Imaginary Worlds - Winning the Larp

Episode Date: January 26, 2017

Larp stands for Live Action Role Play. That's about as simple as it gets when trying to understand what Larps are. They can be fantastical and magical, or they can be hyper-realistic dramas that grapple with topical issues. And Larps are getting more popular -- maybe even on the verge of becoming mainstream. Game masters and Larpwrights Lizzie Stark, Evan Torner, Caroline Murphy and Eirik Fatland explain why playing pretend is the right cathartic outlet for our times; and why Larps may be redefining what we consider fiction or art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I often get recommendations from listeners for episode ideas, and one of the most common ones is to do an episode on LARPs. And if you just said, an episode on what? LARP stands for live-action roleplay. And if you do know what a LARP is, probably the first thing that popped into your head

were a bunch of nerdy guys dressed in medieval armor whacking each other with foam swords in a park. Those swords are called boffers, by the way, which doesn't help their cause. And the funny thing is, in the world of nerds and geeks, where I live quite comfortably, LARPing is often considered too nerdy and too geeky. Like, I was recently at a game shop playing D&D, and this guy was bragging about all the other role-playing games that he

does. And then he said, yeah, but I draw the line at LARPing. Caroline Murphy is not surprised. Buffer fighting looks nerdy. Like, it just does. It just looks like I never want to see videos of boffer fighting. Caroline does a lot more than boffer fighting these days. She's a game master, or GM, which means that she runs LARPs. She often writes them, too. And yes, LARPs have plots and character backstories you're supposed to follow. As a GM, her job is to hover and watch the participants like a referee. A GM can also play characters that are designed to challenge the players or advance the plot,

and sometimes to give puzzles to solve. LARPs are just ridiculously undervalued for what they are. You're getting a tailored, crafted story just for you and your friends for an entire weekend. That's incredibly valuable. Now, there was a time when people were embarrassed to admit that they were Star Trek fans, or God forbid, Trekkies. Comic-Con used to be mocked. When I worked in animation in the 90s, cosplay was the thing you were supposed to hide.

But now that's cool, even sexy. So are LARPs the next big thing? I mean, they're not just about swords and shields anymore. There are post-apocalyptic LARPs. There are LARPs set in space, costume ball LARPs, World War II LARPs. Caroline wrote a LARP where humans interact with fairies, which is not as cute as it sounds because the humans realize the fairies are using them as pawns in their very creepy courtship rituals. Half the players are humans that are trapped in the fey realm and they're playing a horror game. And then half the players are fey who have trapped these humans and they're playing a romance game. But the more I talked with Caroline and other game masters from around the world, I began to realize that LARPing isn't even a game anymore.

game masters from around the world, I began to realize that LARPing isn't even a game anymore. I mean, I think that LARPing has evolved to the point where it's redefining what we consider a work of art or fiction. Yeah, I'm serious. If you don't know what's up with LARPs these days, you're in for a surprise. After the break. Now, I always assumed that LARPing had evolved from Dungeons and Dragons. Like, some guys were playing in their basement in the 70s, and someone said, Hey, what if we ran out in the backyard and pretended to be our characters? Evan Turner says that's not quite right. He is a professor at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in game studies.

And he says to find the roots of LARPing, we have to go all the way back to the psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, who is a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. You know, at the time, of course, Freud was much more popular, where you look into the individual psyche and feel like you can unlock all the secrets in your subconscious. And Moreno says, well, yeah, but you're actually composed of all these different roles that you take upon yourself and they don't quite all jive together. And so, you know, part of what's therapeutic about the role playing is bringing out those aspects that you know are within yourself, but you're too embarrassed to socially reveal them without a fictitious alibi. Moreno's ideas were eventually picked up by the U.S. military during the Cold War,

and they're trying to figure out how to interact with the Soviets during a crisis. The Rand Corporation was running these games in the late 50s, early 60s, and then they realized that the researchers were having too much fun, so they stopped. And that culture, nevertheless, was continued to be cultivated in places like Stanford and MIT and never really went away. In the mid-60s, the Society for Creative Anachronisms was founded in Berkeley. They're the first to start doing the boffer-style sword campaigns. And then by the 70s and the 80s, all of this kind of merged with Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop games. I think that originally D&D and the early forms of LARP were kind of a U.S. phenomenon.

