LARPwriting.org

Threads Blue

2009-12-04T15:50:41Z

Earlier this year http://larpwriting.livejournal.com/81452.html, I announced dates and startup information for an "Adult" themed event.

We're gearing up for writing, reg and final production now.

Threads Blue

Jan 29, 2010

Private Hotel Site, Washington Metro Area, Suburban MD
(Site info will be sent only to participants)

If you are interested, please e-mail me so I can get you onto the list. Signing onto the list does not mean that you are registering for the event and committing to come. It does mean you have a serious interest in this and followup events.

I shouldn't have to say this, but...I will show a draconian intolerance for kibbitzers who show up on the list to offer a lot of "help" which amounts to micromanagement and criticism, with no plan of actually coming to the event. That's not fair to the volunteers working to make this project fun for everyone involved.

That said, I hope you'll drop me a note and feel free to join us in seeing the shape of the Threads Blue event. Thanks!

2009 LARP Roast - Kirt Dankmyer

2009-11-26T03:47:15Z

I know we're all busy with the holidays, but I wanted to remind folks that the 7th Annual LARP Roast is coming up (Saturday 5 December). This is an occasion when the local LARP Community comes together to honor someone who has done outstanding service in the past year.

For folks who don't game with him regularly, I'd still like to urge people to come out and support Kirt Dankmyer who is this year's honoree. It's a fun, hilarious occasion, and there is an endless afterparty.

The evite, which includes details and menu information, is available online at http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/LZIOMXEBIDRVYNQERSTY/2009roast.

Since the deadline for payment and RSVP, just three days away, is in the middle of the holiday weekend, I wanted to give everyone a last minute heads up. If you would like to come to the Roast, we need to receive your payment of $45 on or before Saturday, 28 November 2009. If for some reason you can't pay for the Roast right now, please contact me and we'll try to work something out. We can only accept "at the door" payments by pre-arrangement, and that arrangement must be made before Saturday 28 November 2009.

More information about the Roast:

http://www.larpwriting.org/roast/index.shtml

IMA Cancelled for 2009

2009-08-17T23:56:18Z

This is a short note to say that IMA is officially cancelled for 2009.

The responses I got back confirmed what I have come to believe

1) Many people enjoy the Convention, but it is a third or fourth priority for almost all of them
2) There is not a strong core audience for the convention at this point
3) Most importantly offers of actual advertising and recruiting are minimal. If I were to twist every arm that responded, I could not reasonably expect to get more than a half-dozen to a dozen new people. This ties back to (1) - many people would vaguely like the convention to occur, but making it happen is just not a strong priority.

I think we have to be realistic. Events do reach the end of their lifespan at least in current form. A couple of people commented about it being "too late to save IMA." We've been putting as much time as was *reasonable* into the Convention for nine years. "Saving" it would be an exercise in Pyrrhic victories...a "save" that cost more than the benefit."

In the end IMA as it is currently configured does not hold up to any level of Cost-Benefit Analysis.

I'm open to new approaches, and helping if someone wants to organize a grass roots effort in 2010. Feel free to contact myself or Eric Johnson after Danzig. I feel the Region could probably benefit from some pan-LARP event, but clearly it needs a new core audience and a new approach.

And at the risk of seeming brusque, offers that boil down to "I am willing to tell you what to do, if you do the work and spend the money" are less welcome than offers of actual time, organizational skill, and capital.

History of the Intercon Name

2009-08-10T15:48:23Z

Teem made a comment I thought I'd break out into a longer post

I personally think marketing of the 'Intercon' name hasn't been done well from the initial 'numbers vs. letters' split. (But I really wasn't involved in things then and I don't know all the whys of what was decided.) The sudden change to regionalizing the names of conventions--okay, it was sudden from our point of view in New England--wasn't orchestrated well. I tried, with a couple others, to get the name changed up here to 'Intercon New England' but we got outvoted. (I won't say outargued because I still consider the reasons specious.) Since I was doing much of the communications for the last five-six years, I tried to be careful in naming each of the conventions, but perception tends to win the battle. (And probably 14.2% of the people reading this post will care.)

Well there is a lot of history there, and I think it is worth recapping in full.

One thing to understand is that the suddeness from the New England point of view was based largely on perception, and I think it may be worth recapping both the actual history of Intercon and the myths I've collected over the years.

SILiCon left Boston to go to New Haven with IV, then moved to Trevose V, and Annapolis VI. The plan after VI was that the Convention would move to NJ or NY to be "equally inconvenient to everybody." The reality was that the long travel was a financial strain on everyone and only the "top circle" of attendees would go 250+ miles to attend a convention.

When the original leaders of the SIL withdrew support from the ILF which they'd co-founded at the Annapolis Convention, the ILF leadership held the Convention in Northern Jersey the next year as an olive branch and to make it clear that we were reaching out to Boston LARPers. In practice very few came, and the Convention was a disastrous and painful financial failure. It was run into the teeth of the 1992 Recession, and fared amazingly poorly

ILF went through an additional set of local political upheavals, in retrospect largely driven by the 1992 Recession. Job loss by some of the officers sparked Depression. With everyone stressed, depressed, and out of work, confrontation and infighting was inevitable.

Acknowledging political and financial realities, it was clear that if the Convention was to run at all, it needed to run locally. It was moved to Baltimore Maryland for VIII.

This began two years of misfortune, which it is a vague miracle that Intercon survived. VIII had a bad blizzard, but was already suffering because four hour games were rising in popularity and the Intercon format was "full length v. full length" which was bound to be Problematic.

In the meantime Stephanie ran 7.5 and proved the "all minigame" concept on a small scale. That's a bit of history worth noting. The modern Intercon - all Four Hour games and a Dance was introduced by my wife in 1992.

The ILF Board and Officers refused to issue a charter to run 8.5 until it was too late to run it. I ran the doomed Intercon IX - a convention of full length games at a time when all the good TSFL groups were producing in their own venues, and everyone clearly wanted a convention of four hour games. I asked the Board, which then controlled Intercon about making the Convention one of four hour games and was told that the "Board wasn't ready to do that yet." There is nothing like running a failed concept that everyone already knows is obsolete. The convention did about as you'd expect, dismally.

Stephanie proved the minigame concept at 9.5, which was the first con that you would find almost indistinguishable except in size from J, and took over X, moving the convention to Ocean City.

In the meantime I was working heavily to rebuild ties to younger less radicalized Boston gamers. This began what I think many people still enshrine as a "golden era" for Intercon with the Conventions running steadily and stably, one in Maryland and one in New Jersey.

In practical terms the road trip was hard and we always had to struggle to get attendance at the Jersey Convention, but we began to rebuild a Boston player-base. Internally, the Intercon system came close to extinction with IX, and between 1994 and 1996 I worked with Stephanie closely to rebuild it. She chaired the conventions and I served as a lead officer for the ILF. It's worth noting that this time period 1995-1998 was also the "Golden Age" of the hotel based Theatre Style Full Length game. Other people were also important. Mike Young and Dirk Parham did an excellent job of building Intercon XI.

Unfortunately 1997 was also the "year that killed LARP" with a string of expensive TSFL howlers that left audiences crying...and not for more. Comparatively Intercon prospered because it offered a more stable experience. But the failure of TSFL by 1999 was also spelling a cloud for the future of TSFL LARP in general in the Mid-Atlantic. The mid-90s also saw vampire LARP eclipse all other forms of LARP in the US as we recognized when we tried to organize an ill fated White Wolf game at sequential Intercons.

As early as 11.5 in Mt. Laurel, it was a declared plan that Intercon would return to Boston and the chief barrier was the lack of someone locally to take responsibility for organizing. New Jersey was the far edge of the range at which Stephanie and I could run a con "by remote control."

To his credit, Jeff Diewald was the person to accept the challenge, agreeing 1997 to organize XIII in Natick in 1998.

The turn of the century saw some really dramatic changes...

