Madrid (MAD) to Berlin (TXL)
Apr 10, 2019
Micah Ulrich
This marks the second time I’ve been in Madrid, and I’m starting to know the city. There’s different joys to visiting a a place for the first time, compared to visiting the second or third time, compared to visiting dozens of times. It’s like falling in love1 — you might cherish your first date, as well as your wedding, as well as the many nameless nights where you just collapsed on the couch together and binge-watched some TV show. But you can’t go back to the beginning.2
The first time you visit someplace you barely know anything about it,3 which is to say you have to learn everything. It’s only on subsequent visits you start to get something akin to muscle memory — there’s a fighting chance you’ll know some café nearby you can duck into if it’s raining, or how to make some complicated transfer between trains if you’re trying to get into the city center. You’ll have museums you ran out of time to visit, side streets you missed the first time around, a favorite restaurant you want to go back to.
You’ll also have time. All the effort you spent the first time around just figuring out the Metro or Googling weird menu items isn’t needed as much, which gives you more mental space to think about where you are, to notice the architecture or the food or the way locals walk down a street. Too much of this — live someplace for a few years — and you risk it all fading into background noise. Everything, no matter how bizarre it seemed at first, becomes commonplace and unremarkable.4 If nothing else, travel reminds you how strange and contingent your own mundane life is, when you return to it with fresh eyes.
I came here for a larp,5 so I spent a few days alone in the city, joined up with friends and headed off to the larp, then spent a few days decompressing afterwards. I felt less compelled to try the local cuisine or see the local sights this time around6 so I’ve been seeking out whatever I’ve been in the mood for — pizza, milkshakes, ramen. I ate last night at a really excellent vegan diner7 that had the Beyond Burger on the menu (labeled “La big American burguer”). I also caught Shazam in the movie theater, and got to see the Temple of Debod at sunset. It’s been a good week.
All that said, I like Madrid a lot, but I don’t think I’ll ever really love it. There’s a lot I do love, mind you — cities are best explored after 9pm, after dark, between dinner and drinks, when making an early evening of it means before midnight. Madrid certainly gets that. But there’s something I find a little off-putting about the city. It’s hard to describe; it just feels to me between the language difficulties and the difficulty in finding vegetarian food and a dozen other annoyances that I only rarely feel really relaxed here.8
Maybe, over time, I’d settle in. I could see myself living here, possibly, if I had to. But I lived in Manchester, NH for six months, too, and never grew to love the place. Not everyplace needs to be for everybody.
The larp I attended was Berechtigter Zweifel, a WWII larp set in a German POW camp, a game in the style of The Great Escape. I’m postponing the announcement of this until the end of the “Week of Stories” [As explained in our action-packed Avalon recap! —Ed].9 I was playing one of the German officers, and spent most of the game being very uncomfortable wearing a uniform with a swastika on it.10
The game was fine, but I think a lot of people came away with a similar feeling that I did — there was some promise in the setting, but a combination of design choices, organizational failure (some predictable, some not), and bad luck left most of the players feeling like it could have been better.
The bad luck was simply the weather — for a game about an hour outside of Madrid in April, you would expect moderate weather. Instead, there was freezing rain and snow. Since a lot of the common play space was outside, it was difficult to simply hang out and make connections with other players. Some of the indoor spaces were unheated or heated poorly, which didn’t help; the off-game safe room was often filled with people, simply because it had fantastic heating.
The organizational problems ranged the gamut from not budgeting enough time for everyone to get fitted for their costumes (the game started at 11pm the first day, simply because of the amount of time it took), to having characters sent out less than a week before the game (apparently a number of writers underperformed and quit shortly before the game). To their credit, all the organizational basics — food, shelter, transportation — were absolutely solid. These were all second-order failures.
The most interesting problems, though, were design decisions. Berechtigter Zweifel fits into that loose category of games they’re calling “Mediterranean Larp,” which is distinguished, among other things, by having a high-concept premise and lots of secrets.11 I don’t want to spoil it (in the unlikely case there’s a rerun) but suffice to say that BZ is built around a particularly high-concept twist, and your enjoyment of the game is necessarily dependent on whether you enjoy that twist or not.
There’s two problems with building your game around that sort of thing. The practical one is, simply, how do you get informed consent for something someone doesn’t know is going to happen? The canonical example is the Regency larp which gets interrupted by a zombie attack; one minute you’re gossiping about how dreadful Lord Frothingham looks in that salmon frock coat, the next you’re holding off undead hordes with a parasol while someone tries to bring the coach around.
If I am deathly afraid of zombies or salmon frock coats, I do not want to play this game. But if you want the zombie attack to be a surprise, players are only going to be aware of the frock coats. You can try and get general consent that doesn’t tip your hand — as a psychology grad student, a lot of our experiments talked vaguely about “questions concerning attitudes” and had long lists of possible conditions participants might encounter, in the hope nobody was reading too closely12 — but the less specific you get, the less likely someone is to realize they should opt out. Even in the best case, you’re going to get a bunch of people pissed off because they tore their expensive Regency dresses by breaking into a sprint when the first zombie showed up.
The other objection is artistic. Most forms of art aren’t participatory: you look at a painting, or watch a ballet, or listen to a song. But larp is participatory. You, along with the designers, along with every other player, are creating something together. This makes the job of the designer a little strange. You’re not trying to tell a story, exactly. You’re trying to create a space where other people can tell a story.
Hiding large parts of your game from the players to be discovered effectively makes it impossible for your players to create play around the central themes of your game. If the twist is crucial to making sense of what’s happening in the game, you’re asking players to play a nonsensical game until some predetermined point. That’s a big ask.
I can understand the impulse behind creating a game around a big reveal; you have this amazing story you want to tell, and that sudden surprise can create a lot of powerful drama. But I think it’s almost always a mistake. It’s trying to tell your story, not your player’s stories. It’s better to focus on giving your players the tools to create their own drama: real, grounded characters; emotional levers built into the game; simmering conflicts between different characters and different groups.
Larp depends on trusting your players. Give them the characters and the setting and the space they need, and they’ll find their drama. After that, you really just need to get out of the way.
Footnotes
1 Or hate, if you’re someplace you can’t stand.
2 For people, this happens chemically. I’d be surprised if similar processes didn’t happen for places and things; most of your brain chemistry gets co-opted for different purposes. Nature’s a big recycler.
3 Guidebooks and the experiences of friends notwithstanding
4 The first time my brother visited me after I moved to New York, he would indignantly refuse to jaywalk. I’d be holding a conversation with him while walking down the street and suddenly notice he was no longer beside me, having stopped at some trafficless crosswalk.
I also noticed, shortly after he moved there himself, he started jaywalking.
Fun fact: Prior to automobiles, the streets were a public space, without laws regulating jaywalking. There was a concerted effort by automobile manufacturers to redefine the street as exclusively for cars and trucks, and they’re the ones who promoted the term “jaywalking” and pushed to make it illegal.
5 In fact, the last time I was here was also for a larp, and I’ll be back twice this year for larps.
6 Spain, like Mexico, being pretty generally appalling for vegetarians.
8 Although, counterpoint, I really loved Barcelona, so maybe it’s something else entirely and I’m just misattributing the reasons.
9 I grew up reading a lot of Marvel Comics, and I always wanted an Editor’s Note.
10 No, there are no pictures.
11 Nordic Larp tends to be lower concept and to encourage fewer surprises or secrets in the design, sometimes going so far as to make all character sheets publicly available.
12 This isn’t really as nefarious as it sounds. Since 99% of participants never bothered to read the consent forms, you didn’t want that other 1% to read it and introduce some unexpected variable into the experiment.