Imaginary Worlds - Larping in Place

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Live theater has been shut down across the country, but live action role play (“larp” for short) is finding new ways to thrive in digital spaces. I talk with Betsy Isaacson and Ryan Hart of Sinking Ship Creations about how the phone can be turned into a medium for audio drama. Carly Dwyer and Jasmine Kimieye Graham explain how anyone can feel empowered when working in I.T., especially when it’s a Magical Help Desk. Tiffany Keane Schaefer discovers that Zoom is the perfect medium to tell stories about space travel, and game designer Jessica Creane discovers that her interactive show Chaos Theory can be tailor-made for the current moment. https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/how-i-won-the-larp.html Sinking Ship Creations: https://www.sinkingshipcreations.com/all-events Intramersive Media: https://www.intramersive.com/magical-help-desk Otherworld Theatre: https://www.otherworldtheatre.org/larp Chaos Theory:  https://www.jessicacreane.com/chaos-theory.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Before beginning today's show, I want to acknowledge the protests that have been going on in this country and around the world. I work on these episodes weeks or months in advance, so this episode is very focused on the COVID-19 crisis. I am currently working on an episode about systemic racism, but that won't be out until later in the summer. In the meantime, instead of asking you to support Imaginary Worlds on Patreon, I'm asking instead if you would donate to an organization that fights for social justice. In the meantime, instead of asking you to support Imaginary Worlds on Patreon, I'm asking instead if you would donate to an organization that fights for social justice, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or Campaign Zero, or the ACLU,

and consider making regular donations to them. Thank you, and try and stay safe, everyone. Previously on Imaginary Worlds LARPs are just ridiculously undervalued. You're getting a tailored, crafted story just for you. LARPs are like sandcastles. You build them, they can be beautiful, but the moment they reach their perfection, the tide comes in and washes it all away.

There are relatively few experiences left where you have to be there. There's something about LARP that captures the magic of the present moment. I cried during our conversation. You cried and you were so sad and it was so good and it was amazing. I have always wanted to start the show like that. This is the third episode in a mini-series about LARPs, which is short for Live Action Roleplay. The first episode from 2017 was called Winning the LARP. I looked at the history of live action roleplaying, from college students dressing up as knights and hitting each other with foam swords, From college students dressing up as knights and hitting each other with foam swords,

to immersive experiences where people pretend to be characters from Battlestar Galactica on a real decommissioned naval destroyer. And LARPers would even travel to other states or other countries with their homemade costumes to play vampires or wizards for days at a time. In my 2018 episode, How I Won the LARP, I went deep into LARPing myself. And I use the word winning or won in the title of those episodes because it refers to an inside joke.

I mean, on one hand, LARPs are games. Your characters have goals, they're often at cross purposes, but you don't have to strategize it like a traditional game. In fact, the best way to win the LARP is to have an authentic emotional experience. If everything goes wrong and your character crashes and burns, those can be the most satisfying LARPs. I wasn't planning on doing a third LARP episode. I was actually just thinking about how much I miss live theater in New York.

And I was reading about how some shows are trying to adapt performing over Zoom. That's when I discovered some of the most innovative theater happening right now is live action role-playing. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Balinski, and in today's episode, I'm going to talk with four different creative teams about the way they're figuring out how to LARP while sheltering in place. And in describing these LARPs, I do have to give away a few spoilers. Let's start with the simplest form of technology, the phone call. Ryan Hart is one of the founders of Sinking Ship Creations.

I've done a few LARPs with them before. They're very intense. The players are in confined spaces together for hours with props and costumes. It's the kind of live event you couldn't do now. But Ryan says they were already brainstorming ways of how to do LARPs that weren't so tied to specific times and places. so tied to specific times and places. We wanted to try and make it more viable in terms of logistics because it's not like a theatrical run quite often where you can get a theater and say, we're going to do this for six weeks. It's something that has to be scheduled. You have to go through and the venue ends up eating so much of your, not just money, but energy.

and the venue ends up eating so much of your, not just money, but energy. So the creative director, Betsy Isaacson, had an idea. What if they did LARPs over the phone? And this was before COVID-19. At the time, they were wondering if people would want to be on the phone that long. Somebody has to take an hour out of their day or 90 minutes out of their day to do a phone call.

