jducoeur

For obvious reasons, Intercon (the annual LARP convention that I've been attending approximately forever) couldn't happen as usual this year. It's kind of a noniversary marker for me: last year's Intercon was where the pandemic started really hitting my consciousness -- between games, the hotel TVs were all talking about the news from Washington state as things were starting to look bad there (before we really knew what "bad" meant), and IIRC they were debating the first stimulus in Congress that weekend. Things really started locking down on the East Coast a couple of weeks later.

Anyway...

Lacking an Intercon this year didn't mean no LARPing, though -- it just meant that the games had to be distanced to fit this year's reality. And Extracon, like Virtual Arisia before it, really stepped up and produced a weird-but-great weekend that showed the possibilities of online LARP. All four of the games I played suited the online environment reasonably well; a couple of them only make sense in that environment.

I should note: to get everyone into the spirit of the thing, Alison assembled little Swag Bags for everybody for the weekend, contained everything from The Traditional Intercon Lip Balm (no, really -- at this point, it's sacred tradition) to chocolate to stickers to slightly disturbing squishy little dolls. For those of us who opted in, we even got official Extracon Contingency Envelopes, which we were signaled to open Saturday afternoon. It was lovely, and helped set a positive atmosphere.

So, my weekend:

Friday evening was Spirit Island: Create a Spirit With the Designer. Eric did a sort of Zoom live-art exercise, with the audience participating via Discord as he frantically wrote stuff down. I conked out about halfway through (it didn't start until 9pm), but the group collectively came up with a theme, gradually narrowed it down and refined it under Eric's tutelage, and wound up with the first version of Spreading Rot Renews the Earth.

As it sounds, this is basically the Decay Spirit: it has a special ability that, when things are destroyed on your lands, they become "Rot tokens" that you can spend on the innate powers or to gain energy. It is explicitly the Spirit of natural decay, breaking things down in a healthy cycle, and while it needs lots of balancing yet (there was a second meeting this morning, which I couldn't make it to), I quite like the concept.

This was a neat session -- everyone got to see a bit of the process of how Eric designs Spirits, and put together an Apocrypha Spirit that will probably evolve into something worth playing.

Saturday morning was Common Sense, more an experimental experience than a game in any meaningful sense.

We were all given lists of items to prepare before runtime -- a handful of warm dirt, a freshly-peeled orange, an ice cube, a cinnamon stick, etc. During the run, we were guided through a series of interactions in which we would try to communicate an emotion or idea solely through different non-verbal modes of communication, including at different times:

• Making non-verbal noises
• Using Discord text chat, listing specific smells (in one round) or textures (in another)
• Making faces at each other

It was generally interesting -- not 100% successful, but a good first try. The smell and texture rounds were particularly neat food for thought, finding emotional resonance through those specific senses -- someone would list some items in Discord, and everyone else would go sniff/touch them. The "making faces" round proved problematic for the sole reason that it turns out to be really hard to do that with more than two people, but was otherwise a cool interaction.

I think this one needs some evolution, but has promise as a sort of mental-limbering exercise. Like so much of the weekend, it really needs the online medium. (Although I think it would have worked better on Zoom than Discord.)

Saturday afternoon was Conscientia, and I can't say a ton about it without spoilers. Suffice it to say, all of the players are connected via a telemedicine call using new, experimental technology, and the whole thing is sort of a group therapy session.

Beyond that, as the blurb says, it is a game of "memory, morality, and forgiveness", and it is pretty brilliant, and it is brutal. It ended with one of the hardest collective ugly-cries I've seen in a game -- what I originally thought was going to be a relatively intellectual experience turned out to be quite the emotional gut-punch. There is a lot of fine, subtle design going on here, some of which I didn't fully grok until after it was over.

(I played A -- saying much more than that would be spoilers.)

While this one could probably technically be played in-person, I wouldn't recommend it: it was hands-down the best use of Zoom I have ever seen for any purpose, and the GMs use it as a very precise and subtle instrument to drive the game. (I actually learned about several Zoom features that I hadn't even realized were there, which are essential to the game.)

This one gets my highest recommendation -- one of the best games I've played in years, and mechanically brilliant, but very much an All the Feels experience.

Saturday evening was a lovely palate-cleanser from the emotional wringer an hour before, as six of us got together for Re: That Rip in Time and Space.

This light-hearted game is explicitly set around a "Kids on Bikes" story. You know those movies and TV shows where a group of plucky teens discover something weird and terrible, and have to save the world? This game is about their idiot parents and teachers, the members of the Neighborhood Watch, who are arguing about what to do about the giant magenta vortex that has opened in the neighbor's lawn. (I was Diallo, the local cop who theoretically tries to herd this bunch of cats.)

Suffice it to say, this is not a game of puzzle-solving, because the parents aren't the heroes of this story, the (offstage) kids are. Instead, it is two hours of pure scenery-chewing as the parents argue about sleepovers, who is responsible for what, who has been keeping what secrets, and dog poop. (The poop is a constant topic.)

Utterly silly, but rather a lot of fun -- recommended for some time when you want to turn off your brain and just roleplay in a story that really isn't about the lot of you.

(This one doesn't require Zoom the way Conscientia does, but works quite nicely in that environment.)

Finally, this morning was the capstone of silliness: Too Polite. This is a game that is about Zoom. You are all in a conference call. However, no two of you were supposed to be in the same conference call. But you are all Canadian, and much too polite to tell everyone else that they are in the wrong place.

Basically, it's an eight-person Who's Line Is It Anyway? sketch. At the beginning of the game, the GM randomly and secretly assigns you one-sentence roles (I gather that the official list contains 32 roles, so no two games are the same). In some cases, you must choose a specific detail to add to that role; in general, you choose your name, and fill in the character details as you see fit.

