larping – PLAYTIME

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on September 27, 2017March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

Lizzie Stark closes her three-part essay demystifying larping by looking at it as a form of theater—really, as an art form. Here she participates in a life and death experience. Return to parts 1 and 2.

Audience is the key difference between any kind of theater and larp. In a play, the audience watches the actors perform, and the actors perform for the entertainment and edification of the audience. In larp, there are no outside observers, only participants; the roles of performer and audience are collapsed into what researchers such as Dr. Markus Montola have called the “first person audience.” Each participant is the author of their own performance, and the audience for their own emotions as well as the performances of their co-players. And, in fact, reactions to their co-players’ performances often occur through the lens of the character they are currently playing.

The emphasis on participants over audience also shifts the physical experience of the performer. Traditional theater prioritizes what the audience sees and hears and their staging reflects that. Set and costuming must look real, but needn’t necessarily be made of, say, real leather or plate mail. The directors arrange the actors strategically, in groupings that would feel unnatural in regular life but make the performers visible to a wide number of seats. If the actors do a good job, the audience may take the emotions of the plot and characters onto themselves, crying during a death scene, for example, or longing for intimacy during a romantic scene. In theater, the actors enjoy the lion’s share of the alibi to behave differently, while the dark room quietly gives some alibi to the audience to feel emotions more visibly than they might in everyday life.

Larp also manipulates elements such as set, costuming, and physical interactions, but it does so with a different aim in mind. The emphasis is not on how it looks and sounds to an external party, but on how it feels to the participants who simultaneously perform and absorb the larp. How the scenery looks is only important insofar as it helps the participants to feel. Wearing girdles and a long-line bra might help a participant feel that she or he is a 1950s housewife, even though such garments may remain hidden to co-players.

Since larps rely on improvisation, pre-planning every fight or kiss is usually not possible.

Likewise, how a tender moment appears to onlookers is less important than how it feels to a participant. Instead of asking participants to kiss, a larp might call for a tender touching of hands while co-players gaze into each others’ eyes, simulating the feeling of intimacy. This also dovetails with safety concerns in larp—often designers do not want players and characters to have identical experiences of say, lust and violence, for safety reasons. When one character stabs another, we don’t want the players to use real knives. Characters might have sex, but their players shouldn’t feel obligated to. In a play, of course, these moments are scripted and practiced before performance—the actors work together to become comfortable, and choreograph their smooches or rapier fights. Since larps rely on improvisation, pre-planning every fight or kiss is usually not possible. The solution is to produce a set of actions that stands in for another—different larp communities may call these “mechanics,” “techniques,” or even “metatechniques.” Player-characters might touch hands and make eye contact instead of making out, or use a ritualized exchange of phrases to play through a sex scene. Throwing a punch in super slow-motion and permitting the victim of violence to choose its effect can allow both parties some measure of control. Many larps also use techniques that allow participants to briefly step out of game and negotiate with one another about scene elements such as violence or intimacy before undertaking sensitive scenes.

Larp and theater also differ in other key respects: theater uses trained and rehearsed performers, while larp relies on the improvisation of larpers—a group that can include complete newcomers as well as experienced hands. While theater relies on convention—the actors do stuff on stage, the audience watches passively and applauds at pre-selected intervals—each larp must teach participants how to engage. Larp, therefore, is an art form that revolves around social engineering—the practice of manipulating and subverting social structures in order to generate enough alibi to produce an interesting, thought-provoking, or entertaining experience for participants. A common method larpers use for this is a pre-game workshop. These workshops can take many forms and accomplish many different objectives, depending on the game. Most importantly, the workshop allows larpers to meet and get to know each other before playing, permitting them to establish a base level of trust with one another as people before assuming their roles. During workshops, facilitators might explain information about the game world or act structure, assign characters, let participants practice story techniques and mechanics, reinforce the larp’s theme with sharing exercises, or present a series of activities designed to help players flesh out their characters and social groups. Sometimes, workshops even include scenes that happen before the larp officially starts, as a way of helping players get the jitters out.