And this is kind of annoying and they don't know how good the experience is and and you have to pay money for it. And now everybody's interactions have become phone and Zoom calls anyway. And so it suddenly doesn't feel that much as much of an imposition to be like, you have to take an hour out of your life to do an hour long phone call. I did two phone larps with them, your life to do an hour-long phone call. I did two phone larps with them, and they both involved the actress Jennifer Sutter.

She was so good, I decided not to interview her because I felt like it would break the spell that I had actually talked to the characters she played, and the conversations we had were real. And Ryan says he gets that. I think the biggest thing that we have to remember is that an experience doesn't start, it's not a wall-to-wall thing. You want your design to be wall-to-wall in that

it's going to start when you pick up the phone, it's going to end when you put the phone down. But that's not really true. It really begins the moment you become aware of it, and it ends the moment you forget it. The first LARP that I did with them was called Fragile Recall, and they sent me the audio the first few minutes afterwards. It began with me getting a number of a psychic to call, who was going to connect me with one of my past lives. This is actually the music I heard over

the phone, and the psychic character seemed to be a fraud. She was played as a joke. Then I was transferred to the past, and I found myself talking to a vulnerable, scared woman named Edith Thompson, who was also played by Jennifer. Hello? Hello? Who am I speaking with? This is Eric. Eric? So you're my future self? Or maybe the guards are just putting me on.

Edith was in jail in London in 1923. She told me her husband had been killed by a mugger. And when the police discovered that Edith was having an affair, they decided that Edith and her lover must have planned to knock off the husband. They were innocent, but no one believed them. So Edith decided to lie and say it was all her idea to save her boyfriend, Freddie. But it didn't work. They were both sentenced to death. I had a really intense heart-to-heart conversation with Edith about the different roles we play in life. We talked about qualities we might have in common

since I'm supposed to be her reincarnation. In the end, she told me the best way to help her was to tell her story. So I did. And that's when someone said to me, Edith Thompson? That was a real person. Her death was the catalyst for the anti-capital punishment movement in England. And when I talked to Betsy, who designed the LARP, she said, they didn't want to advertise that Edith was based on a historical person, but they're glad that I figured it out.

Also, I could have gotten another character from real life, a fashion icon named Babe Haley who died in the 1970s. But they thought Edith was a better fit for me. We often do research on people beforehand. Oh, you do? You were pretty easy, frankly. You have a public profile but in general you do pick like like you you she actually would pick me and look like because she knew she was talking to me she looked me up to see to sort of mold edith towards me somewhat yes hmm and what where do those choices play out exactly just generally speaking and in the phone calls there's not a straight script for edith or babe

obviously because you're talking to a person. Basically, there's a document of a long list of things that Edith or Babe wants to know, questions they want to ask, parts of their own life they want to tell. And it's just a matter of, okay, we're just going to, I don't know, boldface stuff that might be particularly resonant to whoever we're talking to. The next LARP I did was called Girl on the Phone with the same actress, Jennifer Sutter. I knew it was going to be about a woman who had been kidnapped, but I thought it would be an hour long phone call. It started with about 20 minutes of frantic text messages. This character named

Irene had woken up in a cell. She managed to steal a phone and was dialing numbers randomly. That's how she got me. Eventually, we did talk, and I learned that she's a college student visiting her grandmother in Caracas. The kidnappers thought they would get a ransom out of her, thinking she must be a rich American. But she had no family except her grandmother. And when she was on the run, I used Google Maps to guide her through Caracas. I used Google Translate to help her communicate with characters in the background, who were also played by Jennifer. I thought I was being really clever using Google, but Betsy told me I was always meant

to do that. Jennifer is really, really good at what we call back leading, which is basically getting people when they aren't quite getting like, oh, I'm supposed to go on Google Maps to have that trigger in their own heads while essentially thinking that it's their own idea, which is really, really, really nice for such things.

