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The Invisible Playground
From the electronically mediated spaces of A.I. we turn to another game that emphasizes the play of its cultural environment: the LARP,or live-action role-playing game. LARPs also blur the boundaries between the inside and outside of a game, but do so through very different means. Live-Action Role-Playing Games are direct descendents of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. As in tabletop RPGs, LARP players take on the persona of fictional characters, defined through formal game statistics as well as through narrative backstory and an invented personality.
Live-Action Role-Playing Games, however, do not take place around a table. Instead, LARPs occur in real physical spaces, as players walk about and interact with each other, dramatically acting out their characters' actions in real-time. Although LARPs do have Game Masters that plan and referee the sessions, as well as rules that handle combat and other complex player actions, most LARP activity consists of social interaction, as players converse "in character" to make plans, pursue narrative threads, and scheme against each other. Live-Action Role-Playing Games can take place in outdoor or indoor settings, in private or public spaces. The location in which the LARP takes place, as well as the dress and interaction of the players, depends largely on the narrative setting of the LARP.A Medie-val-themed LARP might occur in a wilderness environment or a Renaissance Fair. A futuristic LARP might take place in a series of convention hall rooms or in the house of one of the players.
Nick Fortugno, a game designer and LARP Game Master, ran a LARP for many years in New York City based on Vampire: The Masquerade. His game, set in present day NYC, met regularly in public spaces that ranged from Washington Square Park to Grand Central Station. The players all took the role of vampires, ancient and powerful creatures that live secretly among humans. In typical Vampire: The Masquerade games, emphasis is not on physical confrontation or on players hunting humans for blood. Instead, the interest of the game comes from baroque power struggles waged between the aristocratic vampire clans. Fortugno's LARP, titled Seasons of Darkness, was designed along these lines, and was a game of dense social politics and intricate storytelling. Seasons of Darkness successfully engaged with its cultural environment in a variety of ways.
Public Spaces
Although many LARPs take place exclusively in isolated settings, most Seasons of Darkness sessions were held in public urban spaces. Through this design decision, Fortugno (and Tami Meyers, the game's administrator) created a game that intrinsically blurred the boundaries of the magic circle. In most games, even real-world physical games, the play takes place in a field, on a court, or someplace set aside specifically for the game. Seasons of Darkness did not use an artificially designed space, but instead appropriated existing ones. The players integrated their "found" context into the game play in many ways. A balcony overlooking the World Trade Center's Winter Garden, for example, might be used to heighten dramatic effect for a player delivering a speech to other players below; the same balcony might also be used strategically, as a vantage point for spying.
The game-space of Seasons of Darkness was congruent not just with the material setting but also with the cultural environment of New York City. Media, signage, and unknowing passersby were all fodder for the game. A character on the run might duck into a throng of commuters, camouflaging herself among the passing crowds in an attempt to evade her pursuers. Or two players might be inspired by a clothing store window display to have a conversation about current fads in "human" culture. This use of public space as the space of the game greatly increased options for narrative play. As we first introduced in Interactivity, a game's space of possibility is the event-space of all possible game actions that might occur in the course of play. The space of possibility even in a closed magic circle can be quite large. But chance events and a constant flow of people and culture through a session of Seasons of Darkness made the game's space of possibility truly infinite. The game was played nowhere and everywhere at once, as players continually improvised and invented new ways to engage with their environment.
Real-World Interaction
As with most LARPs, Seasons of Darkness players played their game by moving, speaking, and gesturing "in character." In contrast to most games, in which game actions are stylized, artificial gestures (move a plastic token to a new space on the board when it is your turn; pass the ball to certain players in certain ways), Seasons of Darkness players made use of naturalized behaviors. In Freeze Tag, touching another player on the arm has formal ramifications for play. But in a LARP,touching another player on the arm usually has the same communicative meaning it does in everyday life: perhaps it is a gesture of empathy, or a silent request for the recipient to stop speaking. This is a significant departure from more typical games. The blurring and erasure of the magic circle takes place not only in terms of the game's setting, but also on the level of the player's interactions. The core mechanics of a game are basic game actions or set of actions that players repeat over and over as they play. In the case of Seasons of Darkness, the game's core mechanics overlapped with the behaviors of everyday life. Gestures, speech, dramatic skills: these tools for social interaction were part of the cultural environment each player brought to the game. Although social communication occurs in most games, in Seasons of Darkness these activities were themselves core game actions.
This is not to say that the game didn't have its own set of stylized play actions; it certainly did. Combat and the use of supernatural powers required stylized behavior, which Fortungno designed as part of the game. It might be the case, for example, that a tap on the arm did not denote an innocent communicative speech-gesture, but instead signaled the use of a magical action. In Seasons of Darkness, a player that had used a special power to turn invisible crossed his or her arms. This gesture signified invisibility, and other players had to act as if the invisible player was not present.
There is an important distinction to make here. Although it is true that a LARP blurs the border of the magic circle, the boundary is nowhere close to being completely eradicated. Despite its lamination with the actions and events of daily life, the game remains capable of generating its own meanings.The meaning of the crossed-arm gesture is artificial, not a part of our everyday lexicon of interaction. Yet this is entirely consistent with what we already know about games. As we discussed in Games as the Play of Simulation, the metacommunicative aspect of player consciousness creates what folklorist Gary Allen Fine calls "layers of meaning" in which game character, game player, and real-world context exist together within a web of interconnected cognitive frameworks.
