I was back in Spain for the third time this year attending yet another larp, this one Conscience. I played the first run early last year and had a mixed experience, but I was curious enough to attend again, so I joined the lottery when it was announced.

Conscience is based on Westworld,¹ and has a complicated asymmetric design. As in the television show, it’s set in a Western-themed park populated by robots; the players are assigned characters who are either hosts,² guests, or corporate employees. The show contains towards some particularly heavy themes (e.g., the nature of consciousness, the structures of exploitation, the causes of good and evil) and the larp does as well. There’s a lot of violence and abuse in both, and I think it’s essential to exploring the issues that are being raised.³

I was interested in replaying the larp for two reasons. The first was to see what got tweaked between the runs, and there was a range of obvious improvements. The technology was vastly better.⁴ The pace of the game was smoother. They relied on the site — a park in the south of Spain where a number of Western films and television shows were shot — to handle food catering, which was a significant improvement.⁵

But the big reason I wanted to return was that asymmetric design. The first time around I played someone in corporate, and only got a very narrow view of the whole experience. I wanted to come back to play a different role — a guest this time — to see what the difference was. I wanted to see how the different pieces fit together. And now, having played through as a guest, my conclusion is kind of that it all just doesn’t really work.

I should talk a little about what I mean by “asymmetric design.”⁶ Many larps are designed with a single pool of characters in mind. The characters might have vastly different goals and status, but the act of playing the larp is expected to be more-or-less the same for everybody. A larp with asymmetric design, instead, has certain sets of characters, and the play experience for each set is expected to be radically different.

So a game like Inside Hamlet might have vast differences in power between characters — some play nobles, some play servants — but I’d argue it’s a symmetric game, since the fundamental play experience (getting locked in a castle which descends into madness and death) is the same for everybody. On the other hand, a game like College of Wizardry, which has players playing students and others playing professors (with specific rules covering each), would be asymmetric.⁷ Professors teach, students attend class.

Asymmetric games like Conscience are really difficult to design, being essentially two or three or many different larps in one, all being played at the same time. You can make that easier by reducing overlap between the different groups (the less communication between groups the easier it is to balance things) or by reducing the agency or size of one of the groups (fewer players, with fewer options, makes for significantly simpler design choices). Conscience does neither, featuring three large, equally-sized groups who are constantly and intimately overlapping one another. And having thought about it, I think the design as it is just doesn’t serve all of the players. It’s got a fundamental flaw.

The first run I played someone in corporate,⁸ and that game was often almost completely divorced from the rest of the larp: physically isolated, with most information filtered through other corporate players. There were spots of overlap where maintenance would repair the hosts after they got shot up, or security would patrol the park and bring back reports of incidents, but even that was at a remove from the rest of the larp was involved in.

I’ve often joked that every larp which incorporates a corporate structure turns into “Corporation: the Larp.” That was certainly the case in my run. I and several of my coplayers were complaining that we had signed up to play corporate roles in the hopes we’d have lots of philosophical conversations with the hosts on the nature of consciousness and free will. And in theory, we could have spent a lot of time wandering around the park doing just that. But in practice, there was so much going on — department mutinies, corporate espionage, tours for rich investors — you didn’t get much of an opportunity. At one point I even got stuck in a two hour board meeting. It really felt like that game was intended to keep you stuck in the least interesting parts of Westworld.⁹

So this time I wanted to be a guest, and see what that side of the game felt like. And now that I’ve played that side of it, I think it’s where the asymmetric design really starts to break down. It works beautifully for the hosts; they have set plots put in place (and occasionally rewritten by the writers in corporate) these are interfered with and accompanied by a range of horrors introduced by the guests (ranging from being shot on a whim, or being dragged off and tortured, or being manipulated or gaslit only to be executed once that got boring). And throughout all this their memories would be reset and they’d end up playing out the same situation the next day, while small glimmers of their past lives started to intrude into their present.

But in order to work beautifully for the hosts, it requires a set of guests willing to do all that abuse and torture. And so most of the guest characters felt like they were expected, if not strictly speaking required, to torture the hosts. And the guests were almost all written with arcs that felt a lot like “You abuse the robots, then start to feel really bad about abusing the robots, but you keep doing it anyway.”