The game runs 20-45 minutes; after the 15-minute mark, you are allowed to start calling out other players by (very politely) saying what meeting you think they meant to be in; if you are right, they are "out" -- still on the call, but embarrassed, and no longer able to call other people out. The "winner" is the last player whose role has not been guessed.

Since there is no reason not to, the game was also open to spectators. There was a Discord channel specifically for the viewers, that the players were not supposed to look at. After we were assigned our roles, the GM listed all of them in the Discord channel, and the audience had fun heckling us behind our backs.

Me being me, I simply threw myself on the grenade -- I didn't say who I was, but was enthusiastic enough about my role that I got guessed first, not terribly long after the 15-minute mark. That was fine: I'd much rather have an over-the-top roleplay experience than "win", and this was a hoot. (Suffice it to say, I was a biologist here to present my newest discovery, the Giant Big-tongued Gecko. I had a horrifying gecko image all lined up to present; sadly, I didn't get an opportunity before they got me.)

Anyway -- this one is an archetypal Intercon Sunday-morning game: light, fluffy, requiring zero preparation, just jump in and play. The GM says that he's planning to box it and sell it for a few bucks, and I would recommend it: this is one of those games that doesn't require deep knowledge of LARP. We discussed after-game that this is the sort of thing you could just use as an ice-breaker or team-building exercise. It's a lot of fun.

So that was my weekend. I won't say that it was everything that an in-person Intercon provides, but it was a great time. Congrats to everyone involved: it was a fine example of the possibilities for online LARP, and I think some of these games should continue to be played that way even after in-person LARP is a thing again.

ETA: oh, right, and there was Other Stuff. On Saturday afternoon, I attended a delightful online concert that Heather Dale did for Extracon. And we had a short 20-minute virtual outing to a farm, to see goats and llamas. (Llamas! Cute!)

This Saturday was NELCO, the annual New England LARP Conference.

My afternoon was a trio of moderated discussions. Cam and Adina ran "Climaxes in LARP", about the way that games often end with a big climax (sometimes whether you like it or not); Cam later ran "Workshops and Foreplay" -- AKA the Workshop Workshop -- in which we discussed (without necessarily agreeing) what workshops are, what some of the possibilities are, and how they could be used more effectively and frequently. As far as I can tell, the titles were chosen to maximize the available jokes.

In-between was a delightful discussion of the strengths of "Litform LARP", with Tory taking copious notes for an article on the subject she plans to write. ("Litform" is the hip new term for what I call "Interactive Literature"; folks are promulgating it as an alternative that doesn't annoy people like as me much as "Secrets and Powers" does. I'm willing to grant that, as an evocative shorthand for IL, it's not bad.)

But the highlight of the conference was the spontaneous bit. After dinner, I got pulled into a run of "Strangers". I hadn't been planning on it -- it's a weird and abstract Nordic game with heavy workshopping, and I'd been figuring that I was too tired to be creative. But they were short one player below their minimum, so I figured I'd give it a try. I'm glad I did. This is a high-transparency game, so I don't think there's any reason not to go into some detail.

I gather that Strangers is similar to "White Death", but it's pretty different from most of what we usually do around here. It's a highly abstracted game about the immigrant experience, with no speaking -- everything is physical -- and I found it surprisingly powerful.

The game is, no shit, about 2/3 workshop. We spent the first two hours collectively building the world. We were split into two separate societies (Blue and Green), on the two sides of the room (separated by a barrier) and walked slowly and painstakingly through the process of building a pair of separate cultures.

Each group had its own distinctive movement idiom, and we were instructed to use that idiom to build a gestural language, with a modest number of "words" for concepts like affection, aggression, "no", "good", how we go to sleep, and so on -- about eight concepts. Each "country" had a few areas with things in them, and we were walked through the process of developing a collective daily routine, which we then rehearsed repeatedly until it was reasonably comfortable and instinctive. We were also given simplistic "characters": basically, we each got to select a couple of primal character traits. (I was "Fragile/Optimistic".)

Despite my tiredness, the workshop went surprisingly smoothly. It is very heavily structured, and very collaborative, so you don't have to be terribly creative individually: the group as a whole does most of the creation.

The game proper began after we were all comfortable with our newly-invented languages and routines. It ran an hour or so, and consisted of a series of "days". During the first day, we all ran through our routines, including a fair amount of free-form "social" time for play and interaction using our language and movement idiom.

And then, during the first night, people began to disappear.

The GM came along while we were "asleep", tapped one player on the shoulder, removed them from our "Blue" side and put them over on the "Green" side. We "Blues" woke up the next day to find someone missing, and had to deal with the disruption of our little society. It was distressing in a surprisingly visceral way, but we kind of managed.

The next day, we woke to find another character gone. Since this run was small (only four players per society), this left just me and Becky on our side, and we more or less went through the stages of grief together, with our routines running off the rails.

And then the next night I was tapped, and brought over to the Green side. (Leaving Becky to basically have an in-character nervous breakdown, as the last Blue left.) I found myself in a strange Green land, whose rituals were mysterious -- kind of understandable, but a bit hard to relate to my own experience from the Blue side -- and whose "language" I found nearly incomprehensible. I've never been much good with foreign languages, and that apparently translates to gestural ones: I was the slowest to pick up Green-speak. The whole thing was impressively freaky.

In the end, we were all united in this strange new land, finding ourselves partly adapting, partly keeping our own routines. As a metaphor, it was surprisingly effective.

Anyway, the game is fascinating, and well worth playing. It is supposed to have 18 players, not the 8 we ran with, and I suspect it's a rather different experience that way. I gather that they're thinking of bringing it to Intercon; I hope so, and recommend it as a fine mind-bending and educational experience...