there are specific characters you wish to highlight or edge out of a given space, such as in the throne room example. Is it more interesting to be inclusive and balanced, or to have some people on the fringes who must invest great effort in order to be heard? / 309 Player Energy Profiles & Defaults Because it takes effort for players to extend bubbles past their natural size, it’s important that key interactions can take place at a range of sizes. For example, a mechanic that requires players to socially project across the room will be used by fewer and fewer players as a day wears on. Similarly, a game about hiding and whispering should only count on players to remain suppressed for an hour or so – less if they’re doing other tiring things at the same time. Over time as players get tired, they will hold more and more interactions in their default social bubble size, regardless of environmental or narrative cues. This means that either the majority of play can take place at comfortable sizes, or the design must factor in the fact that the unusual social zone size requires an ongoing, sustained effort from the players that reduces their ability to spend energy on other things – especially things that also cost social energy, such as portraying an unfamiliar culture. Tenor Variation Different types of interactions happen more naturally at different social bubble sizes and shapes. People are generally more comfortable having intimate, close interactions when their own social bubbles are small. Pronouncements and public declarations are more natural at large bubble size. Nobody lets their guard down in a conversation open to the world. Create more interactions of the desired tenor by using environmental cues to encourage the corresponding bubble size. ARCHITECTURAL TOOLS FOR FORMING DEFAULT SOCIAL ZONE SHAPES Environmental Layout Where are players most likely to be physically located, and how far apart are they? Don’t forget that a comfortable distance for a large person might be a tiring social reach for a small person and vice versa. Check also for postural requirements – if a player has to hold an uncomfortable position to access a social zone, they are likely to either give up or change the tenor of the conversation Physical Barriers A physical barrier will cut through the middle of a social zone and make it harder to connect. Even a table can sometimes act as a barrier: use this to facilitate more oppositional interactions, or promote collaboration by placing participants on adjacent sides. In absence of clear directions or expectations to unify them, arranging people in a ring around a large, sight-blocking centerpiece such as a bonfire can create rapid cultural scattering as people align behaviors in clumps with only those immediately near them. / 310 Temperature Most people’s social bubbles shrink when cold and expand when hot, so an extreme-temperature environment will shift everyone’s default bubble sizes. Cold environments will also make all social actions take more energy. (This is why running a well-proven game in an unexpectedly cold room can sometimes fizzle: dynamics that count on cascading social engagement lose momentum.) Remember that men and women have on average a 2.5° C difference in preferred temperature. These are only a few example techniques and rules of thumb for physically shaping conversations to generate specific types of gameplay. Exact outcomes will vary by game and by culture. / 311 How do you create the feeling of a massive fictional setting in a very small space? That was the question we tried to answer when we first started designing Do Androids Dream? (Sweden, 2017) late in 2016. We decided to create a set of wildly different environments, representing different parts of the city, but all packed into a single 9x14m blackbox set. We had done larps and studied other larps in the same kind of closed warehouse environment that we were running this larp in, and we had taken part in blackbox scenarios that created large spaces from nothing by simply using tape and highly abstracted transitions between spaces. To go from one to the other, you would just step out from one tape square and into another. But that had never felt large. It only felt abstracted, like a cut scene happening, suddenly taking you to another place. For Androids, we wanted people to feel as if they were in this massive city, a metropolis of the future – not just imagine it, as they stepped over a drawn line. The problem with instantaneous travel over great hypothetical distances is that you never feel as if you have traveled somewhere. You feel as if there exists several separate locations, several spaces, but no space or time in between them. This was partially solved by creating a physical place, centred in the room, in the early iteration. A crossroads which people had to pass in order to go anywhere else. At this crossroads, they had to wait for at least a minute before they could continue to their destination. Our set designer, Carl Nordblom, first had the idea to create a rickshaw or some kind of transportation device with a driver, but we settled on making it into a bus stop, where you could go, sit down on a few chairs and wait. In order to keep the feeling that you were travelling across a big city, I decided that the participants would not be able to meet other characters there – they would always remain in character, but everyone else would simply represent anonymous strangers who were also waiting for the bus. We all know them, the vaguely familiar faces around us as we travel on public transportation. This way, traveling became a solitary activity, one that had you waiting among people, not talking or engaging in your storyline, but simply being your character. The idea was that you could hold monologues here, talking about what you were feeling as if nobody THE BUS STOP MECHANIC // Simon Lindman Svensson / 312 was listening, or as if pouring your heart out to a stranger. Others could comment on the monologues, but they would do so as a random stranger at the bus stop, not as their character, just as you could comment on their monologue as a stranger in their story. Another idea that we had was using the bus stop as a way of introducing Fate