One larp heavily influenced by theater techniques is White Death by Nina Rune Essendrop and Simon Steen Hansen. These two designers were steeped in the traditions Denmark’s highly mannered freeform scene which typically includes games with pre-written characters, discrete pre-written scenes, a strong and very active facilitator, and typically take place in unadorned classrooms. Although influenced by that design tradition, Essendrop and Hansen wrote this larp for Black Box Copenhagen, a festival devoted to larps designed for black box theater settings. At the time, they were both studying for a masters’ in theater and performance studies at the University of Copenhagen. White Death broke the traditional mold of both freeform and black box larp in the way it drew on these disciplines, relentlessly insisting on physicality. The productions of experimental stage director Robert Wilson and French avant-garde director Antonin Artaud, the Danish dancing company Granhøj Dans, Balinese dance, and Laban movement analysis inspired the duo. The resulting larp used simple props such as white balloons, white sugar, white paper, white ribbons, and sheets; lit areas; and evocative music.

The lack of language and the extreme physical restrictions transformed each participant’s body into a game piece.

White Death revolves around a group of settlers who venture into the mountains to form a better society. But when winter comes, in a very Nordic twist, they all die and turn into Transparent Ones. The workshop transforms untrained participants into skilled players through extensive workshops around movement. The life of the humans is hard, heavy, sudden, violent, and isolated. In contrast, the Transparent Ones move lightly and freely, and like to be together and laugh. Although sounds are permitted, no language is allowed in the game. Participants create a character out of a physical restriction. When I played, the slip of paper I drew from the hat decreed that my character had fingers that always pointed at the ground, and a head that lolled to one side, never in the middle. One character could only move in jumping jack motions. Others have imaginary sticks connecting bodyparts such as wrists and knees. The lack of language and the extreme physical restrictions transformed each participant’s body into a game piece; the experience of playing White Death is insistently physical, and uses that physicality to evoke feeling in participants.

Over the course of the first act, the facilitators introduce three symbolic props: white balloons representing dreams, white cups of sugar representing survival, and white paper representing faith. As the participants interact with the props, balloons—and thus dreams—pop; participants fight over sugar, and get covered in it as their physically restricted selves try to drink it; and meaner characters rip faith to shreds while a few desperately cling to the scraps.

During the second act of the larp, the storms begin. During each storm, the barrier between humans and Transparent Ones thins, allowing Transparent Ones to reach into the circle of light where humans dwell and pull them to the dark peaceful half of the playing space. Gently, the Transparent Ones usher humans into their new existence, massaging out their physical restrictions and gracing them with a white ribbon. By the end of the larp, all the humans have been transformed, and the Transparent Ones are happy and together in the darkness.

This larp is aesthetically beautiful to facilitate and play. Set to a soundtrack of folk rock, participants in black clothes play out their grunting relationship dramas and endow bright white props with the deepest of meanings. At one point, I looked up from my narrative and took stock of the room. In corners, a man showed balloon shreds to a woman and wept. One character writhed on the floor, unable to rise due to her physical restriction and shrieking her displeasure. Shambling bullies chased someone who had a few shreds of faith left. I thought to myself, “whoa, this is some artsy fartsy shit.” But I had been so deep inside the head of my own character, that it hadn’t occurred to me at all how bizarre my behavior would be considered in the outside world. As a participant, after playing one act in the hard, heavy, sudden and violent life of the humans, I felt transformed when a Transparent One removed my physical restriction. It’s a little bit hard to explain how in words. The closest I can get is that I felt suddenly capable of happiness; I felt light; I felt loved.

The alibi of the production freed us from ordinary mindsets and our ordinary physicality.

