Tears Are Cheap

(Yes, I wrote a blog like this three years ago. This one is better).

The first time I made a participant cry was twenty years ago. It was at a convention in California, and crying at larps wasn’t something that happened all that often to me and my friends. The details aren’t important… there was a betrayal, a public confrontation, and then… tears. And I remember watching that happen, and feeling tremendous pride: I really made people feel something.

For ten years after that, I made larps that made people bawl. Every larp would have at least a couple of people crying. Once I made about two dozen people wail in an impromptu mourning session that lasted an hour and made me feel like a larp god.  This was before we had even heard of Nordic larp in the US, and I felt like I really created something special.

Then everyone started running “crying” larps. More accurately, I met more people who were already doing the same thing. And I realized I wasn’t special, or brilliant, or a larp god. Because the thing about tears is that it’s really not that hard to make a larper cry.

Tears Are Easy

Here’s a way to make most, if not all, your participants cry. It’s a four-step process:

1. Set the expectation that you may cry at this larp. This will attract participants who want to cry.

2. Tell two or more people that they’re lovers, siblings, etc.

3. (Optional) Let them role-play just a bit.

4. Kill one of the characters. 

Once you get the hang of it, it works almost every time. 

And the reason it works is because people want to cry at larps. Not everyone, but lots of people do, and they just need the opportunity to do it. I used to feel some sort of satisfaction from participants who talked about how much they enjoyed the “catharsis” of my larps. But then I’d go to other larps, and I’d see these participants have similar experiences again and again. And I realized I wasn’t making people cry — I was just helping them cry; they could do it on their own.

This isn’t a critique of people who enjoy “emotional experiences” at larp. Larp is an excellent opportunity to experience heightened emotion, and the vulnerability of expressing sorrow isn’t something we often get to do in our day-to-day lives. There are lots of experiences that facilitate joy or fear, but larp is one of the few reliable ways to experience sadness. Maybe we need the narrative that comes with larp to actively participate in sadness, and I don’t fault anyone for seeking out a unique quality of the medium.

But “making” your participant cry doesn’t make you a good larp designer… particularly if that’s all you do. 

When Larp Becomes a Tool

For a lot of people, it’s the tears that hook them into larp, or transition them away from larps that focus on game-play or politics. And because of this, they tend to seek out larps with an opportunity to experience these emotions (again, not a problem) — and place high praise on the larps where they do cry. And larp designers, being people, respond to positive reinforcement, and create larps with more opportunities for tears… which leads to more tears, which leads to more praise, which leads to more tears…

And then a lot of larps end up looking all the same. 

In 2024, Andrea Nordwall and Gabriel Widing published an article, Against Design. They argue that larp has become framed as a “design practice” where participants with specific preferences consume larps created using “tried and tested larp design methods to successfully form an iterative and recursive feed-forward (user experience) loop.” In other words, participants want a specific experience (tears), and larp designers facilitate this in familiar and repeatable ways. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, Nordwall and Widing suggest it’s detrimental to larp’s emergence as an artform. “The reason larp fails to claim a culturally relevant position,” they claim, “is because the primary focus on design optimization reduces our capacity to form an aesthetic or artistic field in dialogue with the wider culture. As an artistic form, larp makers should look for autonomy and integrity in our practice.” In other words, doing the same thing over and over again to make sure you deliver a particular experience is at odds with the creation of art. 

Personally, I don’t entirely agree with the claims that Nordwall and Widing made in the article (I believe that design and artistic intent can exist in their own dialogue), and they were speaking specifically to the Nordic tradition. But I do think we can take away there are some parts of larp creation that are artistic expressions, and there are other elements that amount to “give them what they want.” And I think - in 2025, and speaking broadly about freeform larp - designing for tears is very much the latter. 

At best, such designs are a sort of vehicle. The larp designer makes something, not out of a sense of artistic expression, but to help get their participants from Point A to Point B - with Point B being a crying jag.  At worst, such designs are a drug, with participants seeking out bigger and stronger fixes so that they can feel a particular way. And really, sometimes it’s hard for me to tell the difference. 

Larp As a Medium

These days, when people tell me about how they cried at my larps, I tell them, “I don’t really care about that anymore.” That’s not entirely true: when I see someone having a strong emotional reaction to a larp I designed, I feel like I did a good job. And I did, because design and art are not exclusive, but lately I’ve tried to look at larp not as a tool but as a medium. 

Approaching larp as a medium means that you create a larp with an artistic intention, and that intention is not simply a particular reaction from the participants. I hesitate to make broad statements about art, but I do feel that art  stands on its own regardless of the response it receives. A tool has to do something, it has a function, and may be evaluated on how well or poorly it accomplishes that task. But a medium is just a method in which an artist works, like paint or music, and it’s created in dialogue with people playing. And those people playing may have their own intent, and that intent may be “I want to cry,” and that’s awesome for them. But if the larp designer were to be an artist, I think there has to be an emphasis on their own act of creation, and not simply facilitating someone else's. 

The irony is that, at least the first time a larper does it, crying in a larp can be extraordinarily brave. They’re showing a sort of vulnerability we don’t often practice as adults. But the larp designer who makes larps to make their participants cry? That’s one of the safest things a designer can do: they’ll have lots of support, a high rate of success, and plenty of praise when they do. But I have to ask (and this is a question everyone has to answer on their own) - is that why you make larps?