Well, it's funny because I felt like, I thought I gave her the most ridiculous advice on how to get out of handcuffs, which is to use a little latch on her watch to like like pick the lock and i have no idea if that is possible outside of a cartoon what what other options are there to get out of those handcuffs so she's got hairpins in her hair so people suggest hairpin she's like oh gosh i have a bobby pin also um she's got a uh sink and soap in her soul and oftentimes if you just put some sort of grease on your hands including soap you can slip your hands out of handcuffs ah i did ask her what was in the

room i'm terrible in dnd with this kind of thing too where i find out what's in the room and i'm like well that's not useful and then later i find out it was actually everything i needed to get out of the room yeah i mean it's the sort of thing where often we have people googling how do you get out of handcuffs? And one of the things that will come up pretty quickly is like, put soap on your hands. I mean, when this character was running through the streets, I thought the actress had gone outside, but she was using sound effects. And when she was hiding in a cafe, I heard background chatter in Spanish and the clinking of glasses. Betsy says they did look to audio drama for inspiration.

One of the things I like about it is there's a lot you can leave to the imagination. Like, there's a lot of things that we simply couldn't do on a regular stage. Like, you did Girl on the Phone where there's a woman running through Caracas. There's no way we could do that on a set. You know, we don't have a reconstruction of Caracas. There's no way we could do that on a set. You know, we don't have a reconstruction of Caracas. But with the phone and some sound engineering, suddenly we can do, you know, quote unquote, sets that we don't have access to, that we could never have access to. It did feel like a thriller.

Oh, can you please help me? I don't know where he is. I don't even know if I'm still in Caracas. Please, please help me. Since I've been mostly sheltering in place, the hours can fly by. But in the hour that I played this game, every minute counted. There were moments where she had to hang up because the kidnappers were looking for her. And as I'm sitting there looking at my phone, waiting for her to call me or text me back, those were the most stressful moments in the game because my sense of time had been heightened so radically. But Betsy says there are a few

downsides to using the phone. You can't control the other person's surroundings. Like we had someone do fragile recall pretty recently with construction outside his house. And so it was just like jackhammers the entire time. And we were like, damn it, this is supposed to be really sober and atmospheric and there are actual jackhammers going off. And this is incredibly annoying. Managing player expectations and figuring out what kind of role the player should be in was also a challenge for the second group of LARPs that I looked at, although these LARPs were actually played for comedy. Carly Dwyer and Jasmine Kimiai-Graham are two of the founders of Intramersive Media,

which is based in Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, that Salem. Well, if you say enough Massachusetts town names the way they're spelled in a chain, it does sound arcane and magical. That is very true. Gloucester, Worcester, Dorchester. I know a place. When they got the shelter-in-place orders, worried about paying the bills and keeping their actors employed,

that's when Jasmine came up with the idea of a LARP called Magical Help Desk, where you play an IT specialist. The actors in their troupe would play witches and wizards who call you because their wands or crystal balls are malfunctioning. Now, Jasmine has worked in IT, and she always thought that every time she got a technical support call, it was like she'd been given a tiny quest with a hero's journey to complete. Every time, to a certain extent, you do get that little hint of anxiety because you don't know what you're walking into, and you have to have an idea of what to do. Even if you can't solve it, you have to be able to make that connection and be able to point someone in the direction that they need to go. And then at the end, you're like, oh, I vanquished the dragon of malware.

