Some Basic Principles of Badgers and Jam

alasdair

It’s probably worth setting out what Badgers and Jam believe is good.  What sorts of things we want this company to stand for.  It’ll mean we have something to measure up to.

We believe in the following things:

  • Equality and Diversity.  Our games should be welcoming spaces for everyone.  Not every game has themes or setting or mode of play that is for everyone, but no-one should feel like they’re not welcome to participate to whatever extent they can if they want to.  We might politely suggest that a given game’s content is not designed in a way that will be fun for a given person, but if they listen to us, and still want to play, then they should, at minimum, feel welcome to try.
  • Fun.  If it’s not fun, we should not be doing it.
  • People who work, get paid. We’re not saying we can make a full-time living at this.  But we believe that everyone on our crew should walk away slightly better off for working on a game event.  So we’re going to factor a token payment (and let’s be clear: it really will be a token) for crew into our event costs.  It’ll be the same amount for everyone who works the game, whether they’re the event manager, the game designer, the NPCs or the support crew, but if someone works on the crew for the entire event, they’ll get paid.
  • Listening to feedback.  We’re never going to be faultless.  We’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to doing things wrong.  We’re human.  But we hope the the measure of us will be found in how we react when that happens, in how we improve, and how we stop the same mistakes from happening again.

Week #1

alasdair

Weeknotes were a thing in blogging for a couple of months back around 2012 or so.  This seems like a sensible space for bringing them back.  The idea, shockingly, is that we log what we’ve done this week, in public, combining both tracking state and motivation.  (I have to do a thing, so there’ll be something for the weeknotes.)

So, if we designate this week as week #1, what’ve we done?

  • Picked a name for the company.  Welcome in (Badgers and) Jam.
  • Bought domain names.
  • Arranged hosting and web management tools, and thrown up a couple of basic websites.
  • Written a first draft E&D policy, and circulated it for comment.
  • Coded and tested some early stage game management tools.  Much still be be done here over the next year,
  • Tested some forum software, and then run away from it in terror.
  • Coded the stub of a ticket purchase system that can be used for many different games.  Need to go away and actually think about the purchase/registration user journey.
  • Came up with a codename for the major LARP project under development for 2018.  It is now to be know as Pentagram.  (Never let a name out into the wild unless you can live with it as a permanent name, in case people react well to it.)
  • Had the third design meeting about Pentagram, it’s starting to take the kind of shape that we’ll be ready to do the writing in earnest in the next few months – the structures and ideas are starting to slot into place, another iteration or two and we should be ready to start producing all the player facing materials.  I have the notes to write up about it tomorrow.

Station Identification

alasdair

This is yet another blog about design for live games, primarily LARP.  It will be largely concerned with the games offered by Badgers and Jam Industries, and the thinking that goes on as we develop games.  There are a few posts in the archive prior to this post, imported from a previous blog on live game design.

Badgers and Jam Industries, at this point, is really just this blog, a domain name, and a collection of historical achievements that are being retroactively claimed as Badgers and Jam games.  Badgers and Jam Industries has been created to unify these things, and because we have some slightly more ambitious plans for the future, that mean it’d be useful to have a unifying pot to keep things in.

So, for the record, a list of the historical achievements of Badgers and Jam Industries:

  • Interregnum – 2008-2009 – old-school Vampire LARP.
  • Testament – 2010-2011 – experimental game about the second coming.
  • Restitution – 2012-2014 – Chronicles of Darkness LARP.
  • Armistice – 2015-2017 – Urban Fantasy LARP about war criminals after the war.

As things currently stand, Armistice has come to an end, and we’re taking some time to  help organise some short form work, while we do a lot of prep work for a bigger and more ambitious offering some time in 2018, of which more anon, in between rambling screeds on aspects of game design.

We vs I

I’m likely to use “we” a lot when writing here, because while Badgers and Jam is primarily the brainchild of one person at present (Alasdair Watson), the games we create are highly collaborative experiences, that require buy in from all the participants, so if “we” talk about “our” design philosophy, or similar topics, it’s because these things do require buy-in from others in the execution.  And because “we” want to involve friends and fellow-travellers under this banner in future, if “we” can.

