I’ve spent the weekend in Spain playing yet another larp, this one Countdown. I didn’t know much about it except for the premise — a Big Brother-type gameshow in the near future where contestants eliminated by the audience are put to death — and it was a unique enough premise¹ that I decided to sign up. I should mention I’m going to be revealing details about the game here, so spoilers beyond this point.

The larp was run in a very nice villa about an hour outside of Madrid. I had assumed players would be eliminated over the course of the game,² and I was kind of interested in how that was going to be handled. We arrived on Friday, and played until early evening on Sunday. There were no breaks, officially; you were ostensibly on camera 24/7, although the existence of off-game rooms allowed you to drop in and out of the game as you needed to.

The structure of the thing was set up basically as a season of Big Brother might have been. There was a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen,³ then the producers would show up and announce some zany activity (Race toy robots! Play a video game! Participate in a cooking challenge with mystery ingredients!) where one of the losers would be selected for elimination. And in between there were confession booths and video calls with loved ones and all the other usual trappings. I’ve got some quibbles with how a lot of that was handled.⁴ But then you had the dystopian elements layered on top of it. And that was a problem.

Countdown leaned rather heavily into the brutality and violence of its premise. Eliminations were conducted by gathering everyone into a circle and having the show’s mascot — Pigman, dressed in army camo, a tutu, and a pig mask — cavorting around before brutally beating the loser to death with a ball-peen hammer⁵ to the chipper tune of Singing in the Rain.

Some of the contestants were psychopaths chosen to participate based on their propensity to randomly assault the other players. The food challenge ended with the announcement that some of the provided meat was human. After one of the contestants was sexually assaulted⁶ the producers announced that the attacker had skyrocketed in fame and was more-or-less immune to elimination in the short term. It was a parade of miseries, in other words.

One of the organizers commented afterwards that running the game felt like running the Stanford Prison Experiment, which I could understand, except the Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to be neutral. This was designed to feature random, unremitting cruelty. It was more like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, if the murderer turned out to be Jigsaw and revealed himself in the first 10 minutes.

So this was a grim, perverse larp, made even more so by the forced excitement the contestants were required to display. It was one where the threat of violence hung over virtually every interaction, where you could be beaten nearly to death by refusing to share your food or shot at a whim by the producers of the show. It was horrific stuff — all fictional, of course, and all the participants knew they could opt out or spend time in the safe room if necessary — but it was intended to be a joyless slice of dystopia. And it was.

I’ve got no problems whatsoever playing joyless slices of dystopia. Some of my favorite larps dabble in those themes. But this felt different, somehow. Like a horror movie that blows its budget on gory special effects to the exclusion of story or plot or characterization, I rather quickly started to wonder what the point was. And I’m still wondering.

In movies, this sort of thing is called “torture porn.” In real life, we’ve got “misery tourism.” I think the connection is that the suffering is the point of the experience; participants are getting a visceral thrill out of it. Remove the suffering, and the experience disappears.

As near as I can tell, this was intended to be a dark satire of fame and reality TV.⁷ Thinking about it, though, I‘m not sure it’s even possible to do satire as a larp. Satire exists as a level of understanding outside of the fiction; not within it. Smashing someone’s kneecaps before shooting them in the head on live TV because they lost a foosball game might serve as a grotesque commentary on our real-life obsessions, but as a participant, you’re actually playing it out with full earnestness. That just doesn’t work.⁸

There are plenty of larps that deal with nightmarish themes: sexual assault; wanton, random violence; torture and oppression. I’m thinking of games like Inside Hamlet and The Quota.⁹ But in those larps, the themes are used to get at deeper things, deeper understandings of who we are as humans and how we relate to one another. I’m not sure Countdown has much to say beyond how ghastly we can act towards each other. I think we already know that.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — another great satire — famously opens with “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” You could put the same disclaimer in front of Countdown. The difference, I think, is that Mark Twain was lying.

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Footnotes

¹ In larp, anyway. We’ve seen similar kinds of things in all sorts of books and movies, from The Running Man to Gamer to Death Race.

² Not exactly an outrageous assumption, given the premise

³ No doubt edited down before broadcast

⁴ There was a lot of downtime between activities, and there wasn’t enough drama or forward momentum to sustain a game absent those. It was quickly obvious they were eliminating NPCs pretending to be players as a way of avoiding the player elimination issue, which drained the challenges of a lot of tension and meaning. Some of the character groups didn’t seem to jell, so whether that was a player issue or a design issue, a lot of that play just didn’t work.

In an earlier version of this article, I mentioned some safety issues as well, but there’s apparently been some confusion and backchatter on this point, so I wanted to talk about it more fully. I’m aware of two specific players who violated the safety rules.

The first one, early in the game, accidentally hit another player while stage fighting, knocking the other player out of the game for a significant period of time. This was brought to the attention of the safety team, who after discussions with all parties involved decided to allow the player to continue but forbidding them from playing on violence. This proved to be a mistake, as that player later jumped into a violent scene and had to have staff intervene to get them to back off.

The second one was a player who was playing a violent psychopath, and they had a tendency to attack people suddenly from behind. This was less serious — he wasn’t actually hitting anybody, although the violation of the safety rules was itself worrisome — and I discovered later no one had mentioned this behavior to the safety team and they weren’t aware of it themselves.

In talking with various people after the second run, I understand that there were additional safety mechanics put in place to address these issues. Prenegotiation was stressed as a way to handle violent scenes, and whether it was those tweaks to the design or just a different set of players it seems the second run did not suffer from the same issues.

⁵ Or maybe a spiked club, or length of rebar, etc, etc

⁶ I feel obligated to stress that the most extreme scenes were consensual, with willing player participation.

⁷ It was based on the book Sulfuric Acid by Amélie Nothomb, which I think was going for a similar bleak satiric vibe. But I couldn’t find a copy in English, so I couldn’t read it as prep.

⁸ A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, and American Psycho are all satires. I don’t feel especially compelled to larp any of them.

⁹ And even Conscience, by the same organization as Countdown, has a lot of those elements baked in.