All the original discussions over Intercon in Boston centered around the concept that the flag of the "Annual Convention" would rotate. So, for example XIV would be in Baltimore, XV in Boston, and so forth...

Unfortunately there was some partisanship. There was a mythology that was at odds with the facts which I've often heard repeated. In this mythology, SiliCon was run in Boston until the original SIL members withdrew from the ILF and then was "taken" to the south. With XIII it was brought "back to Boston"at the insistence of Boston activists.

In reality of course no such thing occured. The Convention was moved to New Haven by the original organizers when they made Bob Vincelette Chair, and moved to Trevose by Greg Frock, who was at the time an intimate of at least some of the original SIL crew. When it moved south to Annapolis, there was some politicizing by myself and others for a "fair shot," but at the time the established plan was to rotate it back and forth from New England to Baltimore until it could settle in NJ. And after the split it returned to NJ, not Washington. Likewise, I and other "southern" Board members had canvassed heavily for Bostonians to join the ILF leadership, and the issue was not holding onto the convention with a deathgrip but finding someone willing to chair it, which did not exist until Jeff Diewald came along.

But...this legend led to some "regionalism" and it was put forward that Boston would run XIV. This wasn't as planned or talked about, but at the time, it seemed worth not fighting over. Thus through 2000, the Annual Convention was in Boston. In 2001, I decided that "enough was enough" and that it was time the Annual Convention began rotating again as we'd always planned.
There was reason behind my madness. The Boston Convention was prospering and the Baltimore Convention was failing. The reason was simple enough. TSFL had failed by 1999 and in 1997-2001, a series of powerful campaigns were sweeping the DC area. XPI began to draw a strong player base, the Mike Young's Dark Summonings and my Mersienne Medieval Fantasy. The failure of TSFL was proving to have a catastrophic fallout for Intercon and we desperately needed a new player base. The number of campaign games meant that a campaign that was only starting in May of 2000 had created an entrenched and loyal following within 12 months, something no TSFL game had been able to equal.

With Intercon Millennium we had proven that the Convention could draw a heavy party-base. That it could galvanize the Campaign Crowd by being a place for them to hang out that was not campaign focused.
Intercon IAGO was the last effort in the south to organize a con with a traditional rotating chair. Intercon had prospered with Stephanie or I as Chairs, and a few other people had given talented service while one of us acted as a primary staff officer. But as Intercon became more specialized the idea of tapping a random layman to serve as Chair was doomed, and the implosion of the attempt to run a second Millennium Convention was emblematic of this.

So...successful campaigns, a successful model to harness campaign players, and a track record of intimidating failures that looked like it could doom Intercon in the South. I wanted to pull out all the stops to produce a really first rate convention, and I felt that returning the Annual Convention flag would be a boon to this. At the same time some of the partisanship in Boston seemed to have been quieted, and people were behaving quite sensibly.

I don't want to sound accusatory talking about "partisanship in Boston," and not in Maryland. It is the case though that it fell out that way. Boston had a large student population of people who had free time and few real life constraints. It was usually the younger and more radical of these people that lent support to partisan ideas, based on half-understood stories about the past. That population largely didn't exist in Maryland because the large student population didn't exist. The truth is I could not *find* anyone in Maryland to care about the "Annual Convention" title.

At the same time, another major strain was going on. The ILF had died. The Board of Directors had decided in the late 90s to back Sandy Antunes' plan to produce Metagame as a print magazine. Sandy was a reasonable and not unrealistic guy. At the Board Meeting where the idea was presented he said "99% of all gaming magazines fail." The Board heard "we can have a print magazine."

Even in 1997-98 it was clear that print was dying and the Web becoming ascendant. But that was a "silly thing to say," if you asked already-graying 90s TSFL players. Sandy thought maybe having the backbone of an NPO to subsidize a core print run would give a "margin of viability" that other magazines had lacked. In all cases before the early 2000's recession firmly hit the US in 2001-2002, it was hitting Europe and killing small business chains. A major distributor collapse and gaming industry downturn torpedoed Metagame, and the ILF became insolvent, and was turned over into LARPA.

The ILF was already becoming irrelevant. It had never had the slightest buy in from boffer gamers, and had scant support from vampire. In practical terms it was the organization for Theatre Style LARP and might have done better to sell itself that way. Instead it tried to be everything to everybody and ended up being nuffin' to nobody.

So...the world was changing and if Intercon was to be saved changes needed to occur.

It was never my intention to "take the official number back" from Boston. The actual plan was more what Teem describes. Each regional convention would have a name "Intercon New England, Intercon Mid-Atlantic," and the designation of "Annual Convention" with a Roman Numeral would be an honor that floated between them.

In practice this was not the way it worked out.

Another myth that I got to hear often a few years ago, but is less common now is how the NEIL Convention "declared independence" from LARPA, and what not. In fact nothing could be further from the case. The establishment of NEIL came after a set of ugly internecine conflicts among the New England convention staff in which I as ILF CSO had been repeatedly canvassed by parties on both sides to intervene.

Not having been born yesterday, I well understood the actual situation. If I intervened on one side, the other side would cry foul that "people 400 miles away with no vested interest were making decisions for a Boston Convention" and I'd be roundly stoned by them. In the end the ILF had ultimate fiduciary responsibility for Intercon, but no effective channel to exercise management control. It was clear that nobody wanted a bunch of Marylanders telling them how to run the local con, right up until they got into a hopeless brawl with each other in which case each wanted me to play referee...but only if I favored them.

At the same time I had my own problems. Intercon in Baltimore had ceased to be financially viable around the time of Millennium. It had never been prosperous and no Intercon had ever done more than make a small profit. Increasingly I was the sole financial support for the Con. I already ran a chain of events every year most of which lost small amounts of money. The difference is that when those events ran, I could take back any nominal receipts to cover losses. With Intercon I was using the same infrastructure to stage the convention I was to stage the 1936 Campaign, but I wasn't able to take any money back...it belonged to the ILF, an organzation that I already provided most of the funding for. I could pay in, but not take back.

The remedy to both problems was clear. The regional cons ought to be autonomous, licensing the shared Intercon name with a set of agreements as to the fundamental things that "made" an Intercon - an Open Bid Process, Non-Discrimination, and Shared Promotion.

Oddly this initially met with resistance. I think the keystone is that while everybody in Massachusetts generally did not want an organization with a Maryland center running their con, they did not have a strong agreement on who would run it, and the early political infighting was still going fairly strong. So I was in the odd position of having to "push" New England to form a leadership group that would run the Convention. A further complication was that I chose to push the requirement that the the organization have some sort of elected structure and constitution. It needn't be Democratic, but it must at least exist and show "community participation and support."

In the end leadership did emerge and NEIL was formed.

I don't think it's mine to go into the political history of NEIL and I doubt that everyone would agree on it in any case. I took the whole number for the next local convention, with the intention that it would be passed back and forth between NEIL and the shell organization formed to fulfill the same organization for IMA.

I'd explained the theory of the Roman Numeral designating the honor of being the year's Annual Convention several times. Certainly there are other organizations where this occurs...several regions have conventions, but annually one is the "Annual Convention" and has a number and is larger.

The NEIL Board decided instead, for whatever reasons to establish its own numbering scheme separately, using letters. I honestly think that the reason was simply that the concept of the rotating Annual Convention was not broadcast well, and there was still some feeling that the rotating Annual Convention number that had "belonged to Boston" since it was settled there to promote XIII was "taken away" with XIV.

In the long run, it is likely that IMA was doomed when TSFL precipitously collapsed in 1999. The new strategies I developed kept it vital for an additional 8 years, and I think that is nothing to sneeze at. In practical terms, I think it has been made obsolete by its competitors, and that what energy remains to it should be rolled back into other LARP conventions and events.