Emergent Storytelling
Whereas some LARPs rely on pregenerated storylines and tightly scripted events, the narrative of Seasons of Darkness was a largely emergent system. Fortugno encouraged bottom-up instead of top-down narratives: many of the most significant story events were player-produced: the result of characters scheming and plotting against one another. Each session was a complex system, with the characters bumping into each other like narrative particles. Every interaction between characters built on previous ones, adding up to larger patterns of narrative behavior. In managing these patterns from session to session, Fortugno had to balance emergent with embedded narrative elements. The unexpected, emergent qualities of the game kept it moving in lively, unpredictable directions. But over the course of the years that the game was played, Fortugno also developed elaborately embedded plots that were only fully realized during the game's final climax.
Emergence takes place within a context, the environment of the system. In Seasons of Darkness, narrative contexts were established out of the complex backstory of the game, which was derived from a host of sources: vampire lore and legend; the mythos of the published game rules; a fictional history of NYC vampires that Fortugno had written; established events of previous game sessions; consistent character personalities and their allegiances and enmities; and the public setting and other elements of the cultural environment. Any conversation or interaction between characters took place within a rich narrative context brimming with story potential.
Meta-Narratives
Playing a game in a public space has its challenges, especially when the players are pretending to be vampires. Large groups of players, milling about for hours late at night, could attract unwanted attention from police and security guards. Part of the play of the game included negotiating the friction between the real-world settings and the unusual way that players inhabited them. But remarkably enough, this very negotiation was a site of meaningful play.
In the narrative universe of the game, vampires live in secret, pretending to be human (thus the "masquerade" of Vampire: The Masquerade). The most severe crime a vampire can commit is to leak information to human society about the existence of vampires. For this reason, players speaking about matters of vampire clan politics or supernatural occult powers lower their voices when non-players walk nearby. Players manifest the in-game narrative of secrecy by pretending that passersby need to be kept in the dark about the sinister truth. At the same time, players maintain another form of secret information: the fact that they are playing a game.The secret meanings of the game, like the fact that a player with crossed arms is "invisible," remain unknown to the general public.
There is a beautiful double logic to the way these game elements play out. Just as vampires in the fictional game-world keep their existence to themselves, players of the game secret away the very presence of the magic circle. Games as Systems of Information explored the ways that games manipulate public and private information in order to drive meaningful play. In Seasons of Darkness, the game itself was a kind of private information, kept hidden from the public. This approach is in contrast to most games, where both players and spectators acknowledge the presence of the magic circle, and the distinction between players and non-players is immediately evident. The special information that Seasons of Darkness players have about the existence of the game is more than the formal information about its rules: it is cultural information, information that defines the play community and binds it together.
The private knowledge that players have about the game acts to exemplify the narrative itself. Players' imaginative existence as non-human vampires is heightened by the secret status they hold within the public cultural environment where the game takes place. Private knowledge about the game functions as a form of procedural representation, a concept we introduced in Games as the Play of Simulation, in which signification arises from a dynamic process. A crowd of hapless tourists parts to reveal the menacing black-clad figure of an enemy vampire striding confidently toward you: this is a powerful moment of procedural narrative that could only happen in a LARP.But unlike most forms of procedural representation, where the closed set of rules and game interactions generate a depiction, here representation arises by layering the game onto the real world. The blurring of the game with its cultural environment is itself an act of representation.
Current Events
The Seasons of Darkness game was set in the real world, in the present day. As a result, political events occurring locally, nationally, and globally could be incorporated into the game narrative. For example, in the game narrative, Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York City for the duration of the game, was a mind-controlled stooge of one of the more powerful players. As the Game Master, Fortugno had free reign to tie real-world events to the narrative play of the game; he freely encouraged players to do so as well. When fashion designer Gianni Versace was murdered, the clan of vampires that influence and guide human art and culture played their characters in full mourning for the entire game session following the news. Building on this creative game action, Fortugno decided to make the death a vampiric assassination with larger political implications.
In this way, Seasons of Darkness was a system of open culture, exchanging meaning with its cultural context and transforming that meaning into game-specific narratives with integrated outcomes affecting future play. Fortugno encouraged a player-as-producer paradigm, encouraging players to modify and transform the game's meaning through independent acts of creation. Although Fortugno always had final approval of a player's appropriation of a real-world event, the shared context of the game and its storyline meant that he very rarely had to exercise censuring authority. The significance of player-production in Seasons of Darkness lies in the fact that players were not simply inventing an isolated game object such as a Quake skin or a work of fan fiction. Their act of creation consisted of locating an event in the real world and stretching the game narrative to accommodate it. In Seasons of Darkness, the cultural environment of current events was the raw material for player-production.
Each of these design elements, acting in concert, created an extremely meaningful experience, supporting a play community of several dozen players for more than five years. Each game element was the result of careful game design choices. The danger and difficulty of designing a game as fully integrated into its cultural environment as Seasons of Darkness is that the game can run away with itself. Because of its intentional play with the boundaries of the magic circle, the game has the potential to blend too well into its environment. If it becomes too ambiguous, the shared safety and trust that allows a play community to persist can disappear.
Acknowledging this danger, Fortugno kept the game design tightly constrained in many respects. Treating the published game as an open system, he re-wrote the rules, streamlining the formal game mechanics so players could focus on role-playing and storytelling. Although the game existed in public spaces, there were always constraints on where players could travel and what they could do during a game. The time of a game session was also clearly marked: every session began and ended with a Peter Pan-inspired ritual in which Fortugno blew imaginary pixie dust and pink smoke over the players. Even in a game with such permeable borders, the time and space of the magic circle remained unambiguously demarcated.
As we have noted many times, game design is a second-order design process. Game designers create play experiences, but only indirectly, by creating rules and structures which then give rise to play. As a game designer, Fortugno skillfully manipulated the game's formal structures and their relationships to cultural contexts, balancing tight constraint with an open-ended integration into the game's cultural environment.The result was the passionate and refined play of Seasons of Darkness.
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