I’m in the middle of an extended trip to England, largely — almost entirely — to prep for the larp I’m running at the end of August. Subsequently, I’ve done nearly nothing of note. Nearly nothing isn’t nothing, of course. My trip’s overlapped both my birthday and the birthdays of a few friends, so I got out a bit for those.

For my birthday I had bought a ticket for Tears for Fears, who were playing at a nearby castle on July 15^th. That’s one of the bands that made up a large part of the soundtrack of my teenage years, but I never managed to see them live. I’ve been listening to their latest album a lot.¹ Sadly, the show was cancelled.² Luckily, I had booked theater tickets for the day before,³ on my actual birthday, so I wasn’t moping at home cursing my misfortune.

I ended this part of my trip with my friend’s birthday celebration, a low-key-but-all-day get-together starting at a brewery down in the Cotswolds and ending at the home of one of the birthday celebrants.⁴ Drinking started at 1pm and continued until what-the-fuck-o-clock. Many of the guests had pitched tents in the backyard or otherwise planned to crash at the house; I fucked off a little before 11pm, having failed to secure a ride back to the B&B where I had rented a room and resigned myself to walking the hour back myself.⁵

I’m now in a hotel next to Heathrow preparing to fly out to Zagreb tomorrow, as part of a site visit for the other larp I’m running. After that I’m back in the UK for the final push to run And Then There Were None, and actually running the damn thing, and then a week of collapsing after running it. God help me.

Obviously, I’ve recently spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about organizing larps with just about anyone who will put up with it. And the more I think about it, the more it’s clear to me that larp organizing is at something like a crisis point.

Writing a larp is rather easy. It’s difficult to do well, like any creative pursuit, but the actual writing of it is quite straightforward.⁶ I think I have at least a bit of a knack for designing interesting larps, with compelling characters and structures which drive play and spaces for players to create their own stories.⁷ And if all you want to do is invite a bunch of friends over and run it in your backyard, then organizing is easy as well.⁸ But there’s a lot of larps that don’t work in those constraints. You start to think about all-day events (and now have to worry about feeding people) and multiple day events (and now have to worry about putting people up for the night) and events for dozens if not hundreds (and now have to worry about site rental and transportation and insurance).

These problems have been more-or-less solved in limited cases.⁹ But as larp designers have become more ambitious, it’s harder and harder to find existing models we can use. So we’re trying to do more things, and more complicated things, and bigger things, and we’re having to solve new and novel problems. And we’re still not great at sharing practical knowledge, so a lot of designers find themselves struggling to reinvent the wheel over and over again. The worst part, for me, is that almost all of these problems have nothing to do with larp design. They’re problems with logistics, or problems with prop rentals and prop creation, or problems with advertising or recruiting volunteers or finding backup players¹⁰ or transportation.¹¹ I don’t want to solve these problems. I don’t find them particularly interesting or rewarding. But in order to run the kind of larp I want to run, I have to.

We’re at a cultural moment where interest in immersive experiences and interactive entertainment is growing exponentially. If you love larp it’s hard not to be excited about what this could mean for the art. But all that interest is attracting the attention of corporations, and they’re moving quickly into the same space larpers have lived in for years.

There are a couple ways this could go. The bad one — the more likely one, if we’re being honest — is that they carve up the space with a bunch of expensive, half-assed cash grabs that suck all the oxygen out of the room and larps, real larps with participant agency and serious emotional heft to them, remain a tiny niche hobby. But there’s a real chance that larp could stake out a position and hold its own, even grow and flourish. It seems unlikely that the mass market is ever going to embrace the effort and the risks that being a fully active participant requires; the corporations are welcome to the majority of the market that mostly wants to ramble through some scenery while a show goes on around them. There’s going to be some small percent that wants more than the freedom to look behind them while someone else gets to perform. And even if that percentage is minuscule, it’s enough to bring an order of magnitude more people into larp.

But it can’t happen if we can’t organize enough larps for them.¹² And right now I’m finding the toil of pulling one together, even a small one with a reasonable budget and a manageable number of players,¹³ is utterly exhausting. Larp organizing right now is an aggressively direct road to burnout. I worry the corporations are going to get there first, and they’re going to figure out how to scale it up and how to drive down the costs, and they’re going to do it by tearing out the heart of the thing.