In historical retrospect the great changes in Intercon were driven by the economy. The stress and tension of the 1992 Recession drove the SIL/ILF split, and the 2000 Recession drove the failure of Metagame, the dissolution of the ILF and the formation of NEIL. The end of IMA is so firmly tied to the current recession as to be indivisible. The one thing we are improving on is practicality efficiency in these changes.

I'll make a final annoucement later this week but it seems unlikely that IMA will run this year, and I personally do not think it is likely that a group will present an organized plan to revive it next year. Last year I discussed the concept that both Intercons should promote the "25th Anniversary," and I hope that whether or not the number XXV is used, the New England Con will consider promoting the 25th Anniversary if IMA does not exist.

While the New England Convention seems "huge" compared to IMA, it is tiny and a mere flicker. Gaming Conventions of less than 500 are considered little better than "student conventions" and barely show up on National Radar. The growth to 300 clearly suprised everyone, and I get a sense of question in where to go from here. I think that this is a time of promise and concern for LARP. if it is properly nourished and organized, the NEIL convention will continue to grow - though that may mean making scary choices to move to a larger venue and embrace carrying the flag of LARP nationally. Unfortuantely I think in many ways IMA is mostly constituting a distraction to the central issue of the growth of Intercon as the intellectual center of U.S. LARP, and at this time I think that is where we need to look for the future growth of LARP as the decade of the 2000s draws to a close.

The Fate of Intercon Mid-Atlantic - A Discussion

2009-08-06T17:19:55Z

Last week I circulated this message to some of the people who were nominal leaders of the Community that has produced IMA in the past. This week I am posting it for public discussion. The short version is that after looking at last year's attendance, the economy, attendance patterns and falloff in other events, and the overall situation, I am strongly inclined to cancel IMA. We have until 27 September to cancel without prejudice, and only about two refunds to issue. My recomendation will ultimately be based on the replies here.

I want to get the tone of the message across. This is not a "ZOMG my Con is dying please HALP!" message. If anything the Con is dying largely because my other project, Threads is more wildly successful than I would have expected, and that an two other events, one of which I also organize, are making IMA obsolete. So I'm not weeping here.

What I want is a calm, realistic Community Discussion to determine for how many people IMA serves a special need that is really not met by any other event.

The Finances.

I ran two projections on IMA

The first showed 85 attendees, with 45% GM attendees (comped) and 65% paid attendees, splitting to 35% at the post September rate. This yielded $1425. A better case, with a 33% split in every category and an attendance of 100 showed $1980 in revenue.

In running expenses, the Hampton, which we fortunately have good information on, yields a base cost of $2176. This can be cut to $1688 if the Convention does not have any suite rooms in which to run. With food the cost is $2776. That’s using a very low food projection, about 2/3 of a Threads budget. No money is budgeted for supplies of any kind, because Intercon uses Threads existing infrastructure.

So at best case:
shortfall $608
worst case:
shortfall $1653

My actual projection of the shortfall is $1165 which is a not inconsiderable sum.

Intercon Mid Atlantic has 6 bids, all of which are good:

10 Bad LARPs: C-Section Nat Budin
Callahan's Continuum Shane Amerman
Limbo! Aaron Vanek
Office Party Carolyn Grodt
The Ducetown Diner James MacDougal
Veteran's Day Tegan Hendrickson

It’s worth noting that Callahan’s has been seen at an Intercon before. That leaves 5 original bids.

What is Wrong with Intercon Mid-Atlantic?

I want to do a little analysis of what is wrong with IMA, and what it would take to continue to operate it.

1) It is nobody’s priority

I think we need to be realistic. This Convention is nobody’s priority, including mine. In practical fact it takes a backseat to Threads, other local Campaigns (not currently an issue but likely to be an issue with Source next year), and increasingly the Roast. Even though I am moving away from acting as the sole central administrator for Threads, I do not realistically see it becoming less of an issue for my time before the end of 2011.

I need to be blunt about the reason I began serving as permanent Chair. It is no more helpful to have a “new chair” for Intercon than it would be to have a “Guest Executive Producer” for Threads. It means the same things get done by a new person who doesn’t know how to do them, so they take twice as long, use about as much of my time (since Stephanie or I are the only available teachers), and often make the volunteer in the leadership role feel invalidated, when they cannot do the job as well as someone with 10+ years of experience. I think this is a factor of learning curve, not of competence. Perfectly competent people like Shelly Mohnkern discharged the job admirably. Nevertheless, functionally, Intercon took no less of my time, effort, and money in that year than any other, because of the nature of the specialized work.

The only time it has worked well to have Intercon under “different management” is when someone who already had a strong knowledge of event production like Mike Young stepped forward to be involved. Otherwise “new leadership” has been little more than an exercise in having a “Ritual King.”

it would be very good if someone with 10+ years of event organization experience and a very strong understanding of LARP structure and promotion stepped forward to take over Intercon. People with less experience could step forward in support roles, if their intent was actually mostly to do support work, not mostly to hold a title like “Vice-Con Chair.”

I’m going to add one personal note here. Since 1993, the losses for any southern Intercon, even when it was an “ILF” Convention have come out of my pocket and Stephanie’s when they could not be met at the con by volunteerism. None of the Conventions since 1998 have actually been profitable, so much of the overrun came out of my pocket. One reason I took over complete management of the Convention was to give myself more control over the overrun. Before the early 2000s, I was in the position that Intercon came out of my pocket, but I was not always in charge and could not do anything to really ameliorate the hit that I took.

Note that ILF dues were never substantial and that all dues money was lost on Metagame during the last two years of production, so I was at that point the sole financial backer for the southern convention. LARPA was theoretically a partner, but it should be noted that from 2000 on, LARPA had exactly one source of income - a tea at which I paid $500 for food to raise $280 or so in contributions.

I don’t want to seem mean, or stingy, but like Threads, IMA must be brought into a situation of at least *controlled loss* and I am unwilling to surrender “final authority” to anyone who is not willing to accept “final fiscal responsibility.” I don't want somebody generously running a disaster I then have to pay for, with me unable to do things to staunch the loss because I'm not in charge.

2) The recession

I do not think there is any question that the Recession is pounding us. There is room elsewhere to investigate why the Northern Con had its biggest surge of membership ever in the teeth of the recession. I think there are various really good structural reasons for that which unfortunately do not apply to IMA.

Our losses last year in membership were actually less bad than might be expected. A major local kink event in the same time frame was down 33%-40% on membership and revenues. We were only down about 20-25%.

The problem is that the recession is merely the straw that broke the camels’ back. It is taking a convention that was never profitable and cost a lot of personal money to produce, and adding $400-500 to that price tag, taking it from “expensive” to “ridiculous.”

Unfortunately there is no immediate sign that the recession is going to end and things go back to normal. Maybe by next year, but not this year, and there is no really good projective data.

3) Local Crowd breaking up

I think we also have to look at the fact that events tend to follow a core audience. If you look over the core attendance of IMA (or Millennium) at the turn of the Century, it is very much the core attendance of Dark Summonings, MMFC, or the first years of 1936. Mixed with that is a crowd of graying 40-something LARPers who came out of the last four years of the heyday of TSFL, and never really bridged to campaigns.

The 40somethings are now 50something and staying home. They’ve been out of touch with LARP so long that once a year doesn’t cut it to stay involved. Unlike the Delaware crowd, their social group is not focused on IMA.

The group that was then the 30something core are now the graying 40somethings. If you look around Threads, that core group has fallen off by about 70-80%. There are a few attendees who entered 1936 as 30somethings but by and large that is not the core demographic.

Threads, because it is an exciting and vital campaign, has picked up a new audience, driven by 20somethings and current 30somethigns, and is doing very well. But that momentum did not convey to IMA.

One of the big draws of IMA was that it was a place where the “Current” LARP crowd of 2004 could meet their friends who had been “out of the scene” for a bit since the death of TSFL in 1998. Realistically this crowd can now be counted on the fingers of one hand.

