I arrived in the UK late on Wednesday, flying into Heathrow.¹ It’s my first time back since they instituted electronic border controls for Americans, so I could skip the always-too-long lines to talk to a border agent and just scan my passport instead. I am aware of the irony of my getting easier access to the UK at the same moment the UK seems on the verge of forcing most of the EU citizens into the overcrowded queue; as someone who views most open borders as a benefit, not a curse, I suppose the news is mixed.

A year in, I’ve fallen into some basic patterns of planning. Some things — larps, vacations, visits with friends — will get scheduled a long way out, six months or a year in advance. Everything else gets built around those anchor points, as more details get filled in. I’ll plan on being in the area a week early, and then realize I’m nearby someplace I’ve wanted to see for a while, and if I’m going to be there I might as well sign up for something else happening the week before in the area.

Which inevitably leaves these gaps. I knew where I was going to be mid-July (the Netherlands), and I know where I’m going to be at the end of August (Spain). And I had no strong feelings about what to do in between. I was filling in those details as recently as a month ago, when a friend mentioned a larp they were attending in England and I booked a ticket and suddenly had another anchor to schedule around.

The thing is, I need those anchors. The downside about being able to be everywhere is that I don’t have any reason to be anywhere. Start to provide some constraints and I start to solve the puzzles. Give me nothing except an atlas and an open calendar, and I’ll just stay put and starve to death like Buridan’s Ass.

The larp which I attended was Tenement 67, part of an ongoing series of larps set in a dystopian Cyberpunk future with the usual sort of mix of corporations and slums and gangs and street surgeons putting in and tearing out implants.² I was a little put off by the website, which was rudimentary but serviceable. But my experience with UK larp is limited, and I was deeply curious about the location, so I figured I’d give it a go.

The location was, indeed, as gonzo as it sounded. The larp was run on the site of Gaol Events, a former prison³ closed in 2011 and since converted into an airsoft space. You’re staying inside the former cells — bars still on the windows and wooden bunks still in place — and although the plumbing’s turned off the electricals still work throughout. Proper apocalyptic. I had borrowed a thin foam camping mattress and a sleeping bag and it was fine, if not exactly luxurious.⁴

Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get into the larp. One of the things you hear about, in this hobby, is all these different kinds of larp — Nordic style, American freeform, Mediterranean larp — but one of the most fascinating and hardest to wrap your head around is what the “default” style is, for a given country. In other words, most places have a sense of what larp⁵ is, and it becomes incredibly hard for the practitioners to really and adequately explain what was different about their way than everybody else’s. Indeed, most people have only the vaguest of ideas that there are other ways of doing things, until they’ve gone out and seen it for themselves.

So while I’ve played some UK larps, all the ones I’ve been to have been either international-style or heavily influenced by it.⁶ This was different. And I just couldn’t get a handle on it. And that fault lies all the way back at the beginning.

One way people often divide larps is along character creation. Characters can either be created by the organizers or by the players. This is obviously an oversimplification; I think a better model is one with player-effort along one axis and organizer-effort along the other.

Larps with high-organizer-low-player-effort simply hand out fully written characters for people to select (or have assigned to them). Low-organizer-low-player-effort larps might have a short list of character blurbs to choose from 5 minutes before the event starts. High-organizer-high-player-effort larps could involve writing up an idea for a character that then gets ruminated on and rewritten by the design team, maybe with a few go-arounds and reviews during the process.

Tenement 67, as is apparently quite common in UK larp, was low-organizer-high-player-effort. This was not entirely clear to me. After signing up I was asked what kind of a character I had in mind. I emailed back the organizer an idea I had, I was told “Oh, that sounds great!” and then I waited. And I shouldn’t have, because that was the last I heard until I arrived at the event.

Now, what I thought was happening at this point was that the organizers were looking at ways to fit my character into the world that they had created. Maybe writing some specific plot lines for me to follow up on, or creating some connections with some of the other players. That wasn’t the case. The players were responsible for doing all of that on their own. I had been included in an email chain with a few of the other players in my group, so I had a brief backstory of a few other people and a few things planned over the weekend.

