Little Boxes of Larp
I’ve been thinking a bit about how we (at Crooked House) might structure another larp, based on some bits and pieces we’ve been thinking about and discussing for a while. And this is what I’ve come to so far as a platform that might work for a variety of concepts. I’m going to call it Little Boxes¹ until something better comes along.
What is this?
- A way of thinking about how to organise a larp around focused scenes.
- A natural progression of the work we did in All for One.
- Some thoughts about how to make a storyful larp reactive and interactive.
- Mashing together some of the things I’ve been playing with in computer game narrative design, larp design, and immersive theatre concepts.
- A potential recipe for other media, such as immersive theatre or computer games.
- Larp but storylets.
Killing Time
Most of the UK larp games I’ve played over the last thirty years have been events where you arrive, go in character, play through the game in real time (maybe with breaks for sleep, but when you wake up it’s the next in-character day), and finally reach the end of the event.
Only a handful of games in the UK tradition have act breaks or time jumps. Nordic larps are much more used to the concept of playing in scenes, their design having been developed from a slightly different direction.
Looking at other media, most books time jump from scene to scene, and so do the vast majority of movies, TV series, and plays. Continuous time is way rarer. Why? Because often the act of progressing from point A to point B (either physically or conceptually) is pretty dull and unmemorable — we only look at the interesting bits. And also because we can leave the events in the gaps up to the audience’s imagination. (I talk about gaps a lot — also see Scott McCloud’s great work on them.)
Computer games have various takes on this, but most heavily narrative triple-A titles try and maintain the character in continuous play while they traverse a game universe, with only jumps for major act breaks.
In All for One we chopped the story into individual scene blocks with gaps in time between them. Storylets, if you will, although we weren’t thinking about that specifically when we came up with them.
Key Moments
I’ve also talked a lot about Moment-Based Design, i.e. design by collecting a set of key moments that a player will always remember, and the narrative being something that glues those moments together.
Moments in Boxes
It is a natural extension of the two concepts above to suggest that you could divide your story into scenes, and each scene would encapsulate a Key Moment of some sort. An opportunity to have a particular experience, to meet a specific character, to deal with a situation. A bar-room brawl, a meeting with the Pope, a sudden storm assaulting your small vessel adrift in the English Channel.
Importantly the connecting tissue between the scenes is left unspecified and is for the players to fill in. How did they get from Paris to Toulouse? I don’t know — but many films or books won’t fill in that gap either. Is it important? Not really! Unless it’s about the journey itself, in which case that’s a scene! (Cue train montage.)
Then the question becomes — how do you arrange and connect those little boxes? And how do the players get involved with them?
Batches of Players
One of the wins we got from the design of All for One was the idea that our key moments would be experienced by small groups of players, rather than the whole playerbase at once. This allows the players in those small groups to feel more focused on, and that the story is more reactive and personalised to them. It’s not unlike Punch Drunk’s occasional moments of private performance.
So let’s say our little boxes design imagines teams of 6 players at once.
Now how do we arrange a game for them so that they all have something to do? Again, it’s something we figured out for All for One.
On Parallel Tracks
If you want to keep the whole playerbase entertained, you need to keep multiple groups of players happy. That means that ideally each group should be taking part in scenes all at the same time. Are they different scenes for each group? Or the same scenes, but in different orders? Or the same scenes, actually in parallel? These are all down to the overall design of your game.
All for One worked on the premise that each player group had its own story, but that some of the experiences they had were similar to those had by other players. For example, Cadre Bleu might have met the Pope, an experience unique to their group. But they also took part in a tavern brawl, an experience that every other group also had. And they all took part in a masked ball, an experience that all the groups had at the same time converging together.
Scene Juggling
So what’s neat here is this sort of arrangement could work as a fixed set of scenes where your players are being moved around different experiences on a physical set. Like Alice Underground, or Everwake. It’s not very different from The Crystal Maze, weirdly, particularly the most recent physical game for consumers. Or the online Ghostbusters immersive experience run by Secret Cinema, where different player groups would explore different rooms in the Shandor Building all in parallel.
It could be for an audience, with very little actual interactivity. A set of scenes which you show to that audience.
But it could also be a very improvised set of stories, entirely revolving around player input, based on the use of black boxes — what we called the sound stage in All for One.
A Blackbox Platform
In All for One we used a mix of blackbox scenes, open outdoor linear scenes, and set pieces in a fixed location. Most of the scenes were sketched out beforehand, barring a few scenes on the last day. But does this need to be the case, if we’re going to be truly reactive?
The blackbox — with backdrops created by projected images and audio effects — can be extremely flexible and reactive, given proper design attention and with the right actors, crew, and library of content and props.
You could run an entire larp on a platform of blackboxes, with enough stages to be able to run all your groups in parallel, different groups jumping through different experiences with some commonality but experienced in different ways. There would be loose story connectivity between scenes — what have you already played? Of course NPCs and directors can massage their scenes based on where they know the party has already been.
The Hub
Given the concept of players going off in small groups to have adventures, it probably makes sense to have a hub area for downtime where players and/or their characters can interact between scenes. Perhaps it’s the bar where everyone meets up before going out on adventures. Perhaps it’s the Enterprise between away missions. Perhaps it’s the Musketeers Academy between lessons.
Frontloading Stories
Given the platform outlined above, you could envisage a design where a list of moments were pulled together and appropriate content readied for the blackboxes (the key prop or character to deliver a particular moment being made available), and then the stories were loosely sketched out for each player group but only the first few scenes were fully designed. The rest of the scenes could be designed or altered on the fly, adapted to fit what the players had already done in previous scenes. Almost like each story was being run by a GM.
Big Larp, Little Larp, Black Black Box
So that’s it. A loose set of scenes running on lots of parallel sound stages, highly improvised, each scene trying to deliver a punchy key moment, and the players meeting up in a hub while the crew frantically do rewrites.
Improvisational larp meeting immersive theatre meeting tabletop RPGs meeting Let’s Pretend, if you like.
It scales. It allows for almost any cinematic genre. It also is much less prone to weather failure than many UK larps.
It does need a very specific set of people with a very particular set of skills. Luckily, we know a few of them…
What are we going to do with all this? Not sure yet, but I am sure it’s a likely model for future events we run, whether those are larps or immersive experiences of some sort. I’d be very interested to hear about other events that run in this sort of structure.
¹ With apologies to Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger.
