I came into this book with a simple idea about larp, that people used it to compensate for something lacking in their everyday lives. What I discovered was a rich, complex hobby, just beginning to enter mainstream imagination in the United States. As it turns out, larp is anything but simple—oftentimes it requires the best efforts of numerous people laboring in concert. People larp for many different reasons. Some people want to escape from the world, while others enjoy solving puzzles, crunching numbers, experiencing extreme emotions, or dressing creatively. For some people larp is a vacation, and for others it’s a way of exploring their most secret selves. Some larps are tiny, run with as few as two or three players in their street clothes, while others are huge, requiring full sets and entertaining hundreds of participants. Larp can convey a political message, evoke strong emotions, or simply engross its participants in their shared fantasy. In short, larp is a medium, much like theater or movies or novels, and just as film has Lord of the Rings, Annie Hall, and Gettysburg, so too does larp have its Knight Realms, its Doubt, and its 1942—Noen ä stole pä?
Larp in the United States is beginning to diversify. Edu-larp, short for educational larp, is a hot topic on the Nordic scene right now and has started to crop up in the United States in the form of literary summer camps for kids. A July 16, 2010, New York Times article by Sharon Otterman looked at Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp run in Decatur, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Brooklyn, New York. The sold-out camp, based on Rick Riordan’s best-selling Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series, arms kids with foam swords, teaches them about Greek mythology, and encourages them to keep reading.
The theater scene may also improve larp’s crossover appeal; several plays that break the fourth wall, offering dispersed action, and in some cases, multiple narratives have cropped up recently in New York City under the guise of participatory theater. Most notably, there is Sleep No More, an amazing theatrical installation put on by the British-based company Punchdrunk in New York City, where I saw it in early 2011. The wildly popular show, which also ran in Brookline, Massachusetts, had its New York run extended at least three times and garnered rave reviews from the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vice, and many other publications. Audience members were decked out in white masks and unleashed into a six-story set to explore their surroundings and silently follow the actors and scenes of their choice for a couple hours. The production riffed on Macbeth and felt like a larp for voyeurs, since for the most part, the masked audience watched the unfolding, wordless scenes without interfering—the audience, though players in some important sense, couldn’t affect the course of events. And like a larp the action was dispersed, with different scenes occurring at the same time. I missed, for example, the witches’ rave that one of my friends loved, because I wasn’t in the right place at the right time.
Arty larp is also making forays into the US scene. On the West Coast, larpers have begun gathering each year at Wyrd Con, a Knutepunkt-like convention that offers both games and talks on larp theory, while on the East Coast, Intercons, conventions focused on small prewritten larps, continue to thrive. I suspect that if the US arty larp scene grows, it will legitimize larp as an art form, give it some cultural capital, and in doing so, diminish the social stigma around all forms of the hobby. After all, the idea of game design as an art is beginning to gain mainstream traction—in May 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts expanded its guidelines, making digital games eligible for funding, in essence, legitimizing them as an art form.1 More strangely, it appears that the US government has already funded larp … in Norway. According to Ole Peder Giæsver of Playground Magazine, the US embassy in Oslo gave a local larp group nearly $5,500 for the Cold War larp A Doomsday Eve.2 Perhaps, like their Nordic fellow-hobbyists, US larpers will someday be able to apply to their own government for grant money.
As for me, I learned a great many things about myself through larp in the course of reporting this book. I’m a self-conscious, nosy, organized, vain, unspontaneous sort of person who loves words, art, and performance. As a player, I prefer role-play and plot discovery to hack-n-slash. While I quite enjoyed my long stint in an escapist campaign game, I think that my natural proclivities lean more toward the Nordic-style games; I felt less self-conscious imagining myself into emotional dramas than I did imagining myself into some magical fantasy world. Plus, I suck at remembering rules.
Most importantly, during this book I learned to embrace my own weird. With so many exotic costumes and haircuts on display, with so much nerdy talk about the subtleties of Dungeons & Dragons rules or the ins and outs of Doctor Who plots, I felt no need to hide the fixations that make me unique, from pickles to Xena to Dorothy Parker.
Will I keep larping? Maybe. Putting on or playing in a larp takes up a stupid amount of time and energy, although with the right playmates, it can be exhilarating. Despite my walk on the larpy side, I have other deep commitments, like, say, a drive to write books, that might prevent the return of Portia, Ophelia, or Madame Blavatsky. And yet, the game is hard to relinquish. Portia wants to get her new altar, Madame Blavatsky requires reanimation, and I can almost see myself rolling around in six inches of flour while discussing the terminal ovarian cancer that will kill me next month, working out conflicts in 1980s NYC through break dancing (or in contemporary NYC through krumping), or enmeshed in some sort of future gender dystopia in which gangs of women roam the streets. New York-based artist Brody Condon already ran an artsy game in 2010 called Level Five in two US-based art galleries in conjunction with Danish and Swedish larpwrights.3 If only someone would invite me to a nearby game like that. American larpers: could you get on that, please?