Essendrop and Hansen got the most out of both theatrical and larp mediums. They used theatrical techniques—lights, music, and graphic props—to set an emotional tone that fit the story, and to demarcate the space and time of the larp as a heightened and abstracted setting. They used movement workshops inspired by theater and dance to transform the motions of their average players into something that looked and felt significant and meaningful. But in the end, the performance was true larp. The alibi of the production freed us from ordinary mindsets and our ordinary physicality. We improvised relationships, struggles, and their resolutions on the spot. The larp’s restrictions palpably located the ensuing emotions and connections within our own bodies. We weren’t witnessing and sympathizing with someone else’s epiphany. We could feel the sugar melting on our skin, the desperate longing for the last sad, half-deflated white balloon, the savage glory of ripping someone else’s faith to shreds.

The larp delivered the primacy of these things into our bones, making tangible the fierce desire to survive. As the experience progressed, we felt an abstract, aestheticized longing for death, not as an end, but as the freedom from humanity’s sometimes inane struggles. And at last, to the strains of Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms,” we entered the transcendental world—happy, light, and together—beyond the grave. ♦

(Image credit: All photographs of the White Death larp being performed in 2014 by Xin Li via Flickr.)

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on September 28, 2017March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

Live action role-playing—or larping—has garnered thousands of fans and soared in popularity over the last decade. Larp expert Lizzie Stark demystifies this deeply expressive form of storytelling.

I have many personas. Like most people, I select particular social masks for different occasions. Among my personas are those of business woman, granddaughter, and friend. All of these social roles are distinct, and they come with distinct modes of conversation and costuming. I make ribald jokes with my friends, but never my grandmother or editor; I watch movies in my pajamas with my grandmother and friends, but dress appropriately for that networking coffee. In other words, I calibrate my appearance and behavior—my persona—as best I can, according to the situation. Everyone does. I can channel any one of more than a dozen social masks—taskmistress, loving wife, or zany artist—during the day as needed.

The stories larp tells are quite diverse. You might play hobbits trying to save Middle-earth; members of a rural Oklahoma community locked in a bomb shelter after the Cuban Missile Crisis goes awry; or fairy tale creatures at a union board meeting. The only limits are the imaginations of the game designer and her player.

The essence of larp is experiential. Participants meet up in real time and space, guided by a facilitator and constrained by the world the designers have built, take on the role of a character, and play out their own character arcs. Sometimes the relationship between the game world and the real world is direct, and sometimes it is symbolic. You can assemble a beautiful costume and play a game about life in a wizarding college in a real life Polish castle, where everything you see is present in the game, as players did in the larp College of Wizardry. And you can live in that reality for days at a time. This is called a 360-degree aesthetic—it’s a larp played in an environment as close to the production’s real setting as the larp designers can reasonably get. Time moves at the same speed both in and out of game—a ten minute walk takes ten minutes in the real world as well as the larp universe; your character looks like and is wearing whatever you are wearing; the game setting is a castle and you are in an actual castle.

Plenty of larps eschew the window-dressing. Freeform and black box larps make use of space and time symbolically. Set in unadorned conference rooms and classrooms, these productions don’t require fancy props, set, or costuming. If power of imagination can transform you into the personification of “tethered love,” as in Peter Fallesen’s Let the World Burn, then what you’re wearing is probably irrelevant. A disposable coffee cup can easily stand in for a bouquet of flowers, an urn for grandmother’s ashes, the world’s last bowl of soup, or anything else that is physically needed. In this style of game, designers can telescope time in and out. We can play out the first flirtation between two characters, as in Emily Care Boss’ Under My Skin, cut to the next flirtation a week later, and play out the entire character arc of infidelity of several couples in a little under five hours. Or perhaps we play the same five-minute scene over and over again for two hours until we have discovered every iota of nuance present.

Larps vary widely—in the stories they tell, in the production values they require, the amount of time they last, and the tools they use to heighten and calibrate the story. Over the last five years, I have spent transformative hours as a young man at the height of the AIDS epidemic; helped allocate a family inheritance by breaking numerous china coffee cups; lived as a servant in Jane Austen’s world for four days; and transformed the flavor of garlic into a character, a second-generation immigrant desperately trying to hold family tradition together. I’ve been a refugee, a settler, a douchey mountain-climber, a manic pixie dream girl commando, a professional nail technician, the democratically elected dictator for life of a space colony, and a ghost suing for possession of the kitchen I haunt.

