Icebergs

Over the years, we’ve come up with a bunch of tricks and tools to help larp facilitators, but there’s one that everyone seems to like. Even better, facilitators can use it to support “Participants-in-Distress” quickly, even with very little special training. We call it the Larper Death Spiral.

It’s become fashionable to talk about how to play a larp villain — that there’s special things that a larper needs to do to play the bad guy. Invariably, I think it’s bad advice, because it almost always focuses on things other than role-play. I’ve heard advice that ranges from how to act out-of-role to pseudo-facilitating for the “good guys” to self-care for the in difficulties assumed to come with it. And with all due consideration, I’m going to call “bs.”

Together, these three prongs (of pre-negotiation) make it difficult for players to effectively self-advocate during play. When a larp is built in such a manner that high-risk play relies entirely on players’ ability to, without a clear structure, simply pre-negotiate for themselves... pre-negotiation alone can hinder our capacity to self-advocate during play.

When we talk about larping — the actual activity of live action role-play — we often talk about how to do things better. This ranges from theoretical (“How do we play to lift?”) to specific (“What are good ways to role-play a romantic relation?”) to technical (“Should we try to do an accent?”). But all of these questions have a fundamental assumption: that role-play is something we can do better or worse. And this question has a lot of implications.