As travel restrictions lift more and more, for better or ill, I’m finding myself revisiting places I imagined I’d return to years ago. This time it’s Zagreb. I’ve missed it. It’s not like I feel there’s a lot I still need to see,¹ but it’s nice to have a comfortable place to return to, from time to time. Zagreb’s urban enough to offer an abundance of restaurants and movie theaters, small enough to not get overwhelmed by crowds, relaxed enough to spend lazy evenings people-watching from a sidewalk café.

So I rented a janky AirBnB² and I’ve just been trying to catch up on all the projects I’ve let slide over the past couple months. That means I’ve spent more time holed up at home than I’ve maybe wanted,³ missing some truly nice spring weather. I’ve gotten out a bit; I went to the movies,⁴ I visited friends, I even played a chamber larp with the folks at Terrible Creations. There was a pricey but good organic vegan restaurant just down the street, and I ate there enough that they started offering me free beers. But mostly I just wanted to chill. And so I have.

The main reason I’m in Zagreb is I’m running a larp here in the late autumn. I’ve talked about it before — Triumph⁵ — and while the main location has been secured since way back in October 2019⁶ we didn’t have a secondary location booked. And after two weeks in Zagreb … we still don’t. I mean, we scouted the area, visited a bunch of places,⁷ and finally settled on a pretty good space a short distance from the hotel. We’re just waiting for them to get back to us with the price. And they haven’t yet.

But that’s fine, because we’ve also discovered the hotel has remodeled a bit in the last couple years, and now has enough space that we can use it for the arena. Which means we’ll be able to run the game, whether the secondary location we’ve found works out or not.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about why locations matter in larps. Triumph would obviously be a much easier game to plan and a cheaper game to run if we could have just booked out some cheap boxy space near the airport.⁸ We’re not doing that. And there’s a lot to recommend having comfortable spaces to sleep in or hang out in before and after the game. But I’ve been thinking about how the space a game is played in changes the game you’re playing.

That’s both obvious — you don’t see a lot of Broadway shows performed on bare stages — and a little unintuitive. Larps already require a hefty suspension of disbelief, so why should it matter if a game is run in an expensive castle or a spare black box theater? As long as the space is welcoming enough and private enough, what’s the difference to the experience of the game?

I usually think about this in terms of immersion; immersive environments make it easier for you yourself to get immersed in a character. I’ve played enough chamber larps in generic convention event spaces to know that’s true. But now that I’m designing a game, I’m thinking about it as a designer. And I find there’s a different way to consider it.

Designers talk about signifiers, elements worked into a design that show you how something is intended to be used.⁹ Long horizontal handles on doors signify “push,” as anyone who’s walked into a door where they hung it wrong can tell you. That’s exactly the problem you have in larps — how do you communicate to players what options are available to them? You can try to explain everything in the workshops or write rulebooks or distribute handouts. It’s better if the location takes a lot of that off your hands.

It’s a lot more fun to sneak off to the stables with a paramour if there are, you know, actual stables to sneak off to rather than a corner of a parking garage. More to the point, having stables makes it more likely you’ll even realize you can sneak off to the stables. I’ve played in a location with an infinity pool (we could go swimming) and a location with hiking trails to a lookout point (maybe there’s something to see out there) and a location with an astronomy tower (I’ll meet you there after dark for *cough* astronomy lessons). In a larp, having the appropriate location communicates a massive amount about the world you’re in and what you can do in it. The physical environment is full of signifiers inviting you to sit or stand or run, to relax or eat or rest.

For Triumph, most of the game takes place in a fancy business hotel, both out- and in-game.¹⁰ There’s a bar (should we order a drink?) and a spa (let’s discuss this in the sauna) and a upscale restaurant (I’m going to sit at the head of this table and glower at everybody for as long as they can stand it). Very smart people have put a lot of thought and money into figuring out how to design fancy business hotels. Players know how to behave in them, which means their character know how to behave in them, too.¹¹ Why reinvent the wheel?

I’m now heading to the UK for the weekend, then on to the United States for a week before coming back to Europe.¹² It’s been nice to be able to relax and not worry about having to move on. But I’m getting antsy.

The truth is I could go on like this for a while — just kind of chill, not doing much beyond working and wandering aimlessly around the city. And the longer it goes on, the harder it is to start again. It’s one of the reasons I had such a bad time during the COVID lockdowns; it wasn’t that I needed to travel, it’s that I didn’t. I could have stayed in one place, getting more and more stuck, less and less comfortable moving on. Call it delayed-onset agoraphobia.

Zagreb is a great place to recharge for a bit. I’m going to be back several times this year — there’s another site visit to arrange with the team and then the larp itself to run — and I’m genuinely looking forward to returning each time. But I don’t really feel alive unless I’m seeing new things and having new experiences. So I’m back on the road.

Next: London to Paris
Prev: Paris (CDG) to Zagreb (ZAG)

Footnotes

¹ Croatia has beautiful coastline, dotted with amazing Roman ruins (as I noted the last two times I was here) as long as you’re comfortable dodging cruise ship daytrippers. Not so much the interior.

² A list of annoyances: a dishwasher but no microwave (which I found out after I had bought some food to nuke from the grocery store), an active construction site next door, no bath towels, a washing machine which requires some excessive fiddling to get it to drain after the wash cycle, and the water heater which sometimes triggers some weird interaction with the radiators and makes an incredibly annoying grindy buzzing noise until you turn it off — which you might blame on the construction site next door and endure for four hours until they knock off for the day and you finally manage to isolate the noise.

³ As an epic procrastinator, one of the ways I deal with getting overwhelmed is by putting things off, so I will not infrequently find myself with a number of projects coming due or overdue at the same time. One of the ways I try and overcome that is by doing nothing — sitting in a rented room and doing nothing — in the hope that boredom will eventually force me to make progress. Sometimes it even works.

⁴ I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once which is a very good movie, possibly a great one if I could have understood more of it. I knew movies in Croatia run in the original language with subtitles, I just didn’t expect half of Everything Everywhere All at Once to be in Cantonese.

⁵ November 17^th-20^th, just outside of Zagreb, tickets still available as of this writing.

⁶ Miraculously, the hotel has been able to locate the contract and our deposit, despite having the event manager turn over twice in the interim.

⁷ Including a nearly perfect place that absolutely refused to rent to us, on the grounds that they were a restaurant and had no interest in not being a restaurant. Very nice owner, but only wanted to rent out the space for food, not events. We offered to pay for the food and they just … wouldn’t need to make any. They refused to even negotiate. Just a restaurant.

⁸ Although to be fair, if your players are drawn from the international larp scene there’s going to be a lot traveling from far away, so knocking 150€ off the ticket price isn’t doing as much as you might hope to help drive their costs down.

⁹ Lots of people call these affordances or use the terms interchangeably, but affordances are things a design allows you to do, while signifiers are hints of what you might be able to with it.

¹⁰ I guess in-game it technically should be some ultra-swanky luxury hotel like the Burj Al Arab, but this is the best we could manage on a budget.

¹¹ Or, more relevant for larps, how to entertainingly misbehave in them — having an appropriately dramatic meltdown in the middle of the lunch service, say.

¹² I really try to avoid flying transatlantic, especially for so short a time, but I have reasons.