In Your Hands - the second LARP of the day

In your hands, written by  Simon Pettitt, Åsa Nilsson and Lea Pullerits and run by Simon Pettit was a more structured larp than before and after silence and explored themes of guilt, alienation and our place in the world.

Unlike before and after silence we were not encouraged to create a fully fleshed out character - although we had the option to. There were some warm up exercises where we were encouraged to embody the character and consider how they would walk if they were happy, angry or sad. However, I don’t think I was particularly was creating the actions of a character as opposed to just exaggerating my own actions. I suppose it is possible that a participant could have created their own character and consistently played that character during the larp but it’s my feeling that the structure of the larp discouraged it. The 3 parts of the larp attempted to encourage players to tap into feelings in their purest form without a barrier between themselves and the emotion. It is my opinion that creating a fully fleshed out character would have disrupted this process, although also might be an interesting game to play on a superficial level.

The larp was set in 3 parts, examining fear, guilt and alienation. We were also assigned a person to support, someone we would help within the larp and a person to challenge, someone we would make things more difficult for.

The surroundings were an area with blankets, pillows and plastic balls which had a crèche like feel. We were confined to that area, a practice which I understand is common with black box larps.

We began in a group pose while thoughts were read out on the theme of that section of the larp, for example guilt. We began by acting overwhelmed with that emotion and then slowly began to rise out of it. In the first stage we were mainly helping the person we were supposed to be supporting but by the third stage we were helping everyone except possibly the person who was actively challenging us and who we were supposed to actively challenge. After each of the three stages we returned to the group pose and answered questions on how we felt,  what made us afraid (I said not being able to save everyone - this was directly after the guilt portion of the larp when some people were beginning to sink more deeply into the emotions and I felt a responsibility to try to bring them out of it). At this point the person I was challenging said their fear was being rejected and I made a conscious decision to stop challenging him and start supporting him as I was with the others. Interestingly, when we came to the question of what made us strong most people answered the question with some form of being around other people or feeling cared about.

So did it work?

For me it was a less intense experience than my first larp, although that could have been for a variety of reasons including having more of an idea of what to expect and the more structured nature of the larp. The group was smaller which felt more intimate and I did feel closer to the others within the group by the end of the larp - it felt like a safe space where we were free to act how we wanted without judgement.

In not taking the role as a challenger in the last third I was obviously deviating from the rules of the larp. It may have been to do with the fact that as it continued we were building up connections as a group although I think I  felt uncomfortable from the start in that role and the person’s mention of a fear of being rejected gave me ‘permission’ to drop it. When I mentioned it in the debrief he said he had found my challenges to his actions quite interesting so possibly I should have gone against my gut feeling. As it was my main direct confrontation, and the only one I didn't respond with kindness to by the end of the larp (including the person who was challenging me) was with the person who was challenging the woman I was supporting. This suggests to me that there was success in building social cohesion within the group and having people come to care about each other.

The only thing that I found jarring was the 3 act structure. After the first act when we slowly began to reach out to each other as a group and join together it felt like an achievement. Then that was taken away by the start of the second act where everyone started alone and had to build the cohesion from the beginning. I felt it even stronger in the third act about whether our position was meaningful in the group - it felt like we had worked through some feelings and then we were back to wondering if we contributed anything. I acknowledge real life can be like that but it did feel unsettling that the larp brought us back to square one.

If you get the opportunity I would recommend you play, it’s a worthwhile way to explore how connections are built. I would also be interested in exploring a larp where each stage builds on the progress of the previous, each moving past a barrier to togetherness but only achieving true cohesion at the end.

Before and After Silence - My first LARP

Before and after silence is an experimental Larp designed by Matthijs Holter and Fredrik Hossman and was run on Sunday by Kevin Burns and Adam James. Although this is the first larp I’ve attended and so I can’t make comparisons Kevin explained that both Before and After Silence and the second larp of the day  ‘In your Hands’ were black box larps which are a different form of nordic larp.

This was the first time I had ever larped and I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was described as :

In a world of more and more sound, silence is becoming more valuable. Before and After Silence is about limitations and listening, and about doing almost nothing. Using silence as its starting point it is about shifting the point of view from “what is” to “what is not,” about shifting the focus from “the sounds” to “the spaces between the sounds,” from “the actions” to what is “between the actions,” and to “what is not done.” Rather than playing characters, we examine how we look at ourselves and how different filters can change how we see ourselves and others.

At first an hour and a half of silence seemed daunting. We practiced being silent for 3 minutes and I found it oppressive. Even in London where true silence was impossible the 3 minutes seemed to stretch into hours.

Each person of the 15 or so playing in the larp had a different character and a different scenario. We had to envision the others around us as other people in our scenario. We were each given a choice of 3 scenarios we could play. Mine were clowns trying to find their way back to the circus, prostitutes trying to find a member of the secret police or a child, made mute by abuse who trusted one child and didn’t trust another but tried to treat them both the same.