4) Redundant to Threads

With the fading of the “Crossover” Old-School TSFL crowd as a major driving force, that leaves IMA heavily dependent on the Threads Community for its core attendance. If every regular attendee who went to Threads went to IMA, and we got a few more people, the con would be fine.

But Threads players, even locals, are not actually drawn to supporting IMA in any drastic numbers. That may change this year with IMA back in DC, but I have concerns and doubts.

The core problem is this. The heart of IMA is alive and well but it is Threads of Damocles.

At the turn of the century a typical 1936 or Dark Summonings episode would have a brief period to socialize Friday night, with players mostly working out IC issues. The rest of the weekend would be an adventure, and Saturday night usually found the players hiding behind barricades and fighting monsters.

IMA was often billed as “the place you can come and actually meet and talk to the people who you game with all year.”

From 2004 on, through 1948, Brassy’s Men, and Threads, that changed. Evenings were increasingly given to parties or socializing. Brassy’s Men formalized that with the Texas Embassy, and Threads Oasis was designed specifically to fill the niche of the Texas Embassy.

So suddenly people have five chances a year to hang out IC/OOC without much pressure and talk, hang out, socialize and have a drink.

The Intercon Party drove IMA from Millennium through 2007 – but now it has been replaced with the Oasis Party at Threads, and the extra chance to see a few people that most of the local crowd doesn’t know is not worth the extra expense.

5) Redundant to Threads Ontology

I think it's also important to realize the extent to which Threads has sapped even the basic premise of Intercon. Through 2007 if you wanted to play a game in the Washington Metro region that wasn't about Adventure in the Mid-20th century, you came to IMA. Now someone who is really excited about running an event about Pirates or Cyberpunk Corporate Wars can do that just as easily through Threads as not. And the efficiency is stunning. Producing a module takes 40-80% less time than an Intercon Four Hour.

While there are a dwindling handful of players for whom this flexibility and tradeoff is not sufficient, to the vast majority it satisfies the need not to be 'stuck in one genre.' That has undercut IMA...and even travel to the Boston Convention...more than anyone would have anticipated.

It's hard for me to be sad about this. The fact that We've designed a service model that is tremendously successful is something it's hard not to be proud of, even as it marginalizes an older service model.

6) Redundant to the Roast

To make matters worse, we’ve also created another LARP event which is a party which is drawing the old line LARP crowd together with newcomers. The Roast, in the same window as IMA is clearly sapping some of the urgency of attending IMA. Since the Roast is currently more successful, damning it to try to keep IMA afloat seems a foolish move.

7) INE and Splash

I think it’s worth also making a note on the impact of Intercon Northeast and Splash. For three years the core LARPA staff gathered volunteers and pushed hard to make INE work, to bring Intercon into a major 1000+ attendee venue.

We’ll never know if that would have been a success or a failure. I am inclined to say that the experiment was already a failure when it ended. There was simply no traction for getting more than a slender handful of new people involved in the LARPs. We might have done about as well promoting without a major con – the 10-15 people who ever showed interest are about the number of random attendees the better attended Intercons usually got stand-alone. To say the least the ROI was making it hard to justify the expense and effort.

But the INE experiment ended when personal issues caused the Dexcon proprietors to choose not to continue to work with some of the LARPA staff and discontinue their support.

Along the way, during three core years for promoting and transiting IMA, the LARPA staff was putting heroic effort into pushing INE, and letting IMA get the dregs of attention. During those years IMA might have built a new audience to replace the graying crowd, but it was not heavily promoted because INE simply required too much time and labor to allow IMA to be focal.

Intercon Splash

Intercon Splash becomes no more than a nail in the coffin. Last year, the proximity of a large cruise event damaged IMA attendance which was already bad. If it continues, Splash will draw the graying 40’s LARPer crowd completely out of IMA. At this point however, that would seem to be the “least of our problems," and we can consider that it is a good destination for that group, giving them a firm home.

Splash has troubles of its own, and is currently postponed but not cancelled. If IMA is withdrawn, it has a better chance at success.

7) Northern Convention

I’m very reluctant to mention the Northern Convention for reasons that become obvious, but I think we need to look at a few things realistically. I expect that 90% of the comments this gets on my blog will be people waging a "defense" against something that is no more than a bland statement of fact about a minority of people.

Marketing Position – it’s worth realizing that everything that is promoted needs some sort of marketing position or marketing message. This describes the niche it fills to people who are looking for a product. Nobody markets a Boffer game as “just another bunch of people running around with PVC fighting generic monsters.” The only basis for marketing generica is in a market where rate is important enough that “lower prices” is a convincing marketing tool. Thus generic medicines and grocery store brands prosper.

I’ve experimented with several marketing positions with IMA that spoke to the niche it already occupied. To market the Convention as very party-heavy (at a time when big parties were popular and a major attraction) and to market the Convention as a focal con for intellectual activity and writers. Overwhelmingly we’ve tended to market the Convention as being risqué, edgy, and friendly . During the early 90s this was a very successful marketing position for us.

Impacts of the Northern Convention

Artificially Low Rates - The Northern Intercon charges much less than we do for Threads, and we cannot raise the price of our Intercon to meet the actual cost of our site, and still attract any custom from that direction.

We run in a Threads venue, for Threads rates, at “everybody come as cast” prices. CCP and SWC carry Threads budgetarily. Intercon can be run more cheaply than Threads, but not *infinitely* more cheaply than Threads. We could cut expenses by offering less hospitality in terms of food, and drink. Unfortunately if we do that we are undercutting what is left of the audience from our early 90s marketing position.

People are not generous. People may say they “understand” if Intercon cannot provide the meals that Threads does. But if “low end food” like dogs and mac and cheese falls to “chips and dip” and they end up having to go to Bob Evans for dinner, they are going to hold it against the Con, and they are going to consider it a problem.

When we looked at hotels closer in and within walking distance of food, we generally saw a really substantial markup in function space. So we are in a “Catch-22” in regards to space. If we could get a site near a good selection of fast food, we could probably cut back on food expenses. But if we did that, we’d still get complaints from our core audience and we’d pay higher function space bills, offsetting our gains.

To make matters worse, 300 can eat more cheaply than 100. A LOT more cheaply. Originally IMA served much better meals than the Northern Convention. But the work of Renee Cyr and eventually a focused staff, experience, and economy of scale have begun to allow the Northern Convention to do more with less money per attendee. Renee improved the food drastically and made the Con Suite something to be proud of. Because the Northern Con is bigger, it has an economy of scale that IMA simply cannot realize.

Promotion - the Kiss of Death

I had some interesting interactions at the recent Northern Con that reinforced a theory I have had for several years. The New England Convention is tiny by “real convention” standards (where 700-800 are threshold) but is huge by LARP standards, reaching 300 recently. Thus to LARPers the New England Convention is “the big LARP convention” and the Northern Convention markets that way. In ten years, I have heard a number of superlatives used in Shameless Plugs promoting the New England Convention.

The problem we have is that the 300+ audience of the Northern Convention is the largest target group of recruits in the country for our event. We are in front of a group of people probably 25% of whom have travelled a considerable distance to attend a LARP con. That’s target.

Unfortunately it is difficult to promote the Convention there. Obviously when we say “We have a great party” (I’ve been very careful never to actually use a superlative), we are trying to set up marketing position. In terms of how focal it is, the Party at the Northern Convention does not occupy as prominent a place, often not starting until 12:30 as opposed to our 10:00 start. There is no formal Friday night party. That's just realism, not being mean. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the Northern Party. It's simply not as focal.

Unfortunately when we say “ours is good” I might as well say “best” because that is what sensitive ears hear. In fact it’s another Catch-22. The more effective we are at identifying places where our con is different and has a unique marketing niche the more likely we are to hit a “sore spot” with someone in the North, because if it really is an area where IMA is stronger that provokes resentment.