LARP As Safe Space

Video Video alasdair

Nordic LARP Talks just got a bunch of video updates, and I’m making my way through them, but I wanted to flag one up quickly, as it’s a very important topic.  One of the nicest bits of feedback I have ever been given about a game I ran is that players could be confident that they wouldn’t come across racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or anything like that in my games – or at the very least, they could be 99.9% sure that the obnoxious attitude was an entirely IC one.  I was delighted to hear that, because I am absolutely determined that my games should be as much of a safe space as I can make them. I have what I hope are clear policies about harassment and unacceptable behaviour at the time in, and in game-related matters, and it seems to have more or less worked.  I definitely feel the responsibility to make my LARP space as safe as I can pretty keenly.

At the same time, I like what you might call “mature themes”.  I like my LARPs to explore real issues, and that means that they have to deal in a “real” world that isn’t all hugs and puppies.  Violence, as I’ve mentioned, is a feature of these games, often quite extreme violence.  We’ve had abuse victims, and abusers, as characters.  So I am very interested in anyone’s thoughts on ways to manage things so as to be able to include this sort of thing, and still remain a reasonably safe space, so I was immediately drawn to this talk:

This is a talk titled “Ethical Content Management and the Freedom to Create” by Shoshana Kessock.  In it she concludes (among other things) that the maintenance of a “safe” space is a community responsibility, rather than just that of the organisers, and further, that by its very nature, LARP cannot ever be considered a 100% safe space.

I think that’s probably true.  But this talk has got me thinking about what to do to improve for next time.  My mental list is roughly as follows:

  • An “unsafe space” warning – clear notifications of what kind of content may or may not feature in the LARP, to serve both as a warning and a rough code of conduct.
  • Clearer signposting of the harassment policy – in the last game I ran, I had a couple of players not realise it existed.
  • A general reminder to everyone that we’re all collectively responsible for the space.
  • Formally implementing “Brake”, “Cut” and “Hold” as techniques – we haven’t needed them yet, but I’d like my players to know they are there.
  • I’m contemplating a “no IC sexism/racism/homophobia/transphobia/etc” rule, to go along with the OOC rules.

Can anyone suggest anything else I could add?

Definition Of Terms: Nordic

alasdair

One of the things I feel obligated to state early in the life of this blog, and will probably feel the need to link back to at intervals, is that when I reference Nordic LARP, I’m very specifically referencing their arthaus/experimental/weird traditions.

I am aware that there is a great volume of LARP in the Nordic zone that is pretty solidly analogous to the UK tradition.  Fantasy LARPS, Vampire/World of Darkness LARPs are all represented there, and are the sort of thing that a UK player would find pretty broadly similar to our own tradition.  I’m also aware that Nordic LARP is not some monolith entity across Scandinavia and Finland – that each of of the various countries have their own styles, traditions, and preferences in their “normal” LARP.  I’m not trying to homogenise these cultures, or suggest that the kid of LARPs I’m likely to wind up talking about are the only ones played in those countries.

Nor am I seeking to suggest that Nordic LARP is only played in Nordic countries – I’m also aware that there are plenty of other countries in Europe where LARPs in the Nordic tradition are played.

Effectively, I’m using the term “Nordic” in the sense it is used on the Nordic LARP wiki, and in the marvellous book “Nordic LARP“.  Which is to say that I’m looking at LARPs that treat the form as worthy of analysis, debate and experimentation, that make some nods of the head toward terms like “creative vision” and “doing something a bit different”.  (One might also add “prizes immersion” to that list, although I get the sense that’s more variable, depending on the goals of each specific LARP.)

Nordic LARPs (in the sense that I’m intending to reference them in) also tend to have some or all of the following characteristics: they’re one-off events (even if they are run more than once, it is simply the same game being run multiple times), they feature characters originated by the organisers (I’m not sure how I feel about the term “Larpwright” that seems to be popular in the Nordic scene, but then I don’t like the term “Storyteller” that White Wolf have been using for two decades now, so it may just be me) rather than the players, and they’re often short (running for hours, rather than days), and they place high value on appropriate costume and scenery.  None of these are always true – indeed, there are a body of “classic” Nordic LARPS that are weekend long events, and there is an great corpus of LARPS that are designed to be played in black-box theatre spaces, but it’s a reasonable set of basic characteristics.

A Little Light Reading

alasdair

I went to Gamecamp at the weekend, and had a lovely time.  I spent quite a lot of time hearing about (and playing) Nordic LARP.  I’ve been aware that Scandinavia has a fairly serious LARP culture, one that is notably different to the culture in the UK for a while now, but this was the first chance I’ve had to really discuss it with anyone who knows it, and learn about it.