I went for the third scenario. It hit a bit close to home and although I was aware I might find it difficult I wanted to stretch my boundaries and I figured that the point of the larp was to feel so I might as well choose the scenario that invoked the most emotion in me.

My attempt to create a character was more difficult than I thought, maybe because of the scenario I choose. I picked a young girl, a 10 year old called Sarah who was living in a cult but I promptly forgot about her when the larp started.

I began at a loss, not sure what I would want from the scenario. Escape seemed likely but there were other people there doing their own (increasingly bizarre) things. I also had an additional instruction. At one point during the the game I was supposed to stand as far as possible from everyone else which, although picked at random, did make sense from a character point of view. Later I would learn that I got off lightly. One person’s instruction was to scream as loudly as possible and one person had to lie on the floor and give birth (which I discovered during the debrief he had interpreted metaphorically in an interesting way.)

After people moved into their roles and became less self conscious any thought of Sarah was forgotten. The silence lifted too. Although it was still there it was punctuated by laughter, some real and some fake, and sobs some real and some fake.

Intuitively it feels like it would be impossible to build a connection with people who each had their own agenda but somehow our worlds began to interact in interesting ways. At first I was trying to act as I though I would in the scenario, keeping myself to myself and staying away from people, but others began to reach out to me for reasons of their own. I was lead to various places by others in the larp - it transpired later that one was trying to save me from alien attack and one was trying to work out if I was an informant. I think seeing everyone else absorbed was the turning point for me and I began to enter the spirit of it more. I realised I was playing a child, an abused, silent child, but still a child. I brought a football into the larp space and started playing with it - throwing it around to others and bouncing it myself. I’m not going to use the words ‘inner child’ - it’s something I normally roll my eyes at and I wouldn’t like to be hypocritical -  but there was something very freeing about just playing - in spite of, or maybe because of knowing the others around me had their own reasons and purposes for playing with me.

After that, I moved onto the third stage of the larp. Although I was unaware of the timing and my guesses could be completely wrong it did feel like I subconsciously split the larp into 3 phases.

In my last phase I dropped the ball, moved a wooden block to the side of the room, stood on it and started crying quietly. It was very strange, almost therapeutic. What I am completely sure of was that I wasn’t fake sobbing like I had been doing at the start of the larp and I wasn’t crying as Sarah, I was crying as me.  Describing it now it sounds strange, almost like a modern art construct that people look at but no one really understands. At the time though it felt really, well, freeing is the only word to describe it. Around me the majority of other participants had formed into a group with one of them at the centre, and one person was going around shaking the hands of people who had apparently stuck within the gender roles he had assigned them.

Afterwards we debriefed and everyone shared their scenarios. There were some very interesting ones. One participant was told that some people around him were aliens and that they were turning others into aliens too. He was given the additional instruction to lie on the floor and appear to be giving birth during the larp which he interpreted as giving birth to his alien self.

According to one scenario one of the participants was looking for a cult leader and I was being seriously considered for the role.

It was not what I expected it to be and a very strange experience, part theatre, part playing and part therapy (although that may just have been me!). However, if I got the opportunity it’s something that I wouldn’t hesitate to do again.

There was a second larp called ‘In your Hands’ which also worked with silence. I will write that up in the next few days.

Gaming and Life

I remember a long time ago having a conversation with someone who's name I've forgotten now - if I ever knew it. "When I feel awkward at work " he said " I pretend I'm in a LARP and then it makes it easier".I wondered about the wisdom of this. When I'm role playing my general move is to do something that will escalate the drama for myself or another player. If I tried it in the office, well, I would probably provide an afternoon's entertainment but I wouldn't have a job at the end of it.

But the idea stuck. I have learnt things from table top role playing. I have learnt how to have a disagreement, a confrontation with someone without backing down or looking away. Admittedly I tend to be a lot more polite on these occasions in real life than I do when I am role playing a confrontation (which is probably for the best for all concerned) but I couldn't do it before. And I have written before that there are lots of fun light hearted games that I love to play but sometimes a game with some real anguish seems more appropriate to how I'm feeling at that moment. And sometimes the catharsis is what I need to help me feel better.

I have learnt how to read people. I have learnt when someone is masking being bored or shy, or scared. I have learnt how to mask being bored or shy or scared. I have learnt how to have my character pretend to mask being bored, shy or scared. I'm sure it's a skill which people sitting in meetings with me have been grateful for!

I have worked things through and worked things out (admittedly) not always very well over the gaming table and with the people I've met, some of them virtual strangers with whom I seemed to have forged an instant connection (and then go on to an awkward conversation with at the bar with ...errr... so have you been doing this long...).

Maybe I am more in touch with myself now. We define ourselves by how we perceive ourselves to be. When you realise you can be anyone you like suddenly getting that new haircut isn't so daunting. Or changing career. Not that I would entirely credit role-play for my success in this area as much as I would, at least partially, credit finally finding people who understood me and somewhere I belonged.