Carly had to be convinced that Magical Help Desk would work. I mean, she loved the premise. But when Jasmine told her the player was going to be in the role of the IT specialist, she said, I don't know about that. For me, as like coming in, it felt like giving, this is going to sound like, I'm going to sound like a bad person when I say this, is the idea of giving over like that amount of control to the audience member felt very different from where I normally come from. It did take some convincing from her that like the structure of the game was really going to work. And, you know, I, she and I had a lot of pushback where I'm just like, well, you know, like from our experience in immersive theater, if you give

the audience too much room, they're going to, they'll derail. And then you're going to like, and Jasmine just kind of kept pushing me back. She's like, no, no, trust me. She's like, I know how tech support works. Cause I don't. I did two magical help desks and they were a blast. And even before I did the calls, I was sent an onboarding document like I was a new employee. It explained that the development of wireless technology by non-magic users had been interfering with traditional magic for years. And I got a pretty in-depth troubleshooting manual, like telling me how to do a factory reset on a magic wand. My first call was with a wizard named Wendell, who had opened a door to a parallel dimension in his basement and accidentally let in all these little creatures.

Now his wand was broken, and he couldn't close the dimensional door. Well, first of all, what kind of wand are you using? Yeah, I'm using a... So, admittedly, it's not a... It's not one of the main brand wands, if you catch my meaning. It's not necessarily one that you would just buy somewhere. It's one that I got while I was adventuring. I got it in uh the cursed plane

of uh elandria i don't know if you've heard about it all being a novice magic user but i actually have not um i have not do you know what kind of magic they use in the cursed plane of elandria by any chance is there a specific magic system they rely on there uh well i think there used to be back when people in the cursed plane of Elandria were, you know, not going to sugarcoat back when they were alive, but they are, they're very, you know, by the time I got there, that really wasn't the case. The whole thing was completely ridiculous, but I actually felt empowered afterwards. Like I did something useful. I helped somebody. And it was a great emotional high on a day when I had been feeling

pretty down about the state of the world. I had the option of helping Wendell on a second call, but I wanted to mix it up and talk to a different character. And that was just as much fun. But Carly told me that if I had stuck with Wendell for a second call, I would have discovered that a story had been unfolding in front of me. They actually, all of them have arcs. All of them have storylines. If you really liked talking to Wendell, you can call back and learn more about Wendell and learn more about what, you know, like all this tech went wrong for a reason. Finding out why the, like what the underlying kind of deep stories are is part of

like the Easter egg fun of it. Magical Help Desk has been such a success. They're thinking about doing a more ambitious second round. They're also thinking of adding visuals because their actors have costumes at home and they could do makeshift green screens. One of the big pieces of feedback that we got from Magical Help Desk was we had a number of players turn around and go, I love it. I want to do it again, but I want to be the caller and I want to bring my friends. What we're playing around with is like the idea of a tactical field support. So you and your party go out adventuring and you get into a bad situation and you have

X amount of time with a resource to help you troubleshoot your problem in the field. I'm imagining like the Blair Witch Project, but they're actually able to call tech support halfway through the movie. Oh, my God. That might be the best way to explain it. Sinking Ship Creations is in a similar position. Girl on the Phone and Fragile Recall were so successful, they're brainstorming how to do video LARPs. In the meantime, they're offering a video LARP for free called Debrief, which they did not create themselves. It was designed by colleagues of theirs. I really wanted to try it. So I played it with an old friend of mine named Dan.

Our characters were MI6 agents in 1960. He was a double agent for the Soviets. And I discovered this after he was killed, but I was able to call him up for one hour using this machine that communicates with ghosts, which is the app Zoom. And since Dan was playing the ghost, he sat in the dark, lit only by his phone. I did not record the call because I was embarrassed by how bad my British accent is, but Dan is a professional actor, and he totally nailed it. He also got really emotional and cried while playing the game, because the themes of mortality felt so resonant to him. And playing that character was a cathartic experience for me too.

And in that sense, we both won the LARP. After the break, I will talk with more LARP designers who are using video and discovering that Zoom can be its own artistic medium. Jessica Crean is a game designer. She was actually in my episode, Board Games Go Indie from 2018. So the idea of doing virtual LARPs is not new to her. In fact, she's working on a mobile game where you act out the story of Romeo and Juliet with a stranger through text messages over a five-day period.

text messages over a five-day period. So it's all about these moments of finding really intense intimacy and connection in a world that is trying to keep you apart. That is a common theme in her work. And for the last year, she'd been performing a show called Chaos Theory in New York. It's not technically a LARP because a lot of it is focused on her performance, but it is immersive theater and the show involves a lot of interactive games with the audience. The premise is that you're going to a meetup for scientists. You can create a fake scientist character or be yourself. Her character is the guest speaker and her lecture on chaos theory unravels to the point where it becomes a lesson in chaos itself. Chaos Theory came out of the 2016 election.

