About a month ago, the biggest, splashiest larp company in the world died. Dziobak Larp Studios, responsible for College of Wizardry and the latest phase of “blockbuster” style games, announced they were significantly in debt and ceasing operations immediately. All their games were immediately cancelled, all their assets were going to be sold off, and everyone who now held a ticket to a defunct event was going to have to get in line behind all their creditors for a potential reimbursement months, if not years, in the future.¹

There have been a number of autopsies as to the cause of death,² and a number of reactions across the web.³ Lots of people are saying it’s the death of blockbuster larps (it isn’t) or the death of expensive games (it isn’t) or all sorts of grand pronouncements that seem to boil down to whatever preconceived ideas or hopes the person making them has stored away.⁴ I think there’s clearly a demand for those kind of events, and other companies — hopefully smarter ones — will fill the void.

For me, the practical impact is that the larp I was supposed to attend last weekend, Gangs of Birmingham, was cancelled with minimal notice. So I’ve had all week in Birmingham with more-or-less nothing to do.

So I spent the week in Birmingham. I was here before; it’s where I started traveling around the world, but that time I only got into the city once, spending the rest of my time staying at a friend’s in the suburbs.⁵ This trip I got the whole week. I could have gone elsewhere, but there was a small meetup for those other people who expected to attend the game and couldn’t cancel their tickets.

The meetup was nice; we got to tour the Black County Living Museum where the game was to be set.⁶ And there were drinks and dinner back in Birmingham. But most everybody cleared out Monday, so I spent my time wandering the city, trying some of the restaurants,⁷ catching a show in the oldest movie theater still operating in the United Kingdom.⁸ But after the aggressive schedule I had in Mexico, I was fine just wandering around for a bit, seeing what was around.

I’m writing this in Madrid, having spent the weekend with a friend and flown out this afternoon. I’m here for a week, scheduled around another larp next weekend.⁹ It’s another place I’ve been, already. So I’m going to relax, take time to myself, catch up on some things, and stuff myself full of Patatas Bravas and Manchego, just like last time.

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Footnotes

¹ If ever. People are naturally skeptical.

² My take, briefly: like a lot of companies, they expanded too quickly, trying to create a market that they could then take advantage of. Events are difficult to manage, budget-wise — you need a ton of capital up front to rent locations and arrange catering and pay staff, but you sell tickets much closer to the actual event. Dziobak was trying to offset this by announcing events in the future and selling early tickets for them which would be used to mount current events.

This isn’t an uncommon or even especially controversial model; theaters do much the same thing when they offer season subscriptions, often before knowing what their future productions are going to be. But it only works if you sell your events. Misjudge demand, start cancelling events because they aren’t selling, and things get dicey very quickly.

Now, this model shares a lot in common with a lot of tech startups — get big, claim the space, then use that market dominance to lock in reliable revenue streams. It’s not the worst model. But it is risky, it does burn a lot of money up front, and given how things ended up a smarter, saner, less ambitious management strategy clearly would have been better.

Don’t take this as suggesting their only business error was strategic; there were a lot of bad decisions along the way. I’m just not sure those were determinative.

³ Compounding all the business mistakes, there was a ton of drama and mismanagement behind the scenes. I really don’t want to get into it here, but there are some people who have very good, personal reasons for being glad that company is dead.

I’m really, desperately curious if a different management team, one less tone-deaf and more willing to listen to their critics and make difficult decisions, could have pulled it off. But that wasn’t Dziobak.

⁴ “Surely, this is the scandal that will take down Trump.”

⁵ Suburbs? Countryside? These don’t really track with the subdivisions in the United States that I’m used to. They’re suburban in the sense that they’re about a commuter’s drive from a city and filled with homes and apartments, and rural in the sense that they’re near farms and fields. But the geography of England is such that they’re all historic villages that evolved in concert with the larger cities around them, rather than the prefab kind of suburbs you find in the United States.

⁶ It’s 26 acres on which they’ve moved historic buildings from the period and reconstructed them, brick-by-brick, to create a simulacrum of a village from the time having undergone industrialization. There’s a coal mine, some period places to eat — sweets shop, bakery, fish and chips take away, a pub — a variety of hardware stores and chemists and general stores, docklands, a schoolhouse, a movie theater, and a number of residences. Most of this is all open and accessible to walk through.

For the game, we would apparently have had access to a number of spaces which are normally off limits, enabling players to play the shopkeepers and run the warring gangs from the various back rooms and meeting halls and schoolhouse. It’s quite amazing, and one wonders if they could have effectively communicated what the game entailed if it would have sold enough tickets to be on more solid financial footing.

⁷ I found a small but astonishing vegan restaurant called 1847, Which was quite expensive but served dishes like Sweetcorn Parfait with Sweetcorn Veloute, Corn Beignets and Chili Ketchup, and Black Rice Pudding served warm and studded with Pomegranate Seeds.

⁸ It was two doors down from where I was staying, and there was a special presentation of NT Live: The Tragedy of Richard II. How could I not?

⁹ Berechtigter Zweifel. And not canceled.