There are a lot of attributes of them that follow U.S. culture. Lizzie Stark is a journalist who wrote about LARPing for her book Leaving Mundania. Now she's a full-on convert and a game master. In kind of a classic fantasy LARP, you have a character, your character has a level, your character has hit points, your character has skill points. And to me, this sort of rehashes the American dream. You know, when you show up to a new game, you're level zero. And through steady hard work of showing up every month, your character inevitably attains wealth and power and influence in the game world. In the 1990s, LARPing branched out into different genres. A game called Vampire the Masquerade was a big hit on college campuses.

But when Evan Turner tried it, he hated it. In fact, that experience is one of the reasons why he wanted to study role-playing from a psychological perspective. I could already sense this sort of weird tension between these people who say, oh, we're just doing this for fun, and then the minute they get into the game, they're trying to dominate you and subvert your will. And then the minute they get into the game, you know, they're trying to dominate you and subvert your will. And I think that that, you know, that lack of consent and the sort of scene status of those who had the most power at the center of it created a lot of cult like situations. Let me just say where people did not feel like they could leave or that they if they left, they'd be shunned from their community. Now, by this point, LARPing was already a worldwide phenomenon.

But when Vampire the Masquerade came to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the game itself began to change. The American rules for Vampire are very competitive. They want you to gain advantage over other people. And the Nordic people just did away with that and concentrated on character and theme and atmosphere. And thus, a new kind of LARPing was born, Nordic LARPs. Eric Fotland lives in Oslo. He's a game master, but he's also considered an intellectual in the field. And he said in those early days, there was a lot of excitement around what made a Nordic LARP distinctive, but also a lot of trial and error too.

The first big LARP I did was a LARP called Kibbe Genesis, which was based to a large degree on George Orwell's 1984. So it lasted for five days. We played it in actually a building that had previously been a mental asylum and pretended that we were now at some point in the future, there had been a nuclear war and we were on the ground. So for five days, people pretended to live in a distant future, Orwellian totalitarian society, and they would work in character, they would eat in character, they would shit in character, they would shit in character, they would sleep in character.

If they woke up in the middle of the night because the thought police were ransacking their quarters, they would be expected to respond in character. And all of this made for, I think, quite a powerful experience. There's a lot of players that afterwards said, wow, this really changed my view of myself and and the world not a happy experience but a very strong one we also thought that in this experience we needed to have some drama you know we needed to have something happening it wasn't enough that people just hang out and pretend to live in this dark totalitarian future and so we added lots and lots of stuff we added artificial intelligences trying to take over the planet there was an intranet which in theory you could hack and there were all these science fiction plots there were even time travelers from the future a nuclear reactor blowing up and so on

for someone who was like deeply immersed into the third day of the lab waking up in the morning like yes i believe it now i i am a simple vegetarian in the year 2097 uh i must go and get my coupons so I can get my food ration. And then suddenly there is like a time traveler from the distant future popping up in a cloud of smoke right in front of them. This doesn't mix, you know. It breaks the illusion rather than adding to it. So if American larps were dramatic, Nordic larps would be subtle. Erik once played a larp that was set in 1942 in

a Norwegian village that was under occupation by the Germans. And they played this larp in the actual village. The locals just kind of watched from the side, as if the larpers were ghosts from the past. Afterwards, we could compare notes with people who had lived through the war. And often there were surprising similarities. Oh, okay, you did this. Well, we also did that. Even in fantasy LARPs, they have a strong commitment to realism. A LARP based on Hamlet was played in the Danish castle where Hamlet took place. There's even a joke in Sweden about LARPers who get so fastidious about their costumes,

they lose sight of the game itself. Someone is a bad LARPer. He doesn't understand why you shouldn't sue your own leather boots for a LARP. Yeah. I enjoyed seeing also particularly the pictures from the American-themed LARPs to see people in Nordic countries dressed as quote-unquote Americans. Yeah. I played at the very first run of Just a Little Lovin'.