It was a strange time for everyone, and particularly strange for me and my family, as my father had passed away about six weeks before the election. So there was this confluence of deeply personal feelings of chaos and this also completely communal feeling of chaos in the country. And so I had this sensation that chaos was everywhere and it was either going to crush me or I was going to find a way to make it an asset. When theater shut down in New York, she wanted to keep doing the show because the themes were more relevant than ever. keep doing the show because the themes were more relevant than ever. So she transferred it to Zoom.

Some of the choices were simple, like what can get cut? What needs to get cut in order to make room for what people really need in this moment? And so there was a deep dive into what is actually necessary? Like what are the things that are missing most in our lives right now that the show can help provide? And part of that was immediate, real time human connection, particularly with strangers. And so we took things that had been, for instance, like a live action game where players have to draw the world's best circle. And usually it's a pretty crazy game, like people will try to stop others from drawing the world's best circle by eating the paper, or they have an option to seduce the other team or the whole room. And so it gets pretty, pretty like traditional colloquial chaos in those moments.

That was easy to do on Zoom because Zoom has a whiteboard drawing feature. But developing a sense of group dynamics was much harder. One of the things that's been really challenging is like, how do you laugh on Zoom? It's an acoustic nightmare if everyone has their mics off. And yet we really need that. We need those moments of being able to laugh together, to feel connected. We had started out thinking, well, we'll just keep everyone on mute the whole time. And then immediately got feedback that people were just feeling very isolated in those moments of just laughing by themselves in their rooms. So we tried reactions next, that people could put up reactions

with a little, like, thumbs up for laughter, and that didn't do it. We tried the chat option and ultimately just came back to leaving people unmuted more often. Tiffany Keene-Shafer has had a similar experience. She is the artistic director of Otherworld Theatre in Chicago, which specializes in fantasy and science fiction. Their theater had to shut down, but they have a LARP division called Moonrise LARP Games,

and it's thriving online. Maybe that's why it's been so easy for us to adapt, because in LARP, it is very much actually that we find the location first. We're not like, oh, we want to tell a wizarding school LARP. Where are we going to do it? It's more like, wow, we found this old dormitory. We should do a wizard school LARP here.

That's how she and her team approached Zoom, like it was a location they had discovered, and now they had to figure out what kind of story to tell there. The LARP they're running on Zoom is called Valhalla. It's a Viking-inspired sci-fi role-playing game, and it's more like a traditional LARP, where a group of players are guided by game masters, who also are in the role of non-playing characters or NPCs. And if they were doing this in a physical space, the players would be able to break off and have these sort of side adventures. Well, Zoom has a feature called breakout rooms, where you and a few other people can break away from the group and have your own separate conversations.

Being able to name breakout rooms, just saying planet Valkyrie and traveling to it, there's something exciting about it. And it's very simple, but you know, you're not just always in this one chat. You're actually like in digital space traveling. You can also change the background behind you on screen. It's a feature called virtual backgrounds. And I've used it as a joke when I'm doing Zoom calls with friends. I'll make it look like I'm in Paris or I'm sitting in the Batcave. But they use virtual backgrounds as part of the story to make it seem like their characters have physically changed locations. When we visit different planets, that's when we start to like, you know, the NPC that is from that planet will have a background that embodies that planet.

