I just spent the last few days on a real, honest-to-goodness space ship¹ with a bridge and an engine room and a hanger bay and a tendency to blow out the electricals every time we did a warp jump. I was in town to play Odysseus, a 48-hour game based loosely around Battlestar Galactica.

Odysseus is what’s been dubbed a “clockwork” larp, or a game in which tasks are pushed out to the players which have to be performed on a regular basis. In this case, the main engine of the game is the jump cycle (and I’m going to be spoiling parts of both BSG and Odysseus at this point, so take that under advisement). The game starts shortly after the robot attack, and much like the pilot of BSG the crew of the Odysseus — cut off from the main fleet and unsure whether they’re alive or not — has to jump every three hours in order to escape. It’s a grueling cycle; the roughly 100 players have to provide 24-hour coverage for maintenance, security, research, bridge crews, and fighter pilots.² The military hot-racked, divided between a Solar shift which started at 4am and a Lunar shift which started at noon.³

In many larps, the characters are living out the worst day of their lives⁴ — their brother dies, they find out their spouse is having an affair, their family is bankrupted, they get cashiered out of the military. People tend to cram a lot of drama into the time they have. An opposite approach is to try and create an average day in the life of the character. Some larps, like Odysseus, manage to do both; the game is long enough that you get small moments of normalcy, where your character is just attending to comms traffic or monitoring the security feed or sharing lunch with off-duty friends. But this is all within the context of a catastrophic military attack with the fate of humanity in the balance — there are the usual suicide missions and boarding parties and saboteurs setting bombs you’d expect from the genre, and a constant relentless pressure to keep everything moving and outrun the enemy.

It managed this through what was simply the most impressive production design I’ve ever seen for a larp. The organizing crew took over a school and transformed it into a spaceship. There was an airlock that had to be unlocked with a touchpad (and which receded into the ceiling when opened). There was a security office with camera feeds from all over the ship. The engine room had a warp core with all the appropriate glowing bits that flashed when we jumped. The bridge had fully functioning terminals and viewscreens.⁵ The away team had a cam which would be projected in the main bay of the ship when they were active. And the whole area was rigged with lights and speakers so you always heard the low, steady thrum of the engines, and alerts — controlled by the bridge — triggered sirens and red lights all over the ship.

My character was a scientist, so I spent a lot of time in the science bay, which was bathed in a tinted yellow light and filled with the expected mess of papers and equipment and weird artifacts to research. The clockwork part of the game for the scientists were puzzles. As in BSG, we were trying to find our way back to Earth, and our ancestors had left a series of beacons, each containing coordinates to the next one. After a jump a team would go down to the surface of the planet⁶ and retrieve the beacon; once back on board it would need to be opened and the puzzle solved to find the next location. There was other business to accomplish — genetic testing to be carried out, weapons research to advance, that set of artifacts to research — but the crucial bit was the beacons.

And on all these levels, the larp was nearly perfect. The ambition, the sheer amount of work and effort that went into designing and transforming the venue, was staggering. I haven’t mentioned the world-building and lore created for the game; the characters felt real and connected to the world in a way that few larps achieve, and the backstory as it was discovered during play managed to make sense and provide deeper resonances to what was happening. For 48 hours, I lived on a spaceship, and you could walk out into the main bay and just watch the crew eating and drinking and complaining about the last shift while the occasional engineer shimmied under a table to fix a power conduit. That’s amazing.

But while it was good, and it was fun, there were a lot of elements that don’t sit right with me. Some of it might come down to the difference between Finnish larp and Nordic larp. Finnish larp, it appears, relies heavily on secrets to be revealed during the game. My character turned out to be a robot (unknown to me) who had killed his wife during a blackout (unknown, but suspected by me) because the person who reprogrammed him accidentally left some killer code which kicked in when his life was threatened (also unknown to me). This turned out to be relevant when he decided to commit suicide to try and trigger the upload sequence and transfer his consciousness to the machine hivemind, only to be told by a GM, “I talked to the person who wrote your character, and they say you can’t kill yourself.”

There also appeared to be a strong element of railroading built into the game. Most of the endings I suggested for my character were outright rejected by the organizers⁷ because they had already determined the conclusion of the larp. Apparently all of my suggestions were either explicitly prohibited by the way they conceived the character or would have made the ending they wanted impossible. I don’t especially mind having larp endings predetermined, but I do think it’s better if it’s clear up front, so players can play to it. And I really don’t like being prevented from doing things because the writer deliberately withheld information.⁸

Those are all relatively minor gripes, though, and possibly stylistic differences. Not getting the ending you think your character deserves is an occupational hazard of larps. But while I wanted a different ending for my character, I was significantly more bothered by the ending they chose for the game.

