I came back to Berlin for two reasons: to play Shattered Mirrors and to finally stow away all the costumes I’ve been dragging around with me for a month. Now that I’ve done both I’m sitting in the Berlin Airport waiting for a flight to the UK. It’s been a rough morning; I had to leave around 5:30am to make my 9am flight and it’s just been a comedy of errors to get here. First I discovered I had lost my phone shortly after leaving my friend’s apartment so I had to wake them up at stupid o’clock to get back in and locate it. The trains were delayed. I was running about 15 minutes late which was stressing me out a little, only to realize my flight was actually at 9:25 and I was early.¹ I couldn’t check in online and had to do so at the airport. Finally I discovered I had somehow bought two separate tickets to this flight.²

This was the last I’ll be able to visit most of the EU for at least several months. If my tracking is accurate I have exactly zero days left on my Schengen visa. I was somewhat concerned the German immigration authorities wouldn’t let me leave,³ that I had miscounted or miscalculated or some glitch in the system somewhere would report me in violation, but border control just wordlessly stamped me out.⁴

I really didn’t want to leave. I’d happily have stayed longer and visited a few more local friends — I have outstanding invites from two friends in Germany alone whom I haven’t seen in forever — but that’s not how the rules work. Schengen doesn’t really anticipate the existence of people like me. I can’t exactly fault them for that. I’m a weird case. But I can’t help but think of smarter ways of defining the rules, whether you think they should be more strict or more lax.⁵

Part of my push to get a residency visa in Portugal is that it makes travel through the EU less fraught.⁶ I don’t find the travel particularly exhausting, but trying to conform to a set of rules which doesn’t acknowledge your existence is endlessly enervating. I’m leaving the EU for a few months. I’ll be back after that, and then leave again and return again on a schedule which is not my own. And maybe eventually I’ll reach a point where I no longer need to worry about it.

The larp I played, Shattered Mirrors, was a small⁷ Alice-in-Wonderland-themed game which ran for four days at a manor house in Mecklenberg in northern Germany. The larp alternated between the real world and Wonderland; players were given two characters and switched between them for different acts. In the backstory Alice had disappeared as a child, leaving an array of journalists, true crime aficionados, and childhood friends to wonder and speculate about what happened, with Lewis Carroll only now publishing a book on the case which promised new evidence. In the real world Carroll has invited a menagerie of interested parties to the publication party while, simultaneously, Wonderland has emerged from a devastating civil war and its denizens are trying to negotiate a new equilibrium.

Alice in Wonderland holds a special place in my heart. I read it religiously⁸ as a child. It played the role that for a lot of my peers was filled by The Hobbit,⁹ becoming a kind of urtext for the world, by which I mean it colors my understanding of nearly everything in strange and subtle ways. I reread it every year. I attended Halloween parties in college dressed one year as the Mad Hatter and another year as Alice. I have a tattoo of the White Rabbit on my left shoulder. I’m a little invested in it.¹⁰ So I was excited and a little trepidatious as I arrived on the first day.

The game was run at the Gutshaus Groß Markow, a small manor that carries a bit of elegance but has seen better days.¹¹ As is traditional, half of the already small organizing team got sick right before we started so the game ran somewhat shambolically through no fault of the organizers. Everyone bore it in good spirits. We were lucky that the photographer took ill rather than the cook; the food throughout the weekend was excellent.

I was playing the Walrus in Wonderland, one of the Scholars of the Weird Sea and a learned if somewhat oblivious presence prepared to declaim on just about any subject. In the real world that became Ocean Ward, a friend of Alice’s with an overwhelming fear of water¹² and a failing career as a musician. Ocean was one of a number of Alice’s childhood friends and the game started very strongly for me, with the opening act starting with a dinner and reading by Lewis Carroll. The four of us playing Alice’s friends quickly bonded and formed a solid bond protecting each other. And then we switched over to Wonderland.

In contrast, Wonderland was very tricky to play, at least for me. Comedy is often the kiss of death in larps; the players find themselves trying to play for laughs rather than emotion. That can be fun, but it gets a little old after a while. There’s only so many tea parties where you rotate seats you can take before you want to get back to your plots.

A bigger problem ends up being similar to the issues I had with Goetica. You’re playing two different characters, which only gives you half as much time with each. And Shattered Mirrors was better in that regard, because the characters were slowly merging as the divisions between the realms dissolved, but in many cases the two halves started very far apart and you’d start to get into one character’s journey when you’d find yourself switching to a different one. Another issue: the characters in Wonderland are static in similar ways to the demons in the Ars Goetica. You have more characterization to go on, but it’s not entirely clear what the character arc of the Walrus ought to be, nor the White Rabbit or the Dormouse or Humpty Dumpty. In Alice in Wonderland they’re plot devices and conversational foils. The only character with any real agency is Alice, no matter how often the Queen of Hearts demands a beheading.

So the Wonderland part of the game started off with most people trying to find their character and falling back on banter to fill in the gaps while they did so. And a lot of players eventually found some kind of arc, but people got there at different times so it was hard to sync up even with frequent calibration breaks.¹³ And while almost everyone expressed an interest in playing Wonderland darker in actual practice a lot of players struggled to find a way to get there. For all the threats of execution and exile being tossed around you still kind of understood that none of it could be taken seriously. Wonderland was capricious.