If the guests aren’t doing horrible things to the hosts, and even escalating the abuse over the course of the game, the hosts don’t have enough impetus for a really satisfying arc. But it takes a huge psychic toll to be nasty and cruel and sadistic and evil, even playacting, even with the full and enthusiastic consent of the people you’re being nasty and cruel and sadistic and evil towards. And if you decide you can’t keep it up — I shot up a few hosts the first night, had some pointed conversations while they were bleeding out, but mostly lost my appetite for it after that¹⁰ — there’s really very little else to do. You could try playing a hero rather than a villain, of course, but since most of the guests were the ones doing the horrible things, any attempts to save the hosts ran into the problem that the guests would only end up yelling and firing off guns ineffectually at each other,¹¹ generally killing any hosts you might have been trying to save in the crossfire. It made for a dissatisfying scene, and after the organizers specifically warned everyone away from interfering with black hat scenes, that route was pretty much closed off entirely.

So, based on the people I talked to after the larp, I think there were three separate games being played. The hosts I talked to, almost to a one, had fantastic games, with deep, emotionally wrenching scenes accompanied by complicated emotional questions and featuring satisfying cathartic resolutions. A lot of corporate players felt their games were okay; they didn’t get quite what they wanted, but most of them managed to eventually find a kind of play that worked for them. And most of the guests I talked to struggled to find wholly positive things to say about the experience. Many of them said they were able to find some good moments and strong scenes, but it never really came together in a meaningful arc. Once you got tired of all the gratuitous violence, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go.

So that’s the flaw, in a nutshell. The larp feels like it’s designed around the hosts. And as far as I can tell, if you want that experience — the dehumanization, the abuse, the gradual radicalization, the culmination in slowly accepting and ultimately demanding your right to be treated with dignity and respect — the game works brilliantly. The other two groups don’t work nearly as well. Corporate’s fine as far as that goes, with lots of mysteries to solve and politics to argue over. But the guests feel the most underdeveloped; they’re crucial to making the host’s game work, but there’s doesn’t seem to be a countervailing force designed to make their game work. I think you’re just supposed to torture people for three days. I’m not sure that makes for much of a larp.

I spent the rest of the week in Spain recovering. My initial plans was to hang out near the game site with friends but I managed to botch my travel plans¹² and so I took the opportunity to visit Córdoba, which is a small but amazing city, one of the most powerful cities of the world around 1000 CE, and still possessing some astonishing things like La Mezquita, the Grand Mosque-Cathedral. It was a worthwhile two days.

After that I headed to Madrid and met a friend who was coming in for the fourth run of Conscience, and had another great couple days wandering around Madrid.¹³ I was able to visit the Reina Sophia again¹⁴ and they were playing Un Chien Andalou so I was delighted to be able to see it, and in a crowd no less.¹⁵ I had intended to rent a car with my friend and drive down to see the Alhambra, but I only discovered the night before that you need to buy tickets three months in advance, so that got canceled. Got up late instead, managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the Prado,¹⁶ and then headed to Málaga so my friend could attend the larp.

And after the intensity of the larp, a rather aggressive tourist schedule, and the delight of spending time with a close friend, I was utterly done. I had big plans on the train back to Madrid of maybe doing a walking tour and seeing a movie, but I just dragged myself to the hotel and collapsed, managing barely to order room service¹⁷ before falling asleep at 9pm.

So now I’m on a flight back to the United States; I’ll be traveling around the US visiting friends, taking care of some business, and attending a larp before returning to Europe.¹⁸ It’s a big, new, comfortable jet, and I’ve managed to get through 8 hours of the 10 hour flight through a combination of movies, napping, and writing up this post.

I’m still apprehensive of returning to the States, but it’ll be fine. I’ll be staying with more friends, slipping back and forth across the continent, and gone before the reality of the thing has set in. I miss the United States, but given how painful the politics remain, I think I already miss the rest of the world more.