But the biggest challenge has been creating a sense of group dynamics and making human connections in cyberspace. And some of it just feels so basic. Like Tiffany is used to making eye contact with players. It's a really important part of making sure everyone's on the same page. But if she's looking at their faces on a grid, the players don't feel like she's making eye contact. But if she's looking at their faces on a grid, the players don't feel like she's making eye contact. But if she looks directly at the camera on her computer, she doesn't feel like she's making eye contact. Also, the players don't all have the same level of technology or Wi-Fi speeds at home. So sometimes people will talk over each other or there are

awkward silences. We had to learn as performers that there is a delay so everyone was like oh there's a void i'm going to fill the void with my voice uh that was a learning curve i will say that the alienation effect goes away probably in like hour one right now in our larp and each time we work together we find a way around it. Our brains adjust to the alien way of communicating. I think that works really well in an online LARP that's in space. They're still trying to figure out how to do a group LARP where people are not supposed to be traveling in spaceships. But overall, going virtual has been a breakthrough. Their theater company and their LARP division have been very locally based in the Midwest.

The greatest treasure that we've really been able to experience is the global platform. We have players all over the world, and now we're getting a digital community. Although in some ways, virtual LARPs have been a victim of their own success. They're attracting a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up for LARPs in person. Betsy and Ryan told me that some of the new players who signed up for Girl on the Phone or Fragile Recall didn't entirely understand what they were getting into. And they want, honestly, they want more of a story being told to them over the phone and don't get like, you really need to interact with this for it to be a story.

They feel sort of betrayed at the end and they're often really angry. And that's just been a marketing question of, oh gosh, we really need to market this so that people know that they have to interact to get a story. So when somebody says, I'm going to do a phone LARP, they're like, I don't know what this is. I don't really understand what live action role play is. I say, we're just trying to give you an experience. And this experience is going to be first person. If you engage with it, you have the opportunity for reaction, an opportunity to have this sort of experience where you have an emotional reaction to it. And you don't need to have acting skills. You just need a willingness to play along. And LARPs are elastic. They will take the shape of whatever you bring to the LARP,

emotionally or psychologically. Again, here's Carly and Jasmine. It does not, in a way that I think a lot of some of the other experiences I've seen or stuff that's going on, it doesn't ignore the circumstance, right? So like, I feel like we're kind of stuck between two things right now where it's either I obsessively scroll through my newsfeed and read all the terrible things that are happening in real life, or a lot of people who would rather like ostrich this out. So this is a game that takes away a lot of the burdens that we are dealing with right now, but also lets you flex that anxiety muscle, lets you flex that accomplishment muscle while

completely acknowledging that you are beholden to technology for all of your socialization right now. that you are beholden to technology for all of your socialization right now. But it's also still putting value on creativity in a time where a lot of creative institutions have had to shutter. You know, we might be a year out from theaters opening. We don't know. So until then, we want to make sure that creative art making and live theater and live artistic interaction is still going. And to keep it in the forefront of people's mindsets, when the theaters do open, they might be six or seven months behind other forms of outdoor socializing. People go back.

And I think we've all discovered from the virtual staff meetings or family reunions that we've done on Zoom, that a virtual space is no substitute for a physical space. But what I like about these games is that they embrace the limitations of the technology while also creating a world inside of it. Like, I love the idea that there are fictional characters who only exist in these virtual spaces. And they're waiting to talk to us. So give these characters a call.

You never know where it could lead. In fact, they're designed that way. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Betsy Isaacson, Ryan Hart, Tiffany Keene-Shafer, Jessica Crean, Carly Dwyer, and Jasmine Kimiai-Graham.

By the way, Jasmine and Carly aren't just residents of Salem. They are practicing witches. Although Jasmine has strayed from the path, much to her family's disappointment. My mother's a witch. My grandmother was active in the witch community her whole life. My adopted sister is a high priestess in one of the local covens. Your parents are like, Jasmine, are you ever going to settle down with a nice witch or warlock someday? Yeah, kind of. That conversation went to some pretty interesting places about witchcraft that did not fit with this episode. But if you want to learn more, I put the audio on the Imaginary Worlds website. Also in the show notes, I put links to all the LARPs that I discussed.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at E. Malinsky at Imagine Worlds Pod. And if you really liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts or a shout out on social media. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.