There were a couple of American players there. And it was really freaking me out to play with them because they knew much more about who these people were supposed to be and where they were supposed to come from than I did. That's interesting. But it's part of kind of how LARP works, that we create this temporary bubble, this temporary reality, and we live in it for a few hours or a few days. And this reality follows the rules that we can remember. So if we're going to pretend to be

people in ancient Rome, for example, we obviously can't learn Latin to pretend to be Romans. We speak whatever language we speak. But then we might change some other things. We might remember some key phrases, how to say hello, how to say goodbye. We might remember some ways to be polite, some things about the values of people in ancient Rome, like what is considered to be honorable and what is not considered. As much stuff as we can cram into our minds and play, that's basically the contents of

the world we're playing in a LARP. So we're just a little love in which takes place in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and happens in Saratoga, upstate New York. That's the setting of the LARP. But of course, it doesn't contain all the information that people from that time and that place would have about the AIDS crisis or about the state of New York or state of politics or anything. It contains a subset of it.

When word got back to the U.S. about Nordic LARPs, there was a lot of interest. Evan Torner wanted to bring them over here. But the Nordic LARPs got lost in translation, even when they were supposed to take place in America. We were looking at the advertising for Just a Little Lovin', and the initial website said, you know, this is a game about HIV, AIDS. I mean, there was a huge Internet uproar at that term.

And so and at that moment, we're like, you're right. It's not really a game. It's it's play where we're playing through it. But it's it's it's a LARP. Lizzie Stark had the same problem with the LARP that she tried to bring over here called Mad About the Boy. It was based on the Brian K. Vaughn comic book series Why the Last Man. For copyright reasons, they didn't take any of the characters, but they took the basic scenario that a plague has killed every man on Earth.

The LARP is about a government plan to fertilize women, and there's a big debate about which women. And then suddenly, halfway through the game, the last man on Earth stumbles onto the scene because it turns out he was the only person immune to the virus. So we got accused of being sexist and hating men and reinforcing gender divides. And we also got accused of being insufficiently radical and running a game that was anti-feminist because it was commodifying sex.

And it was kind of, it ended up being kind of contentious, even though I think for the people who were actually there, the experience was good. Lizzie realized that Nordic LARPs were also playing into a class divide. They were appealing to people with postgraduate degrees and money to spare because American LARPs usually cost 40 bucks. Renting the site and providing food to people, which was also kind of new, but really important for the social experience of the LARP, was more expensive. So instead of 40 bucks, I think we had to charge like 120 or 130 dollars for the weekend. We had to do the work of selling Nordic

LARP to people and ensuring them that the experience would be worth it. I mean, now, of course, you know, there are LARPs with $450 tickets that are getting sold out in minutes. And remember the Boffer campaigns, those people that whack each other with swords? They were getting kind of annoyed about all this because it basically was implying that Nordic LARPs were somehow better, more evolved, and that silly, embarrassing geek stuff. And they pointed out that American LARPs were tackling serious subjects, and they were developing characters with a lot of nuance and a lot of depth. But this is what I think is so interesting. LARPing has evolved to the point where it's not really a game anymore.

I mean, if you're so deeply invested in your characters and your story, there's no way to win a LARP, right? I mean, some people use the phrase, won the LARP, which is kind of sarcastically. Like, our characters won the LARP, and usually you win the LARP by being awesome. Whatever that means in the narrative that you're in. The Nordic LARP facilitators, sometimes we joke about collecting player tears for our GM vials. It's consensual crying, though, consensual crying. Let's be very clear about that. When you experience the emotions of your character, you can't shake those emotions even after the game is over. LARPers call it bleed.

And there's actually a small field of psychological studies on how to debrief after the LARP is over. In the simulation, there is some aspect of if I've shot someone in the head in cold blood in a game, there is some aspect of that that was real to me. And we need to then psychologically prepare people to both do it and then to undo it that then they can go on in their normal lives. The number one thing that is a problem in Bleed is having emotions and especially like sexual emotions transfer over from character to player. Again, Caroline Murphy. Because a lot of people get into character relationships without really knowing all of the repercussions of what that can be like and not knowing exactly how to control it and not having clear conversations about what are the boundaries? What am I comfortable with? What are you comfortable with? Like, how do we make sure this works? And they don't have touch up

conversations about that stuff. And if you don't have experience doing it, then it can be very, very dangerous and gets people into a lot of hairy situations where people are already in relationships and then they have their out-of-game husband and then they have their in-game wife. That can be a problem. Isn't that what you want, though, from reading a book or seeing a play? You want to feel something. You want to experience an epiphany and see the world through the eyes of a character that is not you. So couldn't you argue that LARPs are works of art? Yeah, I think, of course, LARP can be art. Almost anything can be art.