The rest of the weekend passed with you switching between your two characters, as the barriers between Wonderland and the real world broke down. It felt like we were slowly working out both plots, figuring out what happened to Alice in the real world while simultaneously restoring Alice as the rightful heir to Wonderland, but in the end neither plot ended up that way. The lack of a definitive resolution may have been fitting for reality — sometimes children do tragically disappear without a trace — but I kind of wanted the Wonderland plots to have a more conclusive ending. It is a children’s story, after all. They generally get tied up with a bow.

I find myself wondering how it would have played if the larp had run according to plan. More organizers might have allowed for more clearer direction in the workshops. More NPCs would have enabled the players to follow up on more plots and driven a better game. More players would have filled in a lot of missing connections and provided more to do. It felt like a lot of small nudges in the right places could have turned some of the confusion and uncertainty into stronger and more emotionally charged play.

I had fun and made some friends. I’m glad I went, and I’d recommend it to others, if you keep in mind the above caveats. But my main takeaway is the challenge of playing someplace like Wonderland, where there’s a level of surrealism and unreality pervading the world. I think that half the game needed firmer rules and stronger stakes in order to support the design. Without it you just end up playing, well, nonsense.

Next: London (LHR) to Lisbon (LIS)
Prev: Rome (FCO) to Berlin (BER)

Footnotes

¹ A saner person would have been relieved. I was annoyed because I could have slept in another half-hour.

² I only have a single confirmation email, so I must have bought the first ticket months ago and dutifully waited for the confirmation, which never came. When I went to confirm my travel — I have a note to the effect that I purchased my ticket — I couldn’t find it and assumed I had screwed up. So I bought another one.

In a better world the reservation system would have noticed I was buying a second ticket with an identical name and popped up a confirmation dialog, but in a better world the airline would give a shit about its passengers, and we clearly aren’t living in that one.

³ Or, more precisely, would take me somewhere for a stern talking-to then issue me a fine and a blanket ban from Schengen for 24 months before letting me leave.

⁴ Actually stamped me out, squinted at my passport, took out a pen, scribbled a little note, then stamped it again and handed it back. From what I can tell the original stamp was slightly illegible so they canceled it and added a new one.

⁵ I imagine most countries want more travelers like me as a matter of policy. I can see the counterarguments, though.

⁶ Another part, of course, is to eventually enable a citizenship application which makes the rules which apply to me as a US citizen irrelevant.

⁷ Boutique? Maybe. It’s designed for about 30 players and in the event we ended up with a little over 20, including a couple organizers filling some crucial roles. Two players showed up late and had to leave early. A couple more were under the impression the game started Friday and showed up then, along with a dog.

⁸ I suppose Lewis Carroll might say, more accurately, that I read it irreligiously.

⁹ Or, for a subsequent generation, by Harry Potter.

¹⁰ Before I get too far I feel I need to discuss the author, because this is another debate I find infuriating. It’s true Lewis Carroll liked little girls. And Charles Dodgson is strange enough — today we’d say neuroatypical — and we have enough gaps in our understanding of their life that some scholars have hypothesized Dodgson had an erotic interest in children. This started as a tentative suggestion by a few people but seems to have congealed into something like accepted wisdom.

And hey, like a lot of things that happened in the past we really can’t know for sure. It’s possible. The most damning evidence to modern eyes would be the naked pictures Dodgson took of prepubescent girls, including Alice Liddell. But the Victorians had a vastly different understanding of children’s sexuality than we do, essentially viewing children as sexless and innocent. Lots of Victorians photographed children, both clothed and naked, without any suggestion of impropriety. Some companies even put images of nude children on birthday and Christmas cards. Dodgson’s photographs don’t seem particularly out of place for the Victorians.

Dodgson has also been presented as disinterested in adult women, but it’s been persuasively argued this is a result of some clumsy suppression of some of the passages in Dodgson’s diaries. Dodgson’s nieces edited them before publication and removed a lot of the praise for fully grown actresses and artist’s models, apparently because they felt it was unseemly. They left the commentary on child actresses alone. The net effect is that Dodgson seems to obsess about children while being unmoved by adults, which isn’t the case if you read the diaries in full.

Charles Dodgson was certainly fascinated by young girls, and there’s been a lot of speculation that it went farther than that, possibly even instigating the break Dodgson had with the Liddell family. But even today there’s a stigma against men who are invested in the lives of children, especially girls. The whole suggestion that Dodgson’s interest extended beyond that is a stretch, and strikes me as an example of the folly of projecting modern sensibilities on historic events. It obscures far more than it illuminates.

¹¹ I was informed by one of the organizers that it’s been bought by a company less interested in fixing it up than in making money renting it out. So the rooms are a little threadbare, many of the surfaces are laminate and peeling, and most of the furniture isn’t period nor has it been replaced in decades. It’s not in bad shape yet, but it’s kind of genteelly listing that way.

¹² Having nearly drowned after being pushed into a pool by Alice shortly before their disappearance. A core part of their trauma was never having had the opportunity to confront or forgive Alice afterwards.

¹³ The game was divided into acts, often switching just after a meal, so there were hour-long breaks where you’d be able to change into your Wonderland costume and calibrate with the other players.