Development 12 - Spacing is the Placing (Patreon)

The greatest privilege of LARP writing I am afforded by working for Wayfinder is the ability to write for large tracks of land (this is a lie, there are many more advantages, but this sure is a nice one). A couple weeks ago, I played a truly amazing con LARP called My Jam, by Jeff Dieterle. The game was amazing, and world changing, and an interesting aspect of it that I wasn't expecting was the challenges of space. My Jam is set entirely in one room - the dance floor, with a couple of additional side spaces for the DJ and the magically-immune punch bowl. Exiting the space is explicitly exiting the game. I understand why the game was designed that way - it's important to have a signal that you're leaving the game. And the frustrations I felt with the inability to leave the space also fed into the game - there was no privacy, there was no escape from the music.

A friend made a fascinating post on social media, asking about how to use all the space of a campground, like at Wayfinder. It suddenly put My Jam into perspective. The alien nature of not being able to step away from the single scene to re-examine it is natural in con LARPs. It's one space, and the game is about being trapped and immersed in the aesthetic. But in a Wayfinder game, you gain the ability to step away from the central aesthetic of the game, examine it in-character, and then return.

Aesthetic. In a LARP, the aesthetic is the visual and sensory tone of the game. It is cultivated by a variety of conditions, such as sets, music, environment, game documents, props, and costumes. More information on aesthetic and different kinds of aesthetic are talked about here in my post for the Wayfinder Experience.

It is a changing experience upon the play, to be able to take a look at it from a distance. The inability to do so is a feature, not a bug, of many con games. By being unable to do so, I feel claustrophobic, and that plays to the strengths of the game. But I can't imagine creating a space of beauty and peace in a con environment, because the very nature of a con space is antithetical to that. In a previous article, I talked about how the land plays with us. Con spaces, as a whole, don't want to play with us. And we can use that, because the hostile environment is conducive to games about feeling disoriented and not-at-ease. But the woods allow for us to put things far away from each other, in a way that allows our minds to wander. And as long as the woods can keep us in character while doing that, it will feed into the game. 

Distance fails us when the game doesn't support the distance. As long as the game rewards us for travel, travel will be rewarding.