Play – the act of introducing an element that would be destined to happen, into the larp. We imagined that people would be able to say their goals out loud at the bus stop, such as “When I get to the apartment, I will tell them what I really feel”, and use this voiced motivation as a way of promising themselves to be brave and carry out this action once they got to the next scene. We wanted to encourage people to have a moment of breathing room to really think what they were doing and why, and act on that. If you simply wanted to be left alone, you could opt to read a newspaper. You held up your hands with an imaginary newspaper and pretended to read it, showing that you simply wanted to sit there for yourself for a while. In the post larp survey after Do Androids Dream?, the bus stop was praised for how it created a feeling of a larger city, how it separated the zones and how it made it possible for you to get some separation between one scene and the next. Others felt they never wanted to wait, or felt outside the larp while sitting there, and most did not use the Fate Play mechanic. For the last part of the trilogy, Where Androids Die (Sweden, 2018), we decided to make the bus stop less of an abstract space and more an actual mode of transportation in the City. In the new set, we built a symbolic subway car. It was a box along one of the walls, decorated to be reminiscent of a subway car, with ropes in the ceiling that people could hold onto. The most impactful addition was the soundtrack. I created a set of fictional stops, each stop representing an area in the city and also the zones represented at the larp, and a loudspeaker voice that announced these: “Next stop, High Street…. Stopping at High Street.” In addition, we decided to remove the fateplay aspects and focus more on the experience of actually travelling in a subway car, with screeching rails and time spent waiting for your stop, while still keeping the more successful monologue mechanic. This allowed people the feeling of actually traveling in the city, without having to think of it abstractly as transportation outside the zones. One player described it as if they could have sworn the subway car was moving, despite it being built from stationary scaffolding. The feedback on this development and the method in general has made us confident that it is an excellent tool for the toolbox in widening the possibilities of larps played in symbolic or abstract spaces. It allows you to expand the theoretical area of play, it allows people a natural place for monologues and inner reflection and it allows you to give people a sense of purpose. The feeling of seeing people crowd a subway car, then press against each / 313 other as everyone tries to get off at the same station, just like in real life, is also something we heartily recommend to any designer of an urban scenario similar to the Androids larps. FURTHER READING: nordiclarp.org/wiki/Do_Androids_ Dream? nordiclarp.org/wiki/Where_Androids_Die NAILED IT! / 320 Pelargirin ympyrä (Finland, 2004, Eng. The Circle of Pelargir) was a plot-heavy mafia trial larp where characters tried to discover each other’s secrets. The venue was an old manor house with a high main hall, paneled with old wood, and an open balcony over the hall – creating crystal clear acoustics and the opportunity to spy on all conversations in the hall. Unsurprisingly, this sound environment ended up changing the intended interaction and dramatic pace of the larp, steering players towards silent conversations and polite smalltalk instead of arguments and intrigue. The space didn’t feel like a natural setting for addressing conflicts or airing disputes. What happened in Pelargirin ympyrä reminds us of the Achilles’ heel of all larp design: if not instructed otherwise, players will default to behavioural patterns that make sense to them in the real world – like not sharing secrets in a space where everyone can hear them. Therefore it’s not enough to think about which sounds suit a larp setting and how to make those sounds distinct and perceivable. We must also think about how we want players to interact with sounds and with each other, how to support that interaction with design choices, and how to communicate that design to the players. Let’s go back to the fantasy larp tavern. There is a band playing. What are the patrons expected to do with this? Is it just background music to give the right kind of mood? Are players supposed to stop talking and listen? Or jump on the tables and dance, or join in and sing? Perhaps you have also chosen to give the tavern a PA system for background music and ambient sound effects, like the crackling of a fireplace and the chatter of patrons. Maybe during the larp a diegetic storm breaks out, and the PA communicates this with wind, rain, and thunder. Or perhaps the tavern is haunted, and ghostly whispers start slowly creeping their way into the room. How should the players react to the storm or the ghosts? Should the characters start securing the windows, or try to hunt down the source of the scary whispers? The players know there is no actual storm outside, or any literal ghosts to be found. They have to decide how to act not on the basis of their out of character sound perception, but using existing social codes from equivalent situations, their assumptions about genre, and their interpretation of what the designers are trying to achieve. If they don’t know the designers’ goals for the sound effects, they may engage unexpectedly and differently, creating inconsistencies in genre, playing style, and narrative flow. Communicating sound design to players doesn’t have to be elaborate or time-consuming. It can be as simple as a ten second statement during briefing: “your characters can’t hear the ghosts, but they sense something is wrong.” In a more ambitious design workshopping sound elements may be needed, e.g. practicing the storyworld’s popular drinking songs to be able to sing them in the tavern. When the players know the function of sound design elements they encounter, they can adjust their behavior and enjoy and contribute to the soundscape without awkward runtime worries about how to behave. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]