LARP transcription 10-10

SR: LARP stands for live-action roleplay. It’s pretty simple. Players take on the roles of fictional characters, then interact in character, making up a story as they go along. You probably LARP’ed when you were a kid, except, back then, you just called it pretend. In the adult world, most people associate LARPing with Ren Fayre costumes, fake battles with foam swords, and the outer limits of extreme dork-dom. But Sarah Bowman thinks otherwise. She’s a longtime LARPer, but also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the author of a book called “The Functions of Role-Playing Games.”

We met in Austin to talk about how LARP can move beyond foam swords, and become a catalyst for radical thinking and social change.

SR: How has organized role-play gaming changed since it first became popular in the United States?

SB: It’s evolved, as the result of improvisational acting, as a result of war gaming, and as a result of group therapy and things like that. Several of these sort of aspects are joining together, particularly in the late 60s and early 70s, and something like Dungeons and Dragons comes out, which ends up being this hugely popular game. One of the things that we’re sort of returning to is that it really is sort of just a new expression of a very, very, age-old human practice, which is storytelling; ritual, collective storytelling.

SR: I know that the culture around LARPing is pretty different in Denmark and Sweden, for example, from how we perceive it in the U.S.

SB: The Nordic LARPers, incredible group of people that are fascinated by LARP theory; role-playing theory in general, but specifically LARP and how it can be used to promote social change, how it can be used to challenge gender stereotypes, how it can be used to recreate totalitarian states. It’s absolutely fascinating. It makes what we’re doing over here look like child’s play. There’s this one called System Danmarc where they spent nine months creating a set in the middle of Copenhagen, and they created a shantytown. I forget how many players, maybe 350 or something like that. It’s a post-apocalyptic world, and they’re playing the lowest of lowest classes. I mean, there was like real violence, real sex, just, you know, anything goes—

SR: --As characters?

SB: --Real drug addiction—yeah. And the government was funding it. There are people in America who were doing experimental stuff too, but nearly to that degree. I mean, these people had manifestos, and anti-manifestos, and just, you know… it’s pretty incredible stuff.

SR: How much have gender politics and sexism factor into the role play that you’ve experienced, or that you’ve observed?

SB: I specifically avoid talking about gender because it is so varied. Every person that you find with one sort of stereotypical experience, there’s going to be several other people that don’t have that experience, but I will say that in almost every game that I play in the U.S., there’s almost like this shock when I show up. They’re like “What are you doing here?” I’m like, “I’m here to role play!” you know? “Well, whose girlfriend are you?” “Well…that doesn’t matter.” When I’m in character, I’m nobody’s girlfriend, so you know… and they also get surprised that I’m so into it, but at the same time, I’m not focused on the rules, I’m not focused on winning, to the degree that the other players are. I’m more interested in the social dynamics and the experiences that can be had. And that can be disruptive! I was running a game, and people were very upset because there was no identifiable goal to achieve that involved, like, bringing someone down. I do think that’s a more distinctly feminine approach to role playing. You know, if you want to call it a gender stereotype, that’s fine, but it’s more like, how can we work together, how can we create a family, versus how do I frag you, how do I win.

SR: Does this kind of approach to role playing also apply to the Nordic LARPing you were talking about?

