But I Don't KNOW What I Want!: The hardest part of Freeform LARPing

“What do you want to do?”, “Just tell us what you want!”, “I want to elevate your experience, what is your preference here?”

Well meaning players and LARP runners dedicate themselves to providing us the experience that we want, and are constantly soliciting us to tell them the specifics of our desires. But goodness gracious, that’s a lot of pressure isn’t it?! How the hell am I supposed to answer that intimate a question when I can’t even decide where to go for dinner?

We are socially conditioned to think that wanting certain things is bad. Or even if it’s not BAD certainly if WE articulated it we would be rejected for it or make people uncomfortable, no matter how much we support others doing so. Yeah, hi pot, it's me, kettle!

In freeform LARP, where calibrating the direction of your story is so important, being unable to articulate your desires, or even admit them to yourself can be a real detriment to your experience. So, here are a few tools to help you get to the meat of what you really want from a game.

Be honest with yourself

In order to articulate your desires, you need to be able to admit them to yourself. This is surprisingly hard to do because feelings of desire can so often be wrapped up with feelings of shame or discomfort. In order to differentiate the two, you need to be able to sit in the discomfort and pick it apart enough to see what is causing it. Do you have a deep desire for loyal and constant love that you have trouble asking for because you have been rejected before and are worried it will happen again? Experiences like the above are shockingly common.

Now, if you’re in therapy, talk this over with your therapist and they can really help. But if you're not, my strategy is a cup of tea (literally), a journal, and locking my phone in a different room. Think or write about the idea that makes you feel a bit squiggly inside until you can pick apart what attracts you to it, and what pushes you away. Then note down what that experience you want might look like, being completely honest with yourself. No one is going to read this journal but you, you can water it down for your co-players later if you need to.

Read the setting materials

You cannot know what you want if you don’t know what you are signing up for. Conscience, for example, is not a game about cowboys despite it being a wild west setting. It is Scifi and about abuses of power, revenge, and questions of sentience and humanity. Once and Future Court uses Arthurian Lore as a backdrop for queer stories and exploration. Understanding the game that you are signing up for is integral to understanding what sort of play is reasonable to expect from the experience.

In an ideal world, reading the settings information will also inspire some desires in you! You don’t have to come up with what you want in a vacuum, the game runner is there with their own vision for you to build off of. Take in their vision, get your cup of tea and your journal, and jot down some notes about what you want from THIS particular game.

Experimentation

Finally, know when and how you are experimenting. It would be pretty remarkable if you knew everything that you liked and didn’t like right off the bat, so odds are that you will have to try some new stuff to find out. What I want to emphasize here though is to give yourself permission to have a shitty time when you experiment with something new, and take the new in bite-sized chunks. That way you can tackle as much as you feel able to, and have something you know you like to fall back on if you need.

Flipping your place on the villain/victim spectrum is the classic example. You’ve had some great villains oppress your characters and now you want to give back by doing that for someone else - great! Go ham! Tap into your inner desires to hurt, to manipulate, to subjugate - we all have them! 

But if you come out of the experience feeling icky, insecure, and overall not having had a good time, that's ok. Give yourself a hug, pat yourself on the back and acknowledge that you stepped out of your comfort zone and pursued an experience you thought you might like. That alone is something to be proud of, even if you didn’t end up liking it. Nothing is your fault, your co-players’ faults, or the game runners’ faults. You have learned something about yourself and that is valuable. Recalibrate, orient to something you know you like, and finish the game proud of your personal growth.

Bucket List

Once you have a good sense of yourself, a good sense of the game, and a strong idea of what you want to experiment with, you can start to think about what your ideal experience(s) would look like. I’m a huge fan of creating bucket lists for each game of things you would be sad to miss if you don’t get to experience them. For example, if I don’t get to sprint across a field and fling myself into cover during SOE Resistance this summer, I am going to be heartbroken. I also want to have to bellow “Sir, YES SIR”, and be so sore from running around that I can barely move at the afterparty. I have expressed this at some length in my application, so I have high hopes of getting what I desire.

I highly recommend building your bucket list before you start on the Application (if there is one), and then updating it every time you learn more about your character and the game. It makes the application far less of a chore, and allows you to focus your app around the core of what you want even if there are several different ways to get there. It also gives you a quick and easy list to reach for when you start calibrating with your co-players. 

The fun part too, is that you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time you apply to a game. While your target experience is probably different, there are likely some constants that you enjoy everywhere. For me, I like a good cry, and a good fight.

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In conclusion here, deciding what you want takes some time and some attention to yourself and to the game you are going to. I don’t have a silver bullet for you to instantly know, but I do have faith that if you sit down with no distractions and a focus on yourself you’ll be able to come to some conclusions. Be honest. Be brave. And have faith that no matter what it is you want, there is a co-player out there who wants to give it to you. 

With love,

Aj Mooney