The result is that to mention IMA in the north is to risk about a 1 in 10 chance that someone will “bristle and snort” indignantly. It's not everyone, it's not even most people. But that doesn't matter. It's a small and noisy minority that are consistently offended that we dare to say anything positive at all about IMA, becuase to do so is to implicitly criticize the Northern Convention.

Now, if you have a cause that is not of burning importance to you, that is not your bread and butter or life and death, and about once in ten times that you mention it you get a negative vibe back…what do YOU do?

In most cases, stop talking about it. Because…why would you? It is what I would do. Most mature people don't seek confrontation.

So it’s my considered opinion that except for a few core fans, IMA gets very little “word of mouth” in the Northern Community. Because one in ten people is prickly about it and considers talking up the other con to be treasonous, and while most people wouldn’t agree with that point of view, it’s widespread enough to make it more convenient just to dodge the issue. Few people voluntarily bring things up that are going to cause them grief and the ones that do go out of their way to seek confrontation are possibly not the best promoters. Speaking in a cheerful, friendly manner to attendees at the Northern Convention and suggesting they try Intercon Atlantic, I encountered belligerence from about 1 in 7 persons I talked to, ranging from mild negativity to active antipathy. In all cases the reason was clear. Support for IMA somehow implied disloyalty to the Northern Convention.

The ideal marketing pitch there would be “Just like this con, only not quite as good and smaller.”

Which will probably net us about the attendance we are already likely to get…which is “slender.”

There are other subsidiary and administrative issues that also make it more difficult to get a promotional message out, and make having a "Sister Convention" more a liability than an asset.

The Official Leadership of the Convention has been supportive in all but a few areas, however Mike Young has correctly determined that LARP sells by word of mouth. All the Official Help in the world doesn't do any good if giving IMA good word of mouth in the North has a one in ten chance of some hothead perceiving it as "treason" and being negative. And that's sadly just the case.

What Can be Done?

Should IMA be Saved?

I think we need to very seriously ask if there is a reason to continue to operate IMA. My personal vanity says “continue.” The con is heavily identified with me, and I’ll lose prestige if it shuts its doors. Unfortunately I need to think about things other than my personal vanity.

Even if I could easily afford to drop $1000+ (and the actual cost to me is higher…remember that’s just con losses, not my personal expenses the same as everyone else has), on IMA, I need to consider if that is wise. Am I actually BENEFITTING anyone. $1000 could do a lot for Threads of Damocles. In practical fact, most of the people who I am looking to directly benefit play Threads. To pay $1000 to invite a few older LARPers and stray New Englanders, who often feel “dragged” down to the Con to a party that is like a Threads Party but smaller seems bordering on senseless.

The LARPA contest is the one major thing which IMA produces which is an unquestionable “Good.” That said, I am not aware of any single individual on the planet other than the contest winners and myself and EMJ who has ever vocalized that. Because it’s been run privately and OOP at no great strain to the public, it is also a “good” that happens without much public attention or notice.

Part of me feels that even if an event similar to IMA were to be created, it ought to drop the Intercon name. The issue of “competing” in the Northern Intercon’s promotional area may be stupid, but it’s very real. As long as IMA promotes as an Intercon it is hamstrung from doing any serious self-promotion that might actually net attendance.

To be fair, I am not sure that the opposite would help. INE tried bribery, a heavy push, and a very strong full court press and got roughly nowhere promoting in the north. There is no reason to think we’d do drastically better.

A final issue is “things that IMA provided that the northern Convention didn’t” These are things that might stand as reasons for IMA to exist, in order to fill a need not being met in New England.

The Northern Convention in the early 2000s was an artistically repressive environment. Risque or “in your face” art was frowned on, and repressed in various ways directly or indirectly, mostly through peer pressure. In the mid-2000s a host of artists including Alleged Entertainment were a leader in changed that. I still think that some of the people at the Northern Convention may not welcome such challenges as much as they welcome other games, but there is no meaningful barrier to the production of “bleeding edge” or risqué material that I can see in practice. This means that IMA is not necessary as the "only place" that such work can be produced.

IMA had some excellent roundtable discussions, and in the early 2000s was without question an intellectual center for LARP design. But with the addition of the ”Thursday Thing” sheer numbers seem likely to make the Thursday of the Northern Convention a more widely known and recognized focal point.

Finally, IMA is not the only regional hub for small LARP. Relaxicon, run in Wilmington DE by Wilmark Dynasty is a 2-4 hour format event which could benefit from greater promotion and attendance. In pragmatic terms, if my own vanity was not taken into consideration, there might be more *benefit* to the Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington LARP crowd that is core to Threads if Relaxicon were to receive the energy that has gone into IMA.

I have to ask, with the existence of the NEIL Intercon, Thursday Thing, Relaxicon, The Roast, and Threads of Damocles … “is Intercon Mid-Atlantic really a useful thing to have around,” and I’d like reflections on that.

If not, then I think that much of the effort that has gone into IMA could be put into:

a) Finding a more permanent home for the LARPA contest.

b) Producing Threads Season IV

c) Producing and promoting the LARP Roast more widely and at a better venue.

d) Promoting Relaxicon

Personal Angle

While I have undertaken to heavily support it the last ten years, IMA is not all about me. It is a regional Convention. The question for me is “is this a Regional undertaking that Gordon manages to benefit other people in the Region or is this increasingly a regional undertaking that Gordon manages for no other reason than his own stubbornness and vanity.” To that extent I need to honestly ask “who cares about this convention.” I’m not looking for a sugar coated answer. I think it is a very real possibility IMA has simply outlived its usefulness.

Can IMA be Saved?

If Intercon Mid-Atlantic is to happen, several things must occur

1) The prospective 2009 losses need to be trimmed to a sustainable 200-300 dollars.

2) IMA needs to generate at least another 7 bids. Most of these need to be exciting new bids by credible authors not either “unlikely to run” bids, or “mercy bids” where experienced authors dust off an archaic work to re-run.

3) IMA needs to sustain a near-100 attendance, and show reasonable promise of expanding

Cost Cutting/Fundraising measures

Intercon cannot dramatically cut its food service at the current venue, because there is no place to send people to eat within safe walking distance. Intercon can hold its schedule to the three available run spaces, and not book additional suites, cutting the venue cost somewhat.

Intercon cannot cut its “subsidiary” expenses because it doesn’t have any. Every sticker, label, bag, or staple used by IMA is already bought and in stock for VIA/Threads.

One problem with holding “fundraisers” at the Convention is that since it is more clear than ever that I am the Producer/financial backer, it is more clear than ever that it is not “raising money for IMA” but in fact “raising money to cut my losses.” While this seems fair to me, I honestly don’t think it sells well or plays well, and I try to avoid it.

That said, we can cite the recession and go with fundraisers we have not seen in some time, including:

Pieing
Thermometer/contributions
Heavier Raffle push

A heavier raffle push means “better prizes.” This becomes a critical action step. If IMA is to continue, we need individuals willing to say “I will call this specific place and try to get prizes donated.” Or “I will donate this prize which is a thing that is not junk or a joke that someone might want to win.”

Attendees

The other question that really needs to be answered is “what makes the target audience of IMA different from Threads.” One theory has been that the “College Park LARP Crowd” or a larger "Virginia/Maryland Crowd," would converge on IMA. For the last few years, the theory has been that they have not, because IMA was not local. And we have drawn out a few people like Jon L. who do not play Threads.

But we need to ask… “how do we promote to those people.” There is presumably a target audience among the 10-20% of players of local campaigns in the last three years who would like to play something other than a campaign in the genre they did. It is also the case that most of the local campaigns have shut down. There are regional Vampire and Garou games, but in general the tendency of those specialized players to “cross over” has never been very high, and we lack charismatic people to carry a strong promotional message into the core of those groups.

Also, in regards to regional LARPers, If IMA did not really gain any significant traction when events like AGOT, et. al. were running with IMA attendees going to them, why do we think it is going to gain traction with that crowd of people now, when they are spread out and harder to reach?