Next: San Francisco (SFO) to Vancouver (YVR)
Prev: Berlin (TXL) to Málaga (AGP)

Footnotes

¹ For purposes of this write-up I’m referring specifically to the television show, not the movie, and in particular the first season (since I haven’t seen the second).

² The robots, in the show’s vernacular

³ I’d argue Westworld does this brilliantly, setting up what seems initially like gratuitous scenes only to use that to slowly indict the viewer in what’s happening; you get the vicarious thrill of the violence and then have that experience slowly and mercilessly deconstructed over the rest of the episodes.

⁴ The Wi-Fi network they set up for the first run was incredibly shaky, and there were numerous complaints over critical game information getting delayed or lost.

⁵ Although it still has a long way to go. Part of it is that the catering menu in the park isn’t great to start, which is probably less noticeable if you’re choosing from an underwhelming selection of “meat in tomato sauce” on a single afternoon’s visit than for three days running. It’s particularly bad if you’re vegetarian, and you’re reducing that already scant selection to “rice” or “french fries.”

Oh, and I understand scheduling is a huge problem, and the details of when things are going to happen are often out of the organizer’s control. If your catering service promises you lunch will start at 1pm and bump that to 2pm at the last minute, sure, you just have to roll with it. But if you tell people you’ll give them an hour’s warning before the ending of the game, and then you announce at 5:40pm that the big finish will run in an hour, don’t run the big finish at 6:30pm.

I’m still really pissed off about that. I missed the ending of the game because of it, and any attempt I made to complain about it was more-or-less met with “Well, we always planned for the ending at 6:30pm, so I guess we just announced it a little late” and a shrug.

⁶ A better larp scholar than me will, no doubt, shortly inform me there’s already a term for this in common parlance. But I don’t know it, so I’m just making it up as I go.

⁷ Heading off a couple objections up front: Inside Hamlet does have a small set of named characters from the Shakespeare play which have slightly different rules and expectations, so at least in that sense it’s asymmetric. And it’s easy to get into the weeds of what makes the designed play experience for one set of characters different than another set; the goal here isn’t to come up with a categorical definition but to try and illuminate something about different approaches to building a game.

⁸ The director of the company, in fact

⁹ To be fair, there are some corporate roles that seemed in retrospect to play more like guests. I’m thinking particularly of some people in maintenance who were designed to torture the hosts. And there were a few secret hosts among the corporate players. But most corporate roles were corporate.

¹⁰ I had finished Samantha Power’s Education of an Idealist shortly before playing, and it retrospect I can’t think of a better way to lose interest in playacting atrocities than to read about a whole lot of real ones.

¹¹ As in the show, the guns were capable of killing hosts but ostensibly felt like getting stung by a paintball when fired at a guest.

¹² It’s inevitable I’ll screw up some flights or hotels here and there over 18 months of travel, and I suppose I should just be grateful it’s a relatively rare occurrence. I’m seeing a fair number of times where I’ll book a flight in the reverse direction that I need, such as needing to fly from Kyiv to London and buying a flight from London to Kyiv instead. A reasonably common secondary issue is getting the month wrong, and finding out I’ve booked a flight on November 10^th that I need to take on October 10^th.

These are mostly caught when I get the ticket email confirmation, and most of the more expensive flights have a cancellation policy of at least an hour, so it hasn’t been a terrible issue. Still super annoying.

¹³ This makes the third time I was able to hang out with good friends in Madrid before or after a larp, and just spending 48 hours with people I haven’t seen in ages is worth attending a larp, even an iffy one.

¹⁴ I had visited it almost two years ago, shortly before having to catch a train, so ended up cutting the visit short. This trip I still didn’t have enough time to see it all, but having walked 10 miles by that point I was happy to call it after 90 minutes.

¹⁵ Strongly recommend sitting through the first scene next to a ten-year-old who doesn’t know what’s coming.

¹⁶ So, once again, rushed through a museum to see the highlights before running down to catch a train.

¹⁷ Honestly, one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever eaten, and I used to microwave frozen pizzas in college as a cheap meal.

¹⁸ Only to turn around and return to the US for Christmas, because I am still not great at planning this shit.