I landed in Zagreb just a few days ago, long enough to conduct a final site visit for Triumph before heading back to the UK to run And Then There Were None in a few all-too-short weeks. And if you don’t want to read another rumination and/or screed about larp organizing, you’ll probably want to skip this and the next update.¹ Sorry.

The visit was preposterously ill-timed² but if I’ve learned anything it’s that you rarely get a choice. Binding yourself to something bigger than you are means you’re going to be dragged along according to its schedule, not yours; you can cut yourself loose or do your best to hang on but you’re going to be doing a lot less steering than you’d have hoped.

This week I’ve been suffering through communication breakdowns, both in communication with players and communication with organizers. It really feels like a symptom of a more general inability, everywhere, to create communication systems which work. This wasn’t the future I was promised, and it damn sure isn’t the future advertised by Spaceship Earth in EPCOT.

There were four major revolutions in personal communication that happened right around the time I entered the work force. The first three made it easy to talk to people you already knew: phones went mobile, email went mainstream, and SMS text messaging was rolled out. None of them work well any more. Spam has in one way or another destroyed them all.³

The fourth revolution was chat rooms. Person-to-person text chat is basically just an evolution of SMS, and we’ve seen message boards and USENET before, but the idea of a live, ongoing chat allowing people to collaborate in real time and drop in and out of the discussion should, legitimately, be game changing.

So why isn’t it? I’ve worked on projects organized through Facebook Chat and Slack and Discord and WhatsApp and they’re all varying degrees of dismal. Nobody likes them. Worse, very few people pay attention to them. So you’ve got a lot of people who just won’t see notifications or will check what’s happening only occasionally, get overwhelmed by dozens or hundreds of messages they missed, and tune out.

I’m not sure we can blame people for the state of things.⁴ And we can maybe blame the technology for not being where we need it to be, but I’m pretty sure it’s fallout from the commercialization of the internet. There’s really no reason why any given chat client couldn’t interconnect with any given other chat client. The people who make the clients could compete on features: better alerts, sleeker interfaces, more fine-grained mute controls.

But Facebook doesn’t want to make a great chat client. They want to lock as many people as possible into their platform and shovel advertisements at them. So they make it as difficult as possible to get access to those messages outside of the Facebook ecosystem. Ditto for Slack (who wants to sell spaces for business), and WhatsApp (who want to charge businesses to message you), and Discord (who wants to sell you … special emojis? Better moderation tools? I’m not really sure how Discord is making money.)

This isn’t really a monopoly situation,⁵ but every one of these companies has a strong incentive to not play nice with the others. And so, like a city with a dozen competing phone exchanges, you can’t just buy a phone and call anyone you want. You have to constantly switch from one to another, hopping from client to client and community to community. And if you’re like me, trying to contact someone with urgency, you’ll find yourself asking a question in the group chat then firing off a private message on a couple other servers and then following up with an email and a prayer.

It doesn’t have to be like this, of course. We could decide to enforce interoperability rules, create standards around the ways people communicate they way they did with email and SMS, even crack down on bad actors and reclaim some older technologies. But we seem to be stuck in an age of ascendant corporate power and compromised government. People are less interested in inventing the Next Big Thing™ than they are finding more and more ways to monetize what’s already there. I guess the rest of us just get to put up with it.

I’m currently sitting on a crappy chair in the Frankfort airport, halfway through a horrific six-hour layover. I got up at 4am, and I’ll be landing in London at about 4pm. Inflation and COVID and the worker shortage and gas prices spiking have really eaten into the cheap flights; this was the only reasonable one I found on quasi-short notice.⁶

I can’t recommend the Frankfort airport, honestly. I had hoped to find some comfy cafés to kill time in, or at least a lounge, but the layout and the amenities here were clearly designed for people merely passing through. It’s all old and dismal and uncomfortable.⁷ Maybe the other terminals are nicer; all I know for sure is that that’s where the lounges are.⁸

I’ll be spending the whole month of August in the UK. I’m moving around less — although still some, mostly by train — and I’m just trying to put the And Then There Were None larp to bed and reduce the major stress-inducing projects in my life by one.⁹ I’ll let you know how it goes.

Next: London (LGW) to Stockholm (ARN)
Prev: London (LHR) to Zagreb (ZAG)

Footnotes

¹ Although the one after that is probably going to have a lot of how glad I am to get the first one out of the way, and very soon afterwards I’m going to be freaking out about the next one, so you might want to skip everything until December when things get a little back to normal.

² Shortly after making travel arrangements I got a notice that Portugal was finally moving forward on immigration interviews and the one I had been waiting to schedule for 12 months was booked for the middle of this site visit. I asked if it could be moved a week or two, my lawyer graciously moved it three weeks to the middle of the And Then There Were None run, and by the time I finally got that straightened out the only available slot was late October.

It’s fine. I have to get another FBI background check done anyway, and that’s a three-month thing.

³ Like a lot of people I won’t answer my phone unless I recognize the number — it’s virtually always a robocaller — and for the same reason I mostly only use text messages for two-factor authentication.

Email’s a little sadder; because of all the spam prevention measures it’s nearly impossible to ensure your actually valid emails actually get through. This is a huge problem if you’re trying to communicate with players and can casually assume about 30% will miss critical communication from you about payment deadlines or transportation details or food allergies.

I had a late drop out for And Then There Were None because after the player signed up they neglected to join the Discord, apparently never saw another email from us, and just … made other plans? Without getting in touch? This is horrifically frustrating, for everyone, and if you wonder why all the larp organizers are constantly begging you to check your spam folders and whitelist their email addresses, this is why.

⁴ I mean, people are going to be flaky with or without technological assistance. So I’m taking it as the baseline.

⁵ Although Facebook certainly owns a surprising number of these things.

⁶ Adding insult to injury, my flight to Zagreb from London also left at 7am. Nothing like kicking off and ending a three-day trip with sleep deprivation.

⁷ Airports keep making incredibly stupid decisions, and the consistency with which they make them leads me to believe there’s some design rationale behind them, like they’re trying to discourage the homeless from taking up residency by making the space so grim and lifeless that everything flees.

I’m not entirely sure they’re aware that the vast, vast majority of people don’t hang out at airports by choice. We don’t need to be encouraged to leave. We’re trying to leave.

⁸ I considered heading there — I had plenty of time — but it required exiting and reentering security, and I wasn’t even sure I could get there if my flight left from a different terminal.

⁹ I guess to be perfectly honest I’m the ur-major-stress-inducing project in my life, and one I’m obviously sentimentally attached to and reluctant to get off my plate, but the larps are #2 and #3.