The question is not getting these people to come out and have mercy on poor IMA. The question is “does IMA have any meaningful role as a local nexus/feeder event.” If the answer is no, then it is very hard to see that it has an audience left at all that isn't better served by Threads, the Roast, and Splash. If the answer is “yes” who are they and where do we contact them.

The Myth of the General Public.

I’m going to take a moment here just to debunk a myth that has wasted more Southern Convention Committee meeting time than everything that Adam and Jamie ever explored. The Myth of the General Public and “putting signs up on college campuses.”

For years it has been an instant panacea that if only IMA would “promote to college gaming groups” and “put signs up on college campuses” we would be awash in the attendees the Northern Con has. This despite the fact that our big regional schools are laid back commuter schools like GW and Mason.

Let’s understand something for starters. The Northern con gets students because their area has more higher learning institutions than any other part of the nation per capita, and overwhelmingly they are not commuter schools. “ Although Brandeis has a commuter lounge, there are almost no commuter students (understandable given the terrible parking shortage), so most students actually need to live on campus.” 80% of Brandeis undergrads live on Campus.

62% of GMU students are commuters, and the other schools in our area aren’t much better. The result is that except for one school – UMD – there is really none of the energy that makes up the membership of the northern Convention. A full court press at George Mason is not going to net the same results as a full course press at WPI or Brandeis.

What people do not understand is that the percentages also lie.

At Brandeis, where approximately 0% of students are commuters, all life is structured and organized through campus.

At GMU, you would think that 48% of life would be structured and organized through campus. But that's not the case. It's probably (I attended GMU, and also UNC-G which was a less commuter-based school) about 5%. The reason is that at GMU, 50% of the students have transportation. Typically in social groups one in four or one in ten people are ringleaders or transport providers. At GMU that is a high enough percentage that almost ALL social life can take place off Campus. Parties are at suburban group-houses, and other than needing to "hitch a ride" most students simply integrate into the social life of the suburbs. UMD is the only school of any size at all big enough that this is not true. GWU might provide a better focus, but in addition to being a very unusual school, it also benefits from a nightlife that really spills into Foggy Bottom and DC proper.

So the percentages don't tell the whole truth. DC probably has only a tiny fraction of the percentage of "participatory" student population as Boston, even when the numbers look roughly equal on paper. Given the structures of our schools, our turnout - which is to say any at all - is probably about the best we can reasonably hope for.

There is not some magical talisman where we can go to a campus put up a couple of signs and get attendees. Signs usually have to be approved by student organizations, and the places they can be put up for free (coffee shops, etc.) are not overwhelmingly likely to generate a lot of traffic. What has worked in the north is sustained contact with well organized student groups that are the heart and soul of student life on the campuses they occupy. In our area, the heart and soul of campus life is taking 95 home to dinner.

I’m not against the idea of on campus promotion. But let’s bear in mind the realities

It takes someone in the local student organization to sponsor most promotions or postings
Only with full support of the local student club is any really strong attendance going to happen.
That requires cold calling if we don’t already have the contact
It requires time investment to follow up, maintain the contact, and promote involvement.

If anybody has the time outside of Threads to do this, let me know.

Inroads Locally

In twelve years of contact with XPI and three with ARC, I can count the number of people who crossed over and came to Intercon…despite aggressive promotion by myself, and others, on the fingers of one hand.

Likewise, despite multiple promotions, I am not aware of anyone from the Wilmark Dynasty Crowd who has ever come to an Intercon without first passing through Threads.

Promotions to standing groups are just hard. Again, I am not saying not to do them. But I am wondering why they would work now if they didn’t work in 2004.

Word of Mouth

Mike Young has said that LARP is sold by word of mouth. That’s basically true. Shameless plugs can create awareness, and push word of mouth, but nearly every individual who comes new to Intercon comes because a “Friend brought them.”

What we need to see to make IMA sustainable is any substantial commitment to a “word of mouth” campaign. Blog mentions, Twitter mentions, and direct contact. We need to see people saying “I will bring at least one friend.”

Summary

If Intercon Mid-Atlantic is to continue it needs the following things:

a) Some evidence that there is actually regional support for it. That it continues for any reason other than that I hold it and pay for it. That it is meeting a need

b) Individuals to volunteer to get raffle prizes. By calling, using connections, or donating things that are not trash or junk, or blatantly obsolete surplus.

c) Individuals to volunteer to do promotions to narrow, targeted audiences. This means “I will carry fliers, make an announcement, and personally get invested in IMA at X specific event.” Basically we need the kind of promotion where someone stands up and says “I am going to this great event.”

d) Mention on Twitter, IM, and lists. Very few people ever pass along the IMA promotional mails because it is “awkward.”

e) Individuals to promise to bring a friend or two. Period. Nothing says “I am promoting” like actually bringing a new person.

f) I need other people who are involved in Intercon who will go to bat if I ask the Northern ConCom to actually play nice and send at least one or two messages out for us. It needs to be somebody other than *me* putting pressure on them.

g) Sponsors for the LARPA contest. I need to see at least $200 or so dollars of it sponsored by people other than me.

I’m interested in thoughts, offers, opinions…I'm not interested in condolences or general hand wringing. This is a business matter and needs to be discussed in cool and detached terms.

Adult Event - Threads Blue - Jan 29, 2010

2009-07-30T21:40:26Z

Background

About twenty years ago,back in 1991, if you were cool and sort of proto-gothy, you played Cyberpunk RPG. 1991 was a seminal year for LARP. NightLife and Vampire the Masquerade were about to blow Cyberpunk out of the water, and the latter was about to establish an eighteen year dynasty of LARP. But we didn't know much about that. It was May and even the lamentable NightLife hadn't been published yet.

I was running a game called "The Second Circle of Hell" up in a hotel room at the then Sheraton Hotel in New Carrolton Maryland. It had kinky overtones, borderline nudity, making out, and toe sucking. That same evening I got to do an audit of an event some friends of ours were running called "Lady Jhayne's Party." It was notable for being a cyberpunk game that was both goth, and had some vampire overtones. The atmosphere was a sort of art-house party/private sex club with a lot of erotic staging and byplay.

There have since been other heavily adult themed games. "Second Circle of Hell" had more closed door runs, "Stardust," "Fete D'Ogun," "Orgia," "The Green Fairy". In the past few years I've also followed the work of J. Tuomas Harviainen and Nina Hämäläinen in Finland, who wrote the "Soft Core" series of LARPs, as well as "Sin Filled Nights of Bratislava" which I reviewed here.

Since 1991, I have had, off and on, the idea of producing an adult themed game. Several years ago, I even began investigating potential outdoor venues as a serious adult game would be inappropriate to run at the Property where Threads is run. I always ran up against several problems. Obviously one of the first and foremost is dealing with the potential "flake factor" among some of the players. This is always going to be a problem and will get worse if adult elements are involved.

The other potential issue was comfort levels. The Threads of Damocles LARP Community splits more than 60% towards people with some kink experience, but not everyone has been to BDSM events, and is comfortable doing a lot of public play. How do you set up an event to provide opportunities that are challenging to people at one comfort level, without having others just have to sit watching and bored.

Until Threads this was almost impossible. Either you needed like Tuomas to be running for your local kink community and have all kinky people, or you needed to "tone it down." Because there was no way to let people select scenes by comfort level.

This Winter, I conceived of the idea of using Threads as a springboard for a truly adult themed game. The universe is broad and was designed to accomodate "all manner of shit." The game doesn't have to heavily impact the principal continuity and the licensing on Threads is such that anyone can run it under a creative Commons license, so there's no issue with "material." Threads already had a lot of adult themed material. But I wanted to produce the sort of scenes we did not produce in the regular season. Realistically there are scenes whose very PRESENCE would be disruptive to a Threads Game. While I could theoretically bid "Orgy in the public space," the presence of a provocative event like that would overshadow and eclipse the game, become a focus that unbalanced the rest of the environment. I think we can all feel that and I think we all pull our punches. I want to create an event where this isn't necessary.