You know, maybe that’s fine. Art is art, whether for an audience of millions or an audience of one. We can keep on keeping on in the same vein we have been in perpetuity. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just that it feels to me like there’s something special about what we do, something particularly valuable to share with the world. So much of modernity wants us to be passive consumers, to engage with art — movies, or television shows, or popular fiction — in the shallowest possible way.¹⁴ Larp demands more, raises each participant to the level of co-creator and then expects them to actually do it.

The world desperately more actors, in the original sense of the word. More people engaged and active, in art, in politics, in their communities. We need to resist the forces that sap our energy and drain our agency. Larp can teach us how to do that. We need more of it.

Next: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)
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Footnotes

¹ A friend and I were discussing how it’s easy to think of artists who have an early flourishing of success but whose later work just doesn’t hold up in the same way. It’s more the rule than the exception. But there are a few — I suggested David Bowie, they suggested the Rolling Stones — who remain vital throughout their career. I’d lump Tears for Fears in with the latter.

² You’d have thought COVID, but no, the bass player injured their rib.

³ Richard III, staged by the RSC in Stratford. Richard III is one of my favorite plays by Shakespeare, almost more of a vicious black comedy than a tragedy. This performance is the first to feature an actual disabled actor in the role of Richard, which seems ridiculously overdue. I know there’s a debate over whether to play up or play down Richard’s deformities, but if you’re going to play Richard as genuinely disabled it’s starting to feel unconscionable not to cast actors who are as well.

At any rate the actor playing Richard — Arthur Hughes — was fantastic, funny and electric and riveting from start to finish (no small feat when the play runs three hours long). And the supporting company was uniformly strong as well, at turns melodramatic and raw and comic and dreamlike.

⁴ My friend shared a birthday in temporal vicinity with one of their friends, so they were sharing a birthday party as well.

⁵ I hadn’t quite realized the sidewalk (or pavement, if you prefer) ran out after about 20 minutes on the trip. So there was a long stretch where I was walking in pitch dark — I lit up the light on my phone for the whole time — with varying degrees of hedgerow lining the road and making hopping out of the way of any oncoming vehicles challenging.

This may have been uncommonly stupid. But it was so dark it was easy to see cars coming from a long way off, and it was quiet enough it was easy to hear them as well, the road was uncharacteristically wide, and the light from my phone meant it was impossible not to spot me a long way off as well. And in the end not a single car passed by. Had I known that before I started, it would have even been pleasant.

⁶ I know this is like saying writing a novel is easy because all you need is a bunch of paper and a typewriter. But, like, that is all you need. If I decided to build a house I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to construct a door and windows and a roof, and that’s before even get to questions about hooking up electricity or running the plumbing or putting in insulation.

I think anyone who’s played in a larp has a grasp on how to go about writing one.

⁷ I’m always aware that, writing a larp, I’m only doing part of the work. The players have to close the circle, decide whether to kill the dragon and marry the princess or kill the princess and marry the dragon. Figuring what parts of the design to nail down and what parts to hand over to the players is a big part of the challenge.

⁸ Okay, anyone who’s tried to schedule a D&D night knows that’s not strictly true. But it’s at least a self-contained problem.

⁹ Running freeform games at conventions will typically give you space and scheduling help. And if you want to run weekend-long games out in a field somewhere — whether you call that a boffer larp or a combat larp or a festival larp or some combination of all of the above — you can find plenty of people who can walk you through what you need to do. It might be a lot of work to run these kind of things, but there’s at least a well-known model you can follow.

¹⁰ In the Age of COVID the chance that a player or players will have to drop out last-minute looms high on my list of fears.

¹¹ Just last week there was a rail strike announced for the first day of the first run of And Then There Were None. ¾ of the players were planning on arriving by train.

¹² We aren’t even running enough games for the larpers we have now, given how many larps have two or three times the applicants as they have spots.

¹³ And Then There Were None is designed around exactly twelve players.

¹⁴ What better way to show your appreciation for a media property than to buy branded merch? Or perhaps you’d prefer to argue online about which actors would be perfect for the sequel, and whether their political positions disqualify them for the role?