So, the ending. Up to this point the human race has been attacked in a shameful sneak attack, hounded across light years, driven nearly to extinction by a violent and implacable foe both crude and cunning. They are under assault by an endless horde of faceless threats from without, and infiltrators posing as friends and neighbors determined to destroy society from within. Multiple attempts at diplomacy have been rejected. And finally, in the face of oblivion, a group of humans bravely gave their lives in a suicide attack, exterminating all of the enemy in a single stroke, and decisively saving civilization. Their noble sacrifice will be forever remembered.

This, above, is a fascist narrative. The dehumanization of the enemy, the paranoia, the focus on the glory of the military, the triumph against impossible odds. The larp ended with the literal genocide of the enemy — and if there were any doubt of that the organizers made it clear that all robots died permanently and irrevocably when the bomb went off, including the ones onboard the Odysseus. The final moment of the game was the deliberate killing of an entire race of sentient beings, accompanied by the cheers of those who did the killing.

It’s often difficult to write military stories without leaning on these kinds of tropes. To its credit, BSG was well aware of this, which is why after being lauded for its paranoia and anti-terror plot lines by conservatives for the first couple seasons⁹ the writers rather brilliantly flipped the script and had the humans living under occupation, acting as terrorists against the robots. It’s also clear the organizers of the game were aware of these kinds of tropes: the extensive history of humanity in the game is chock-a-block with repeated attempts to kill off large groups of people, all presented as horrific acts by those who convinced themselves they were doing the right thing; that the injustices performed against them justified their reactions.

This is why the ending of the larp was so baffling. Whoever wrote the lore understands the threats that jingoism and the refusal to see your enemies as people can cause. But when I was trying to talk over possible endings with the organizers — suggestions I made ranged from a robot victory to a militarized détente to the withdrawal of the robots following internal disagreement about the best course of action — the people I talked to seemed dead set on a big, military confrontation resulting in the complete eradication of the threat. It was variously described as “a big win for the humans” and “a hopeful ending” and “an upbeat note.”

It certainly wasn’t an upbeat note if you were one of the exterminated. Or someone who loved one of them. Or someone who fought long and hard for a diplomatic solution only to have it fail. And I could understand if that was the point — you think you’re playing Starship Troopers the book and it turns out you’re playing Starship Troopers the movie. But if you’re doing that, if you’ve designed a “Surprise, you’re a Nazi” punchline, you’d expect a longer and more somber payoff, and I’d hope it’d get at least a mention in the debrief.

I certainly don’t think that the organizers intended the tone of the ending they got. And a lot of the players understood the kinds of tropes that were being playing around with, and found the ending just as unsettling as I did. But we’re living at a time where immigrants are being demonized and dehumanized and right-wing hate crimes are on the rise. Subtlety might not be the best approach. Last I checked, some players were talking about the possibility of getting “Remember the Starcaller” T-shirts printed up. The Starcaller was the ship that delivered the bomb which killed all the robots. If the point of the game was how terrible war and genocide is, and how easy it is to get otherwise reasonable people to fall in line and support it, it sure feels like a lot of people missed the point.

Next: Bastille Day, 2019, Netherlands
Prev: Berlin (TXL) to Turku (TKU)

Footnotes

¹ Okay, so it didn’t fly and was located in a Helsinki school. But by other, less literal definitions of “real” it was totally real.

² Much as in the series, the cycle was just a little too short to allow a clean escape, so fighters had to be scrambled to hold off the attack while the jump drive reset.

³ The shifts were interwoven: solar 04:00–12:00, lunar 12:00–16:00, solar 16:00–20:00, lunar 20:00–04:00.

⁴ To be fair, they’re generally living out the most extreme day of their lives, but (for a number of reasons) most larps are biased towards disaster. Sure, you might marry the love of your life, but you should probably expect one of you to die in a couple hours, anyway.

⁵ Run using the EmptyEpsilon simulator

⁶ Accomplished by loading everyone into a panel van in the airlock, and driving them to an appropriate park

⁷ And I spent a solid hour talking to them during the game, trying to find a resolution

⁸ This is especially disturbing if you’re playing a horribly antisocial person, and spent a lot of time recognizing some of those tendencies in yourself and sympathizing with how they feel and vowing to do better yourself, only to be told someone understands the character far better than you do.

⁹ Remember, the series launched in 2004, well into Bush’s “War on Terror”