I think the Soft Core series, which Tuomas describes in the introduction to "Bratislava" is more an inspiration than "Bratislava," at least in terms of Blue Tracks.

There have been outright adult/kink games like "Midnight Seductions" in Philadelphia. But...those have been called wanting in terms of being anything other than a "meet market" game...little more than an excuse to dress up in costume. I think most of us want more structure and organization than that.

At the same time I've been increasingly taken with the idea of theatricality and theatre in the kink scene. This is really something that is just emerging as a thing of its own in the past few years, and there are some brilliant local people who have driven aspects of it who I greatly admire as artists.

However, rather than set out to create one artistic vision that is *mine* I want to create an environment where a stellar collection of artists can come together completely freed from the constraints of having to "tone it down." Any scene is welcome here, though a sufficiently outre scene may not garner many applicants. I expect a fair number of small scenes.

Announcing

And on that note, I'm announcing

Threads Blue

Jan 29, 2010

Private Hotel Site, Washington Metro Area, Suburban MD
(Site info will be sent only to participants)

(thanks to jadasc for the name)

Target Audience

The first Threads Blue game will be designed to be attractive to people with no previous association with Threads. We hope to get a lot of new people, many of whom may never play a regular Threads event. Threads is a huge and disparate genre, and you don't need to know "all about it" to come play anymore than you need to already know the background for four hour games you play at an Intercon

I expect a fair number of people to come and spend a good bit of time watching and deciding if they want to get their feet wet. I plan to arrange some interactive elements of the blue tracks that allow people to experiment with various aspects of alt-culture if they choose without feeling pressured.

I also don't think authors are going to develop anything that will leave regular Threads players who are not interested in adult themes feeling the "missed out" by not coming.

Club Rules

The overall concept of comfort at the game is "sex club rules." In short, you must be okay with watching or seeing or hearing anything. You're welcome to turn away of course, but you can't make people stop doing things because they squip you. However you are NOT presumed to be okay with ANYTHING you do not instigate. Look don't touch without permission. Dungeon rules will be effectively the same used at some of our local leather events and locations, particularly DC Crucible and Camp Crucible.

We'll provide safety instruction and other information for first-timers so that nobody feels they are "dumb."

A Unique Genre, building on the Past

I expect to see things other than sex explored. Esoterica is another area where I think there is always a certain amount of "holding back" because nobody wants to risk being too over the top. Certain types of experimental art tracks press the envelope enough to distract from standard Threads.

I think this will be an exciting and in many ways a totally new thing. I think the framework of Threads (which is frankly already a fairly kink-heavy event by most standards) provides an excellent foundation to work from in creating something that is not quite like anything that has been done before.

Getting Invited

Threads Blue is *invitation only* So how do you get invited:

1) If you are on the Threads-Adult list you should have already been invited. If you aren't for some reason e-mail me at gordon@vialarp.org

2) If I know you, drop me a note. The event is "invite only" to protect against weird walk-ons, not to be overly selective. If I know you and you can act like a civilized human being, you're in. e-mail me at gordon@vialarp.org and say "I am interested and would like to receive information."

3) If I don't know you, I need somebody who is attending to vouch for you. That's all. So you can "invite a friend." We just want some line of contact so that we don't have total strangers off the net.

When you are invited, you'll receive the Evite (to say whether you are going for sure or not) and an invitation to the Google Group for the game. Please accept both even if you are a maybe on the Evite, and set the Group to Web Only.

Who should you invite? Well people that you think would not be uncomfortable at the event, and who would not make others feel out of place. This is not the time to play a fun trick on your Joe Vanilla friend just to "see how they react." We want everyone at the event to be happy and comfortable so that it is a really great time.

This is a big adventure, and the culmination of a decade of thought and planning. Please join us!

Intercon Mid-Atlantic Bids open - $500 LARPA Contest Opens

2009-03-23T22:32:51Z

ids for Intercon Mid-Atlantic, Oct 23-25 in Gaithersburg MD are now open.

We're back in the Washington DC area this year. Check the website for transportation information

IMA Is accessible through

Washington Metro Red Line and Convention Shuttle (Fri-Sun)

Two major airports - DCA and BWI. Also through IAD - all connect to public transportation

Amtrak through Washington Union Station

Registration is currently $20 but will go up when games are announced May 1st

No formal deadline has been set, but games bid before April 30, 2008 are more likely to be accepted.

http://ima.larpaweb.net

The annual LARPA Small Games Contest is also open. To bid a contest game, please fill out the submission information and deadlines here:

http://www.ima.larpaweb.net/imawiki/index.php?title=Contest_Introduction

Two Top Prizes $200 and $300

Overall best will win $300, $200 for best in Category, Additional $100 top prize

Two category winners will receive $200 and the be eligible for best overall.

Categories

Games compete either in the 5-12 player category or the 12-24+ player category. Each category will have one $200 winner, and one of the winners will receive "best overall" for a total prize of $300. Games must have a flexibility of at least 6 players. So for example a game could be for 12-18 players, or 18-24 players. Games may be written with more characters than 24 available, provided all other criteria are also met. Games can be run privately for playtest purposes

John Updike is Dead

2009-01-29T06:27:22Z

This isn't news to the world. John Updike died on Tuesday. Many of my friends do not know this, or do not know what it means, but I am saddened. So I will tell them a little.

Around 2002 I had a bitter argument online with a player and author about the use of non-genre media in LARP. I made the point that my influences are not limited to the universe of action-adventure or genre SF, Fantasy, etc. Many of my stories come from "mainstream" fiction. I was inroduced to the concept of LARP through John Fowles novel The Magus where it takes the form of "Godgaming."

If you had asked me on monday to name the greatest living American author I would probably have named John Updike. Of the men who formed the constellation of great names when I grew up, he is the last among the living. Updike's name I associate with the like of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mailer died two years ago, and I drank.

Even his lesser contemporaries are mostly in the grave. There are novelists who reached his ability but only in one or two books. Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Hunter S. Thompson.

Philip Roth alone remains alive and I mean him no disrespect. But I never warmed to Nathan Zuckerman the way I did. J. D. Salinger is miraculously still alive (as far as we know). His literary career ended the year I was born. There is hope however. Margaret Salinger says much of Salinger's unpublished work is marked for publication when he dies so...he may yet emerge as the true literary giant of our era. I think not though. Relevance is more important to a novelist now than in the year of my birth and I fear he will be an echo for academics a museum of his own past. Salinger is a narcissist and to me it is narcissistic enough to be a novelist...he has compounded the sin. Sad that, but his choice. I think it's a shame he broke up with Joyce Maynard, but it gives me something to look forward to.

But...all that aside...

I came to Updike through Bech: A Book, and its sequels. I had a Jewish girlfriend and was fascinated by all things Jewish, particularly Updike's alter ego Henry Bech. I saw myself in him. I saw mortality in him and most of all I learned a sense of proportion about ambition from him. Updike will get a funeral...he was a Christian of sorts...but someone should sit shiva for Henry Bech. I later pursued him through Couples, which taught me what to really expect from polyamory. All the truths Heinlein glossed in Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love. My readings in Updike were eclectic. If my friends know of him it is almost always through Witches of Eastwick (considered one of his lesser works). Of all of his works I think the one which I most admire is The Coup which is probably much like admiring Shakespeare for Coriolanus. I admit I never read the Rabbit novels. Someday maybe I will.

Occasionally someone comes along that I honestly am a bit stricken by...there have been a lot of losses to the literary world lately. I do not think they will be replaced. I truly mean this.

