Inclusive, co-operative play. This is what I love about larp. My dream is to have everyone in larp games both feel and be an important part of the story, to the extent they wish. Costumes and immersion, pretending to be someone else for four hours, and then going home grateful that I briefly escaped work and cleaning and paying bills.
But it’s a utopia––and we all know utopias are as fictitious as our characters.
Human nature, insecurities, and ugly internal narratives get in the way. We’ve all seen those players who greedily take the spotlight, who use others for their own fun, who don’t share, who bend truths, who cheat, who take the narratives places others don’t want to go, who only solve problems by killing characters, who are just fucking mean to others.
You can leave one larp game for another, one larp organization for a different one, but these people will always be there or follow you. These troublemakers get fed up because they don’t get what they want, so they blame the environment and leave it for another. They may finally get asked to leave or kicked out. Sometimes they quit entirely and sit on social media to criticize others’ fun because they’re just ugly fuckers.
A more nuanced scenarios is when you, as an individual, just don’t get along with someone. Everyone seems to like them and you just clash with this person. It’s happened to me several times. I’m sure these people are lovely, but something fundamental in us clashes, and I just cannot engage them on any level. There’s nothing wrong with this. We don’t have to get along with everyone, but we should always remain respectful lest we become one of the above disgusting fuckers. If I don’t get along with someone, I’ll generally keep a wide berth around them and always maintain politeness. If I must deal with them while larping, I’ll remove myself as soon as it’s politely possible without ruining the game for others and seek out another source of fun for myself. Sometimes, if they’re just irreparable bastards, I just won’t acknowledge their existence––ever––but this is exceptionally rare and only invoked for my health and safety.
So these awful players, and these scenarios, are all some serious truths that we’ve experienced while larping. Now I have to tell you the harshest truth of all:
If we exist in a community of assholes, it’s our fault.
Anil Dash is this amazing dude who works in startups and is an expert about creating positive cultures. Back in 2011, Dash wrote about how to handle assholes in your online communities, but it also applies to the offline aspect of our larp community as well. His focus is on web business owners, but each and every point is applicable to our larp community and how we interact within it, whether a member or an officer. Seriously, read the article and replace every mention of “business” with “larp” and enjoy an eye-opening read.
But let me be very specific. While Dash is talking to business owners, larps are a community effort. Yes, we have leadership, but in a community it’s not just those in charge who are accountable (though they chose to be officers, so they’re more accountable). Each of us contribute to the whole of our community, and:
When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you’re the person who made it possible, it’s 100% your fault. If you aren’t willing to be a grown-up about that, then that’s okay, but you’re not ready to have a web business [or be a part of a community].
We all make ruinously cruel things possible within the larp community by feeding threads of drama on our Facebook. Opinion-schminion. You’re just being a dick when you let “discourse” turn into mud slinging on “my Facebook I DO WHAT I WANT” space. Then someone vaguebooks about said drama, someone asks “what r u talkin about” and the cycle continues.
Those who participate and get ugly continue fueling and consuming it because everyone love the drama. It gives us meaning and fulfillment––except that meaning is to cause dissent, and that fulfillment does not sustain a healthy community––nor a healthy person. When we gossip, when we assume the worst about someone, when we don’t get our way and publicly accuse someone of cheating, we are childish and mean and not ready to be part of a community.
In one of my favorite parts of his blog post, Dash points out how companies with significant influences reinforce this behavior: “a company like Google thinks it’s okay to sell video ads on YouTube above conversations that are filled with vile, anonymous comments,” and how most newspapers place more value on page views (which fuel ad revenue) than “encourage meaningful discourse about current events within their community, even if many of those page views will be off-putting to the good people who are offended by the content of the comments.” I’ll tell you right now, if you have significant influence in the larp community and you perpetuate this ugliness, you’re just an asshole. Fuck you.
How many times have you laughed when someone regretfully says, “I read the comments”? This disgusting behavior is so prevalent, it’s now a joke. We’re laughing over savage and inhumane behavior toward one another. And we facilitate it and participate in it within our larp community. We actively let people tear others down in a very public and rather permanent manner.
Even more subtly is how we allow this behavior in person. How many of us overlook bad behavior because the player is “just that way” or “had a bad night” or “is cool most of the time” or “popular”? How many times have you heard “but if we kicked them out, we’d lose a ton of players”?
The larp community, and large organizations in particular, seem more interested in the wrong and misleading metrics of gaining and retaining players––any players. This comes at a steep cost though. Over time you see what’s happening now: membership does not grow, no one wants to bring friends into such a toxic environment, and new players quickly flee. This is Business 101: You cannot dilute the quality of your product and expect people to continue using it. You cannot ignore problems with your product and expect people to evangelize it. After all, how do most people get involved? “A friend told me about it and brought me.”
And the argument that games will shrink if we enforce humane behavior toward one another? Welcome to the pain of change. Any time there’s a transition, there is always friction. But when you ride it out, when you clean house, when you create a more positive environment, you will grow again. You’ll bring back some of the good people who bailed long ago, you’ll start gaining new players who’ve never larped before, and most of all, you’ll have a strong community built on a hobby full of kindness rather than vitriol.
In the mean time, I’ll do what I can do:
- I won’t allow ugly shit to start on my Facebook about my hobby
- I’ll keep writing and trying to help this community grow into something better
- And if you’re an asshole, no I won’t play with you.