So I showed up, having previously met literally three players at the event,⁷ tenuous connections made to two other people at the event, with at best a vague understanding of the setting. And the larp certainly looked fantastic, and people were running around yelling at each other and brandishing guns and collapsing with nanoviruses and hacked cybernetic implants and generally having a blast. But between my underwritten character,⁸ my general discomfort meeting people, my limited connections, and the general noise and smoke grenades in the hallways I had real trouble making it work. And then one of my two connections died, and the negotiations I was a part of broke completely down, and I just kind of drifted away from the whole thing.⁹

So that’s something to keep in mind, as we move forward with Triumph. I wish the website had been a bit clearer about expectations. I would have prepped differently, at least. And while I might fault the organizers for not setting expectations better — and in truth, I might have skipped the event entirely had I known, since I didn’t know enough people to really feel comfortable making the connections I needed to — I’m not even sure they were wrong for not doing so. It’s a game made for a very specific community, and it had plenty of players. Most everyone else who turns up probably comes with a group or knows people already. Why bother reaching beyond that?

I don’t know that we can rely on that for Triumph. I’m not sure we would want to, even if we could. There isn’t a community for it. Or rather, part of running it is creating that community.

Right now I’m on a small propeller plane right now leaving England for Ireland. At the moment I’m looking over the Irish Sea, just clouds and water and a few ships far down below. They look like toys — everything looks like toys, from a height — and for the first time I can clearly imagine the globe and where I am on it; I know the coast of Wales and the coast of Éire and can imagine a higher viewpoint, some loftier traveler looking down at my miniature airplane and watching me etch my way across the sky.

I finished out my week in England crashing with a friend near Birmingham. It’s always sad to say goodbye, but I’m spending some time in Ireland and then heading to Berlin, where I’m staying with a friend, and then off to Madrid, where I’m playing a weekend-long larp with friends, then spending a week crashing with one back at his home.

In other words, I’m constantly in the process of forging a new community, or trying to repair and reestablish the ones I’m already part of. Sometimes I’m better at it than others. But a big reason I attend all these international larps is because, at least for me, I haven’t found another community I’ve felt as home in.

After Tenement 67, I caught the train back down to London. There was a meetup for those of us who played Odysseus who happened to be in town, and I gladly arranged a hotel nearby so I could hang out late. I may have had a mixed experience at that game, but just being able to hang out with that crowd and talk about upcoming games or design problems or war stories from people who went through it … that’s as magical as anything else you’ll get out of the experience. That’s worth the price of admission, in and of itself.

Next: Kerry (KIR) to Berlin (TXL)
Prev: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)

Footnotes

¹ For all the flying in and out of London, you’d think I’d be flying in and out of Heathrow more often. But the budget airlines are all running in and out of Stansted and Luton, it seems, and so I’m often flying in and out on them. It’s a scam, of course — the outer airports are generally murder to get to without a car, and with the costs of trains to get there and back don’t end up being much cheaper after all.

² Come to think of it, it’s basically Max Headroom. Speaking of which, why hasn’t anyone done a Max Headroom larp? Or was this already it?

³ HM Prison Ashwell, apparently

⁴ I did, rather cleverly I think, find a luxury hotel with a heavily discounted room in London for the Sunday night after the larp. And I greatly appreciated collapsing into it.

⁵ Or, I guess, LRP

⁶ And, to be fair, this one had some variations from “classic” UK larp, I’m given to understand. But it was still a purer form of it than I think I’ve encountered before.

⁷ Two of whom were from Sweden and the Netherlands, respectively

⁸ Let’s remember I wrote the character, here.

⁹ To be fair, a major reason I gave up was midway through the second day, when the entire complex was put on lockdown, which in actual practice meant that everyone I wanted to talk to was on the other side of the complex, and for two hours every attempt I made to talk to them was met with people with guns yelling at me and threatening to shoot me where I stood.

I understand being yelled at with people with guns is very in-genre, but I have yet to find a larp where a section of the event being put in lockdown didn’t immediately kill the event dead for everyone except the people doing the yelling. One must exist, surely, but I remain skeptical.