To think of larp as becoming a completely different person is both true, and a fundamental misunderstanding.

Playing these roles—many of them pre-written in short paragraphs—always requires acts of creation. Newcomers to larp often tell me they couldn’t become a completely different person for a few hours or days—it would just be too hard. But to think of larp as becoming a completely different person is both true, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens when a larper plays a character. I am not a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic. But the process of playing one in Tor Kjetil Edland’s I Say a Little Prayer forced me to map the character of Benny, the new single boy in town who often acts without thinking, to Lizzie, the overly analytic, straight, married journalist. To do so, I had to connect filaments of my own identity with parts of Benny’s. During a larp you’re continuously improvising, responding to situations and other characters on the fly. There simply isn’t enough time to construct a vision of the character that is completely separate from yourself. By necessity, you spin a character out of the stuff that makes up your own soul. Essentially, larp allows us to say, “I’m not Benny. But if I were Benny, my life might have gone like this.”

As in all art, my experience as Benny was made more meaningful through the designer’s use of structure and techniques. I Say a Little Prayer featured, among other things, a thematic act structure. Every act concluded with a lottery of death, designed to represent the randomness and terror of the early AIDS epidemic. Each surviving character put at least one ticket into those lotteries—more, if they had engaged in risky sexual behavior. During the act breaks, the facilitator drew a name out of the hat, a character died, and we held a funeral that represented our connection to the dead character with touch.

I still don’t know what it was like to be a young gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic, but by playing one in this larp, I have a better understanding of what it might have been like. I had to recognize the shared humanity between Benny and myself. And in doing so, I also put on and connected with certain parts of my personality, for example, the part that is terrified by the early death of people I love. There’s my friend Cheri, dead of metastatic breast cancer at 35; my cousin Kitt, dead of a skiing accident at age 19; or the litany of female relatives whose genetic error I share, dead of breast and ovarian cancer quite young.

Larp manipulates the social masks we have inside of us for many purposes—catharsis, aesthetics, and even fun. Because larp allows players to tap into their fundamental personal essences, it allows participants to connect with each other very deeply in very short amounts of time.

As I said at the outset: larp manipulates the social masks we have inside of us for many purposes—catharsis, aesthetics, and even fun. I sometimes think of core personality as being a bit like a river of liquid rock—no one vessel can contain it completely, though it can be channeled into manageable eddies, and scientists can safely sample it in small quantities and purpose-made containers. In other words, as Walt Whitman put it in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Every human embodies multiple identities—we are mothers but also daughters and granddaughters, writers but also amateur chefs, jokers who can be deadly serious when the situation demands it. Together, these roles and how we approach them—each its own eddy of the lava flow—make up our core humanity and identity.

Because larp allows players to tap into and perform their fundamental personal essences, it allows participants to connect with each other very deeply in very short amounts of time. And it does this both by asking participants to play roles, and by asking them to improvise all their own lines. They are themselves, but different. Consider improv theater pioneer Keith Johnstone’s advice on the form (which is connected to but not identical with larp). Johnstone advises improvisers to “be obvious” because your obviousness is really your true self; it comes out of you and will therefore be different from my obviousness. If I ask you what you’d bring on our trip to Mars and your first impulse is to say, “a Kenny Loggins tape,” then you’ve revealed something about your true self. This stands in stark contrast to traditional social situations, where the lines we utter can be almost scripted—polite conversation consists of exchanging pleasantries—and those scripts remain remarkably similar across different social situations and individuals. Consider the narrow range of appropriate responses to the question “How you doing?”; “Fine. You?”; “Good.” The wild situations and setups of larp free us from these socially prescribed exchanges, and in doing so, open up possibilities for deep human connection.

In the second installment of Lizzie Stark’s essay on larping, she explains how the role-playing game provides alibi for an experience.

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on October 24, 2017March 4, 2019 by Eugenia Bell

Part 1 of Lizzie Stark’s essay introduced us to the world of larping. Here, she explores larping’s most vital element: the alibi and what it means to be in character.

