Round up of Events

Fallen Stars

I’ve played three LARPs in the past month or so and really enjoyed them. In many ways it’s similar to tabletop role playing but the emotions experienced tend to be more intense and the connection built with the other players seems to be greater.

Fallen stars is a LARP which was run by Mo Holkar and Graham Charles as part of the Seedbox Collective. It’s about objects which were placed in a jumble sale to raise money for a church roof with the understanding that items that weren’t sold were either going into storage or into the dumpster to be crushed. Each participant played an individual object. They were all the sort of things you might find in a church jumble sale including a book on wedding speeches, a musical saw, a cricket ball, binoculars and a heart shaped paper weight which I played.  

Her name was Rose

There were three parts to the LARP. When the customers weren’t around the objects behaved like those in Toy Story. They could communicate with each other, mainly about how they had been treated, how they were priced and comments customers had made about their value, but as soon as people came into the room they had to pretend to be inanimate. Customers with different needs (played by Graham and Mo) examined the objects (which included objects which weren’t played by a character and weren’t considered to have a spark of life.) In some cases the customers mistreated our objects and in other cases they showed genuine interest in purchasing some of the character played objects.

At one point in the LARP each character gave a monologue about a significant memory in their life. Mine was being given to my owner by an ex-girlfriend and then thrown against a wall and forgotten about when the relationship ended, before being donated by his mum to the church sale. (“but he will be back for me - I’m sure”. He was not.) While they recited a story from the past the other players acted it as a charade. The LARP took place over the day of the sale. As time passed the characters who hadn’t had a buyer became more panicked and indignant at not being sold and it created an atmosphere of fear but also mutual support.

This LARP, while examining how we treat (or mistreat) objects also seemed to illustrate how we treat people as things . Obviously, it is not the same. I sincerely hope that my mobile phone doesn't have a rich inner life which hurts it when I throw it across the floor in frustration after getting annoying news. I hope I don't have a Sid from Toy Story moment when the books I read in the bath suddenly turn on me at my most vulnerable. But do we sometimes treat people as things? The philosopher Kant believed that

"We should act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

In other words, although we sometimes need people for our own purposes, a bus driver say or a doctor, we should not merely use them as an instrument to our own purposes (although clearly they have a purpose to us) but also treat them as people who have their own hopes and dreams beyond what they can do for us. I'm not sure I always do this. I use people sometimes, even those I care about. So this is what I've taken away 1) It was an interesting LARP (where do people come up with these ideas?). 2) Do I treat people well enough? I've always believed in Kant's maxim - do I live it? I was aware of this concept before I had began to consider Kant. In Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax expressed the theory that sin comes from treating people as things. She added the important qualification 'including yourself'. 

We are judged and do judge according to other’s standards. There is pressure on everyone to act a certain way, to look a certain way and that determines our value in the eyes of strangers. If the LARP asks us to consider anything perhaps it asks us to consider this. How do we decide the worth of others? Who decides our worth?

The seedbox collective is a group based in London intending to run a LARP every month. The next LARP is called ‘I say a little prayer’ and is about gay men living in New York in the 1980s. Please visit the webpage for more information:

The Seedbox Collective

GMing

I must do this again. I GMed one game but that was in my little safety bubble of people I knew and trusted. Also, most importantly, they were there doing me a favour. Any entertainment value they got from the game (and I hope that they did) was incidental because they were helping me out. GMing for people who expect to be entertained is harder. I wonder if I should run Inspectres just because I suspect that as a teacher making things up on the spot will be much easier than planning in advance and having my plans derailed and trying to bring them back together again. There is an Indie meet on the 18th August. Watch this space.

The Immersivist's Club

The Immersivist's club is a newly created club based in London for a group of people who want to play story games and LARPS which seek to answer questions about life and possibly create emotional bleed. Examples of games that we'd like to play include Ribbon Drive and Grey Ranks as well as a number of Nordic Larps. Our first game, Ribbon Drive is on this Saturday but we hope to be playing different games regularly. Please join our Facebook group for updates

The Immersivist's Club

Mailing list

I now have a mailing list which I will send out twice monthly with updates on blog posts and events. Please sign up here:

Worlds of note mailing list