SB: The kinds of stereotypes that we have in the U.S. are very different than they are, I’m coming to find out, in the Nordic countries. Like in Finland for example, it’s 60% female LARPers, because of the types of experiences that we’re talking about here. These Nordics have basically tossed out the genres and they really get to the core of human interactions. For example, there’s one called “gang rape,” where there’s one person who’s the victim, and then you have the rapists, and the victim verbalizes what the rapists are thinking and feeling, and they verbalize what they’re doing to her and how she’s feeling. So it’s this massive empathy projection model, where you have people who are, they’re not actually acting it out, they’re verbalizing what they’re “doing” to one another, but they have to keep eye contact with one another. And you’re not allowed to escape from it. You’re not allowed to laugh, to break character. I mean, you have to be there, and you have to take it to the next level. And it plays with that ambiguity between eroticism and disgust. It forces you to deal with your own abuse fantasies, because you have to empathize with the person on the other side, whether you’re the victim or the perpetrator. But it’s safe, because it’s only two hours long, and then you’re done, and we go, and we debrief, which is what we call it, which is a way of getting out of role, talking about the experiences we had during the game, and everyone knows going in what’s going to happen in the game. They know exactly what role they’re playing, so there are no surprises. Everyone goes in with a strong respect for each other, and for the game itself; the integrity of the game. And trying to have the experience, which is not supposed to be experienced as fun. And that’s one of the major differences between the American style, hobby aspect of it, versus a lot of these European models. And honestly, if you’re playing with someone who has been raped in a game, which I have before, it was one of these things that everybody freaked out about. You know, I had enough distance from the character that I wasn’t feeling violated, but it was so disturbing for other people, because it forced them to deal with their own fears, and their own feelings about these things, which to me is great role playing, you know? It’s like it forces you into that space, oflike “Wow, I really have to confront myself and other people right now.” You can have sort of grandiose statements of “this is wrong,” but not actually engage with the emotion of it. You see a lot of people distancing themselves in that way. “This is wrong, I put it in the wrong category, and I’m going to be very angry if it gets brought up, but the rest of the time I’m not going to think about it.” And then you have these people in these Nordic countries that are willingly putting themselves in these situations for two and a half hours, where they’re playing out this dynamic, and it’s not for erotic pleasure. It’s not like an S&M game, where everyone knows there’s going to be some kind of payoff at the end, let’s just put it that way. The payoff is the experience itself and it’s not supposed to be fun. So, what makes people do that? Why would somebody willingly put themselves in a state of torture, a state of rape, even if it’s not real? One of the things we talk about in role-playing games is experience points. People focus on the experience, how much experience did we get from this game? And, you know, it’s always an arbitrary thing. It’s like being a teacher grading. “Ok, well, you get a 90.” Well, what does that mean? You know what I mean? How much effort did you put into this paper, what did you really experience, whatever. And usually, to be fair, you sort of have to give everyone the same amount of experience points, even if, you know, some characters were more active in plot than others. But really what it is is a metaphor for life experience. You get a certain amount of points if you survive a situation that is traumatic, that is scary, that is violent, that is dangerous, you know? Or confusing, or awe-inspiring. It doesn’t have to necessarily be negative things. Those experience points you can then use to make yourself a better person in some way, to increase a certain skill that you have, to, in the case of many of these games you have magical powers, you can increase your magical potency, your ability to handle situations like this in the future. And so if you can work through it, you can process through all the emotions, there is a lot of bleed, as they call it. You know, you experience something intensely traumatic in the game, it does take a toll on your emotionally. You have to figure out how you feel about it, and you have to sort of come through that. So it’s not just the character, I would argue, that’s gaining experience points, it’s also the player. There’s no experience points in any of the gang rape scenario, or any of these Nordic scenarios, from what I can tell, because they’ve just thrown out all of those mechanics, they really just get to the core, you know, what’s the experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re an elf while we’re doing it, you know, let’s just play out this very real human dynamic and see where it takes us.

SR: How is this kind of identity alteration different from other forms of vicarious experience, like identifying with the main character in a novel or a movie?

SB: It’s another level. I’m not gonna say it’s a different experience, because it’s the same sort of experience, but it’s another level, and you are the one creating and enacting, and you are co-creating with a group of people where everybody is sort of bringing what they have to the table, and you’re seeing how it meshes. I mean, that’s a level of immersion that a book can’t give you, because a book is constructed by somebody else, and a play can’t give you; again, written by somebody else; a movie can’t give you. And that’s why these games are so engrossing, is because people get to, instead of just being passively told what they’re experiencing, they get to enact themselves. Ultimately, there’s a higher level of engagement.

