And we’ve just finished The Forbidden History. The costumes are repacked, the ridiculously late wrap party¹ has wrapped, and we are speeding back to Berlin on the bus. We’re now in the “Week of Stories”² but, even without that, I don’t know that I have a lot to say about the game. There were the usual first run problems, same as any other larp, but it felt like things worked overall and mostly delivered the experience it was trying to.

But I have been thinking about how I approach games, and the ways that intersects with larp design. So that’s what I’m going to write about.

This game I played Douglas Carey Harmon, an indifferent student who aspired to be a poet (without any real conception of what that actually paid in the real world) who was rapidly running out of money, having been cut off by his family. He belonged to a Satanic secret society that taught that other people existed to be manipulated. He imagined he lived for poetry but really lived for a good time. He was amazingly fun to play.

It is far easier to play extroverts than introverts, and people who are congenitally unable to consider the consequences of their actions are doubly easy to play. I put a lot of effort into costuming — dressing in a ridiculously archaic boater³ and a striped jacket for classes, and having a glittery red jacket complete with horns, a pitchfork, and a tail for the masquerade ball. I drank, I wrote bad poetry,⁴ I slept through classes, and I generally focused on having a good time.

My approach, in other words, was to try and embody the character as fully as possible. This is a pretty common approach; you inhabit a character and just try to live as them, trusting by doing that you’re going to push other players doing the same thing into pushing back, and that friction is going to generate interesting play. Well designed larps built around this principle make sure that happens — uptight germophobe characters are paired with slobs, philanderers are romantically linked with obsessively jealous partners, characters with dark secrets are placed into cults dedicated to admitting the truth to the world no matter the cost.

In my case, Douglas had many hooks into potential drama — a cousin who might have known about his getting cut off, rival poets to snub or insult, a lot of professors angry at his lackadaisical approach to classes. But even though that was all seeded through the game, I’m not convinced that’s the way the game is intended to be played.

There’s the concept in amusement parks of “dark rides,” as contrasted with “thrill rides.” In dark rides, you get into a vehicle which travels past a variety of scenes. The original ones used blacklights and fluorescent paint (hence, “dark”) to both mask the small size of the rooms⁵ and camouflage the quality of the effects. They’ve kind of fallen out of fashion, although they’re all over the place at Disney World, where The Haunted Mansion is particularly regarded as a classic of the genre.⁶

I’ve been thinking about them, because there’s a whole school of larp design that takes a lot of cues from them. You tell the players to show up at location X at a particular time, and they get to see something cool happen, where they discover they need to show up at location Y where something else cool will happen. Maybe they’ll need to chant a ritual or clap their hands if they believe in faeries or something, but chances are it’ll be a lot of standing around while a few select players (or, in particularly egregious cases a few select NPCs) get to play the game.

I’m not claiming that that’s always a bad design choice: sometimes you need to provide exposition, sometimes you want an effect like pyrotechnics which would be too dangerous for people to be involved in, sometimes it’s just the most straightforward way to resolve a plot problem. But it’s a very passive design, rather than an active one. It’s a larp in the barest possible sense. You’ve given players a character and a world, and removed all of their ability to actually do anything with either.

The “embody the character and move through the world” strategy, in other words, can sometimes be a kind of dark ride. In The Forbidden History I moved from class to class to cult meeting to special seminar to party, according to a surprisingly rigorous schedule. Sure, I had control over what I did — I could have skipped Ancient Greek or attended an additional Practical Ethics seminar — but the character conflict, the drama that fuels the emotional arcs of larps, depended largely on happenstance. The difference between a massive, character-defining argument and a boring half-hour sipping tea sometimes came down to which room you randomly decided to walk into, or whether you went to bed at 1:45 rather than 1:30.

An alternative to this is called, appropriately, steering. When you steer as a player, you’re deliberately making choices that your character would not, in order to ensure that something interesting happens. I suppose an extreme example of this might be an escape room, where no matter what your (usually paper-thin) characters might do in a given situation, you as a player are entirely focused on solving puzzles.

There’s always a tension between these two strategies. Steering for many people reduces immersion; the mere fact of planning, for them, necessarily destroys the suspension of disbelief. But the alternative can lead to a very sterile game. You can play your character to the hilt, and just never run into any conflicts with anyone. The slob mentioned earlier, played truthfully, probably abandons the germaphobe. Philanderers carefully cover their tracks. And your dark secret will never leak, no matter the threats or enticements.

You might imagine an ideal game, where there is no need for steering at all, where every character decision overlaps perfectly with the decisions you would make as a player, and all your character drama lands in your lap with no effort. Some games just work like that, by dumb luck. Most games don’t, and well designed games tend to be better at reducing the gap between the two. But we need to get beyond the idea that larps should all naturally do that, or larps that don’t are somehow flawed or badly-designed. Sometimes players have to do some of the work.

I think I’m reasonably good at embodying characters. But I’m still working on how to steer in a larp. Games like The Forbidden History, I think, implicitly expect you and your fellow players to approach the game in this way, to deliberately step back and create conflict and pitfalls for your character, to work together to construct a dramatically meaningful story for yourself.

Reading back on what I’ve just written, I suppose someone might point out that choosing not to simply exist in the world, but instead to make active decisions which may be uncomfortable but lead to deeper, more meaningful experiences, sounds like it might be useful advice for life rather than larp. And I guess it is. But the line between life and larp is often a bit thinner than we might care to admit. And honestly, if that weren’t true, well, then what would be the point?

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Footnotes

¹ The schedule had the final masquerade ball wrap start at 21:00, so it finished at 01:30, meaning you might get to bed by 02:00 if you’re aggressive about it. Realistically, most people were up until about 04:00.

The bus left promptly at 10:00. I’m honestly surprised there are as many people still awake on this bus as there are.

² That self-imposed moratorium on criticism intended to prevent larp organizer burnout.

³ See this if you’re unfamiliar.

⁴ Well, not all bad.

⁵ It’s a lot easier to make a graveyard feel graveyard-sized if you can’t see the wall that’s about 15 feet away.

⁶ RIP Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.