Let’s leave it. Too much analysis would probably risk outing the other folks involved, which is not my goal. Just wanted to share how badly off the rails things can go even when everyone thinks they’ve properly nodded towards safety.
If something like this happened today I’d be much, much better equipped to handle it.
@Jmstar Time for a behind the curtain question.
At Tipford, the person you assigned to be my daughter I see on a semi-regular basis, and we’ve larped together before and trust each other. That was really great, and we were both glad to get to explore that relationship.
Did you know we knew each other when you assigned?
No thought went into individual relationships at all. I don’t even remember who you are talking about, but I’m really happy it worked out.
When these things work out, it’s glorious.
But, getting back to the topic: Are we, as a larpy gamey culture, getting better at this?
That is, are we:
I think we are. I’ve seen and witnessed changes in safety mechanics, and thing the use is becoming more and more normalized.
Am I mistaken?
I feel like things are getting better. There are many drivers for this. Some institutional drivers:
Games on Demand, in its various incarnations, totally normalizes this, and converts people. You go in expecting weird stuff and that’s what you get. Some of that is content and some of that is social contract. You take the good bits home, or at least accept them when you encounter them. Spend two hours at any GoD and the routine use of safety tools will never be a foreign concept again.
New World Magischola has had a huge impact in the North American larp world by implementing and normalizing safety tools that actually work. It attracts people from across the larp cultures of play, usually well-heeled thought leaders, who return to their little silos and introduce the OK check-in and other tools organically. This actually happens and it is very exciting to me.
Hi Erik; that sounds to me a little like the “door is always open” idea, which I think is so important for games which can be emotionally intense for whatever reason. I know that when I was at Metatopia we were a little way into one of my games, and one of the players said “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can do this game”, and that was fine. I reassured them that we were perfectly happy for them to do that, that it wouldn’t be a problem and wished them well. Little did I suspect that eight hours later I’d be in just the same situation myself, and I had to excuse myself from a game for various reasons, and they graciously assured me that it wasn’t a problem.
I suspect that may be the most useful of all the safety techniques I’ve actually seen used.
Best wishes,
My WORST gaming experience about which I started joking just a day later that this will be my go-to anecdote about safety on even the lightest larps was when my friends asked me to introduce them to LARPs on our annual near-Christmas meeting that I was hosting. I was delighted that I can show them the hobby and chosen a good, quite popular Polish larp/jeepform based on a movie called Perfect Strangers. The permise is that there is a meeting of old friends - there are two or three pairs in relationships and one single person. They decide to play a game - they will read all text messages aloud and pick up the calls on speaker. The audience of the game is responsible for writing texts and calling to the players.
I tried to be careful. I told them that they shouldn’t role play in their actual relationships. I introduced safe words, I said that everybody is free to walk away from the game at any point. The game is played with real phones, so put some emphasis on the fact that real-life phone calls and texts don’t participate in the game, and they shouldn’t read them aloud.
What I didn’t predict was the fact that one of the players will decide to engage people from outside the game (and of course this is the one person that actually knew something about LARPs and really wanted to play in one at last).
So we have this guy who suddenly starts getting messages that he reads aloud, but I see that no one on the audience had sent them. They are consistent with his character’s plot though (it was concerning drugs), so I decide that hey, maybe I just didn’t see something. And then he picks up the phone and we all see that it isn’t an in-game call, cause no one on the audience is doing it. The player, nevertheless, picks up on speaker, and the person calling is terrified, they say that they can’t contact their friend that they did some drugs (the guys plot concerned drugs) and that they don’t know what to do.
At this point we’re almost shouting at the player to take the person of the speaker, so he does, he goes to other room, talks for a while, comes back, assures us that everything’s alright now. We were obviously too shaken to continue playing, and he kept trolling us for five more minutes before he told us that it was a prank and he only wanted to make game more interesting.
So, I think that, especially with new players, and ESPECIALLY with new players who think they know enough, establishing that there is a FINE line between the fiction and the reality and that rules are there because they are needed is a very basic safety tool that maybe we sometimes forget, because it is too obvious.
Oh my. That’s rough, and I’m sorry.
There are so many failures here – do you have interest in pulling them out, discussing mitigation strategies, etc?
It sounds like you know what went wrong, but it might help others.
Yeah, I think talking about it could do some good 