SR: And a sort of communal experience comes out of that higher level of engagement?

SB: They call it the magic circle, in theory. It’s like a ritual circle you enter. Sort of the same circle we create when we have, you know, more standard rituals, such as weddings or funerals, or bat mitzvahs, or any sort of older religious traditions. The question then becomes, is this a religious experience? The jury’s still out. The answer is sort of on both sides of the fence. It certainly has a lot of the qualities of one.

SR: What do you think?

SB: Well, I’m a very big fan of a theorist named Emile Durkheim, who basically believed that all social organization is religious in nature, that we create social organization and classification based on a belief in something, and we invest a central person, whoever that may be, the shaman, the priest, the storyteller, with that power, and we expect them to confer upon us wisdom, or a feeling of security, or whatever it is that we’re looking for. It creates a sense of communal cohesion. Sometimes you can change social roles through the process of a ritual, like you go from childhood to adulthood through a puberty ritual, for example. And I think role playing games are a manifestation of that impulse that is present in every human culture.

SR: If it’s such a universal human experience, why is there such a strong stigma around role playing games?

SB: People are very uncomfortable when confronted with the idea that the persona that they present on a day-to-day basis may not be the only one that’s present, so they get very uncomfortable when they perceive other people changing personas on them, even though we all do it everyday. I mean, sex and violence are the two main drives of the id, but it’s usually just so tightly controlled, both of those things, in society, that these games do provide an outlet. I don’t like to call it an escape. And if it is an escape, it’s like, an escape from what? An escape from the mundane trivialities of everyday life? Well, ok, fine, I fully admit that. I don’t wanna live to do my laundry. I don’t wanna live to go fill my car up with gas. I wanna live to have some sort of epic goal in the world! As a child, it’s very pleasurable to experience an elasticity identity, meaning that you don’t have to be fit into one particular role, you can become a unicorn, and then you can become a fairy princess, and you can become a goblin, or whatever, you know? And there isn’t this strong emphasis on rules, when you look at childhood pretend play. You get to be the mommy now, you know, “OK, I get to wear the apron now,” whatever. And then there’s this huge pressure to conform to the collective consciousness, the reality that everyone signs a social contract including language, including proper behavior in social settings, and figuring out where your niche is in society, where you fit, and how you’re supposed to enact fitting that. And one of the things that’s very important is to relinquish those old fantasies, and live in “reality,” which is a construct.

[laughter]

And role players understand this, and they understand that they can alter reality whenever they want, if you consider perception reality. They can’t necessarily alter the physical realm, but they can alter the way that they perceive reality. And so role players have essentially refused to fully relinquish their creative power, and that is incredibly intimidating for people who have. And it’s the same thing with artists. They feel compelled to continue to engage in fantasy, to continue to engage in creativity, past the point when they should have “put away childish things.” The same thing with people who play video games long periods, into their 30s and 40s, they get accused of prolonged adolescence. But the adolescent period is where the self discovery occurs! So I don’t think of prolonged adolescence as a bad thing. I do think that people should learn to be individual, and they should be able to learn how to be self-sufficient, let’s say, in terms of finances, in terms of being able to get a job and things like that. And they have to make a lot of sacrifices to become an adult, and to live in the social world. I think role playing is one of the ways that we’ve sort of worked around those sacrifices. I’ve made this assertion before; I think that fantasy is necessary for a healthy psychic life. It’s how we think, and the things we experience in these hypothetical realities, let’s say, that allow us to temporarily break out of those roles, and then come back to those roles with a newfound understanding of ourselves and other people. If you ask most people why they role play, they won’t say that. They’ll say “ Cause it’s fun!” Because it feels good to not have to be in that social role, to be able to play out some other thing, whatever it is.

SR: Sarah Bowman is the author of “The Functions of Role Playing Games: How participants create community, solve problems, and explore identity,” available from McFarland Press.