The question is whether it's good art. I think that one of the things that's really, really different about writing as just a writer writing a novel versus writing a collaborative story with a lot of people is that you have to fight this impulse to want to control everything. And you have to fight the impulse to railroad people onto your storyline and your train, which initially people just fail at. Like it's really, really hard to do that because you're used to writing a story that only people are going to consume as an audience, not as participants. But the other thing is, if you put on a play, it can be seen by hundreds or thousands of people. A LARP can only truly be

experienced by the players themselves. That kills me. Really? It kills me because I've told so many stories over the years. I've been doing this for 15 years now. And I've told so many stories over the years. I've been doing this for 15 years now. And I've told so many stories over the years. And sometimes people will tell me a story that I told them and I've forgotten it. And these are things that have changed people's lives. They're like, wow, this time that you did this thing and all this stuff happened, it changed everything for me in and out of game level. And as a creator creator that's a little

bit crushing because there's this kind of existential question of legacy right you know well have you ever been tempted to write novels or other medium yeah yeah I've been working on that actually I'm in like a writer's club now and we meet bi-weekly and just write things just work on stuff I feel kind of bad being like you should be you should be doing screenplays or you should be doing tv or you should be doing plays but then it's like well who am i to tell you what kind of art you should be doing you know no i know i know what you mean though and there's there's these times at which i've i feel like frustrated as a creator that i've created like something beautiful and that I can't show it to anyone and that there's no way

to show it to anyone and that even if I could show it to anyone I just don't know that it would be the same yeah like let's say we you know we I wrote like an amazing parlor style game and there's cast characters and everything and I've got the best cast that I could possibly imagine I've you know cast the all-stars of LARP. And I have like a 360 camera like sitting in the middle of the room. And maybe I set up a Twitch stream so everybody can watch as these characters interact and all these things. But there's so much going on at the same time. These two characters are off whispering in the corner. What are they saying?

Meanwhile, this character is having a big fight with another character. There's too many threads that are going on at the same time. And they're all just so perfectly interwoven that you can't capture that. But I don't think it's frustrating. I think it's one of the things that makes LARP so special. There are relatively few experiences left that are where you have to be there. I guess what I'm saying is to me, it's a feature, not a bug. And there's something about LARP that captures the magic of the present moment.

Which is so rare in our digital age when even Snapchat is not as ephemeral as we want it to be. So what are LARPs? They're not games in the traditional sense. They're not like plays. And while I do think they're works of art, there's no category of art you can easily put them in. I asked Erik Fotland what he'd compare them to. Well, LARPs are like sandcastles. Like, you build them, they can be beautiful, but the moment they reach their perfection, the tide comes in and washes it all away. but the moment they reach their perfection, the tide comes in and washes it all away. And some LARP designers very deliberately, they design for the memory,

they design for the story that is told after the LARP. You know, it's about the creation of memories. It's a temporary beauty, and I think that makes it even more beautiful. Designed memories. I think it's a pretty good category. All right, so to be honest, I came into this episode thinking, LARPs are really interesting. I'm going to research them.

I'll talk about them. But I don't have to do one, right? But I'm intrigued and incredibly impressed. And I've been told don't make the mistake a lot of journalists make of just doing one LARP and then writing about it like you've had the definitive LARP experience. You need to try a few and figure out who you want to be in this world. So I will get there eventually, and I will let you know how it goes. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Evan Torner, Caroline Murphy, Emily Kerr-Boss, Eric Fotland, and Lizzie Stark,

who is not a fan of Game of Thrones, but yes, she knows the Starks are a big deal in that show. LARPers would actually G-chat me with spoilers. Like when the red wedding happens, they would text, they would just, apropos of nothing, people I hadn't spoken to in months and months would be like, hey, how'd you feel about what happened to your family last night when they all died? Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. And let me know what LARPs you'd recommend.

I tweeted E. Malinsky. You can join the conversation on Facebook. And, by the way, I am going to have my first live show at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as part of the Work by Work On Air Arts Festival. It's going to be from 4 to 5 o'clock on Sunday, February 12th. So come on by. And I've mentioned before, you can help support Imaginary Worlds on Patreon. If you sign up to give $10 a month, you get access to a Dropbox folder that has extended

clips and full-length interviews. And the interviews in this episode are really interesting. Just click the Patreon button on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.