Larp presents an alibi for interaction, an excuse that shocks participants out of everyday life and allows them to behave and connect with each other differently. Alibi is the convenient excuse we use to justify behavior that is out of the norm. Danish larpwrights Bjarke Pedersen and Jonas Trier Knudsen popularized the term “alibi” in its larp context. Larp is not possible without alibi, but alibi is present in many other social contexts, and permits special behavior in those situations as well.

One of the simplest and most effective forms of alibi is a physical mask. A mask takes away a person’s natural identity and substitutes another (ghost, Freddy Kruger, Mexican wrestling star) in its place. It causes others to respond differently and playfully to the masked person. And the masked person, in turn, responds accord to these new rules of identity. It’s implicitly understood that I’m not my regular self (but still, expressing some facet of my regular self) when I wear my luchador mask. When I threaten my husband by bellowing “clean the kitchen or suffer the consequences,” he will not take me seriously . . . though he may pretend so in the moment.

Alibis can . . . enable people to step out of their socially proscribed roles and engage in out of the norm behavior.

Alcohol and Halloween are familiar alibis. It’s understood that drunken confessions of love may fade when the speaker sobers up. During Halloween, people dress up in unusual costumes—many of them provocative and sexual—and mischief often results. The morning-after Halloween stories that I’ve heard mix the alibis of costume and booze: “I was so drunk, and you have to understand, it was Halloween and I was dressed up like Captain America, so of course I . . . .” ( . . . went home with Wonder Woman, picked a fight with Iron Man, stole an American flag, etc. etc.). Alibis can put people in a different frame of mind that is marked out from the mundane world of regular life, and enable people to step out of their socially proscribed roles and engage in out of the norm behavior.

The structure of a game or larp can also provide an alibi by changing the expectations around social behavior. Consider a larp that requires a villain, say, a twisted serial murderer. In real life, being a serial murderer is not acceptable—it’s a deeply criminal act, punishable by life in prison, or in some states, death. Even in a larp, players might look askance at someone who said, “yes, me. I want to play the serial killer.” But if the larp instructions call for the facilitator to assign roles to players, or for the players to draw roles out of a hat, and X ends up the murderer, then the responsibility is removed from X. Rather, the facilitator of the larp, or the structure of the larp itself has given X an alibi to take on the role of serial killer for the good of the group. It’s not creepy for them to play the serial murderer, because after all, it’s not like they chose it.

All larp provides an alibi for players to behave differently than they normally would. Someone raving about their desire to sue a particular ghost would either be committed or given their own reality TV show. But it would be perfectly normal behavior if you were playing Jason Morningstar’s ridiculous party larp Ghost Court. And it is through the alibi of larp that participants gain emotional access to their characters. Because I am embodying a character and relating that character to myself, I am allowed to take that character’s concerns seriously. Although it is inherently ridiculous to pretend to be a poltergeist suing for my right to haunt your kitchen, while I am in character, I can make a serious argument about why I should be allowed to stay, even if, seen from the frame of regular life, that justification might also be funny and absurd.

Alibi helps move participants into a liminal space where their identities are loosened and new types of actions and points of view are possible.

Alibi helps people move out of the head-space of their regular lives and into another aspect of themselves. It helps larp participants transition from doctors, waiters, and academics into new roles as cyborgs, magicians, and World War II refugees. And yet, the transformation is never fully completed. The shells of those original identities remain within the player who is portraying the character. (A player who genuinely believed they were now a real-life serial murderer or a cylon rather than simply playing one, would be unhinged and represent a serious risk to the safety of their co-players—in nearly a decade of larping, I have yet to encounter players who couldn’t separate reality from fiction in their minds). In this way, alibi helps move participants into a liminal space where their identities are loosened and new types of actions and points of view are possible. That between-ness allows players to try new things and form deep bonds with one another. It’s where the magic of larp resides.

(Image credit: A scene from the larp End of the Line, produced by Bjarke Pedersen’s Odyssé. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen via Flickr.)