In the UK (and the US, as I understand it), LARP (and roleplaying in general) is not taken terribly seriously, and that’s not a bad thing but it does mean that there isn’t a culture of study of the phenomenon from either a practical or an academic point of view, which means that running games in any form is a very much learn-by-doing exercise.  There’s no body of scholarship discussing what works and what doesn’t, and suggesting tools and devices that game participants can learn from.  That’s bugged me for a few years now.  The only advice gamerunners can get tends to be the “how to run this game” section of the various game books, and those tend to be quite highly specialised toward a specific game, and they tend to be very tabletop focused.  The UK LARP culture has almost no documentary tradition.

So I’m delighted to discover that the Nordic scene, in contrast, has a strong history of documentation, which means I’m currently immersing myself in this lot of books – a decades’s worth of LARP theory from the Knutepunkt conference.

I suspect that quite a lot of this blog, at least for the next while, is going to take the form of “I’ve been reading this bit of Nordic writing, and here’s what I think” or even just regurgitations of some of the basic concepts as I attempt to fix them in my head.  Bear with me.

There was one non-Nordic book I learned about, and the odds are I’m just late to the party on it, because it’s been out a few years: Hamlet’s Hit Points.  This is a book providing an interesting conceptual model for thinking about narrative as it applies to gaming – trying to be the gaming equivalent of Robert McKee’s Story, or similar other screenwriting texts, written by Robin D. Laws of Feng Shui/Gumshoe/other stuff fame.  Again, mostly tabletop-focused.

I’m a little hesitant to actually recommend the book, as honestly, it’s mostly a brief explanation of a model for thinking about narrative, and then a lengthy application of the model to Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca and then a few pages that basically say “try applying this to your own stuff, see if you think it helps you”. That said, it has given me a few things to think about, and it might be of interest to some.  Were it free, I would recommend it without hesitation, I’m just not sure it’s 100% worth the price tag.  But it does give me hope that things are changing in the UK/US scenes, and we might start to see a bit more writing on these topics from non-Nordic sources.

(This concludes your broadcast from the department of faint praise.)

I don’t intend to run a Nordic-style LARP.  (I should say I’m aware that this term is a gross simplification, as there are loads of different styles of LARP this could encompass, many of which are not so very dissimilar to what I’ve run in the past, but I’m using the term to indicate that part of the Nordic scene that is different, so please forgive the simplification.)  I like my LARP as a serialised form, and I like it good and pulpy – the more-or-less traditional UK (and US) style, and that’s what I’m going to run.  But I think there are lessons I can learn from the Nordic form, and I’ll come on to that in posts to come.

In closing, I commend the following to your attention: http://www.meetup.com/Nordic-Progressive-Larp-in-Britain-and-Ireland/

There are some nice-seeming people trying to get a Nordic LARP scene started in London, and of particular interest, they are running a series of interesting one-offs, more or less fortnightly for the next few months.  I’m going to try to get along to a few, and if anyone I know is are interested, I might have a go at facilitating a couple of one-offs myself in a few months time (if I can find some interested players), just to see how people feel about the experiences.

 

Visitors Must Report To Site Office

alasdair

Hardhats to be worn at all times.  Insert men at work graphic here.

Right, with any luck, I’ve now got that joke out of my system, tortured that metaphor to death, and we can get on with things now.

An introductory explanation, then.  I’ve been running/facilitating LARPs in London for about six/seven years now (consistently, anyway – I’ve been running and playing LARPS on and off for about 18 years now). The recent set have included one reasonably conventional old World of Darkness Vampire LARP (Interregnum), one experimental home-grown thing (Testament), and a fairly unconventional new World of Darkness crossover LARP (Restitution), which completed in March 2014.

I intend to run a new game, starting late this year, or possibly at the very start of next year.  It will be an Urban Fantasy/Horror LARP in a similar vein to a World of Darkness LARP – it may even mostly be a World of Darkness LARP – but I am taking 2015 as a development year.  I will be faciliating once a month gatherings for anyone who is interested in playing to meet up and discuss ideas for this game, in the hope that a collaborative development process with produce a LARP that is better than average, and most importantly, better than the ones I have run before.

I’ve set this blog up to be a reference point for interested parties, and a place to write up my developing thoughts on LARP in general, and this future game in specific.