There will be new and great artists. But the novel is dying or dead. The day when it is mostly a matter of desperation sales, adventure, and Oprah Winfrey is upon us. I am not saying writing is dead. But there will not be another John Updike just as the survival of John Williams and the existence of Orchestras or the importance of John Lennon or does not suggest there will ever be another Igor Stravinsky...there will be no new great classical composers...

There will be no new great American Novelists in the mold of the 20th century. Updike was the last of the real titans. I liked him. He was unassuming, wrote prose spare enough to die for, and was comfortable with sex.

We shall not see his like again.

Repo - the Genetic Opera

2009-01-18T21:27:56Z

So I spent the weekend with Stephanie and she suggested a Saturday night entertainment. She said REPO was in town, and we should go see it. I said "sure."

I'd heard of Repo. It had been brought to my attention because it concerned a dystopian future where they repossessed people’s personal organs, and that happened to vaguely match a plot I’d been writing for Threads of Damocles.   But Repo was a musical and I’m not that fond of musicals. Also a number of people ranted and raved about it, and I’m not a big joiner. Finally a friend who saw it wasn’t impressed by the “personal sell” element of the Road Tour.

But I didn’t have anything against it either, figured it would be amusing.

So for people who don’t know the background, here’s the quick rundown. Repo was an indie arts project playing in black box theatres, that managed to get a budget and a theatrical release as a project of Director Darren Lynn Bousman, best known for the  Saw franchise. It’s a very SFX and squip heavy satire. It’s impossible to really say what genre it is. You could say roughly it fits into the dark musical genre associated with Assassins or Sweeny Todd. But theatrically it shows more like Frank Miller’s Sin City, or other dark anime rendered into live action. You might through Guillermo's Pan's Labyrinth in there too...but it's not serious, so that's a very weird divergence.

I can understand why it's a marketing nightmare. It's "Springtime for Hitler" level fucked up...like "Hey what if we made Pan's Labyrinth into a musical comedy." It's the sort of thing that does well on stage but has a very fucking hard time getting in front of a film audience.

One paralell that has been invoked is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the roadshow adapts this framework, encouraging people to come out in costume. Since the costumes include pretty hot looks for the girls, I’m generally okay with that.   For actual thematic similarity the closest thing I’ve ever seen to it was Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise. In terms of feel and content, it struck me an awful lot like Frank Miller, but the universe complexity and themes really reminded me of Mike Kaluta’s Starstruck (not the more recent Gaiman piece). I think the feel may come somewhat from the fact that Starstruck was derived from an off-Broadway play by Elaine Lee, Norfleet Lee and Dale Place.   It’s darker and more “modern” than Starstruck of course, along the lines of Watchmen.

At any rate, Repo flunked it’s test-screening badly and Lionsgate sent it straight to DVD.   It missed the mark largely because it was billed to the test audience as a horror vehicle by the Director of Saw II, and it’s not. It’s not surprising that “Frank Miller as musical comedy” did not play well to that crowd. It was a flop, and so like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil faced a huge issue getting released.

Theatres are sockets that studios put movies into to make money.   You pick the movies that are going to fill a 200 seat theatre to 200 people. Not that are going to fill it to 50 people.   It’s true hype and advertising play a role. But while I don’t agree it is the worst movie ever made, I can see it having real trouble finding a clear advertising method and an audience. I’m not sure the people who went to see Sin City would like it, and I’m not sure who you’d sell it to. One thing to understand about movies is just how fucking enormous releases are. Sin City cost $40 million (a lot more than Repo’s 8m,) but grossed 158 million worldwide. You can have a TV show, or Broadway show that a fuckload less people are interested in that is still very profitable.   Movies need a big audience to be anything other than arthouse films. I suspect that Repo’s gore makes it hard to play in art houses like the Landmark E St. Cinema. And frankly that’s a big drawback. I can’t say “everybody is going to love this show,” because unlike say Sweeny Todd, if you are not okay with seeing human skin cut open and blood spurt out this is going to freak you right the fuck out. It's not incredibly far afield in either tone or gore from Kill Bill, but it's a lot more fantastic and it's a musical.

At any rate, Director Darren Lynn Bousman and Writer Terrence Zdunich are touring around with lead Alexa Vega to try and generate a cult following.  Intentionally or not there's a sort of push for it as a new Rocky Horror, and they want to see a bigger big-screen release. I think it’s a noble goal, and I doubt it’s really profiting Bousman, though it may be the best thing Zudnich can be doing for himself right now. If you've read Terry Gilliam's The Battle for Brazil you have some idea of how these things work.

They make a good show and it’s fun and friendly. People who know me know that I’m not big on actresses. I don’t care much about them…my fandom stops with Ingrid Bergman, Myrna Loy, Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich.   A friend of mine got me half sold on Julie Christie. But that’s about it. That said, Alexa Vega kinda kicks ass. She’s got a commanding personality which is not something you usually hear said about actresses. When she takes charge, vocally, you actually feel it, and that’s sometimes very hard to do with a pretty girl especially one who’s playing young. I’m gonna like the girl of course, it’s me, but she’s a cut above.

I was pleased to meet them all where “meet” = seeing their presentation and passing about nine words in the lobby on the way to the gents. All friendly words though.

So this film is not without talent. The big names in the film other than Alexa Vega (who was in Spy Kids and is apparently now on Broadway in Hairspray) are Paris Hilton and Anthony Head (who played Giles on Buffy for folks like me not good with names). Paul Sorvino (Law and Order) rounds out the bill.

There's also apparently a cameo by Joan Jett though I missed it.

The music is pretty fucked up in a good way. Sarah Brightman actually has a screen role as does Ogre of Skinny Puppy. But I think a real chunk of the sell is the soundtrack. You’ve got David Lee Roth's in studio guitarist Brian Young, the frontman from Filter, the drummer from Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros, the rhythm guitarist from Guns n' Roses, David J Haskins the bassist from Bauhaus and Daniel Ash of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. It also includes Ozzy's bassist Blasko, the drummer from Rob Zombie, POE ("Hey Pretty"), and Rami Jaffee, who has played with The Wallflowers, Foo Fighters, Soul Asylum and Pearl Jam.

The producers were Yoshiki (who I've never heard of but is apparently big in Japan the way Elvis was big in the U.S.) and Joseph Bishara who produces Glenn Danzig, which kinda figures.

So what did I think of it?

Well…I did not walk out thinking “this is the greatest fucking movie ever made…I am obsessed with it.”   But I think it has the power to grow on you. There’s a lot of rich complexity of the sort that you see in Pan’s Labyrinth that feels like there's a world behind it. It feels strongly like it was made from a comic or graphic-novel media.

The music was the same way. It's complex and despite it all not all that catchy except for "Zydrate Anatomy." Some of it really seems to suborn music for story which since it claims to be an opera you can't complain about.

But I think it grows on you. It's rich and there's enough there for two watchings. It's a fascinating world, and in the end you've only sort of licked the dark corners of it.

I think it's destined to become a cult classic, though I doubt it will ever see a major theatrical release. It's got some serious chops and if it seems a little scratchy in places, it's really beautiful in others. And it draws you back. Sin City was pretty, but I'll be damned if I remember more than one or two scenes. It was a comic book - bubblegum. I suspect I'll remember Repo ten years from now in pretty good detail.

It's worth buying rather than pirating, and I'd strongly recommend it (out on DVD and Blu-Ray on the 20th). It isn't often art is "something else" and Repo is definitely something else.

Not really a meme...

2009-01-16T16:14:22Z

As most people have probably gathered I do LJ memes approximately never. I've recently become interested for reasons of personal reseach in the concept of the "Johari Window"

According to Wikipedia:

A Johari window is a cognitive psychological tool created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955 in the United States, used to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships. It is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise.

When performing the exercise, the subject is given a list of 55 adjectives and picks five or six that they feel describe their own personality. Peers of the subject are then given the same list, and each pick five or six adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then mapped onto a grid.

Charles Handy calls this concept the Johari House with four rooms. Room 1 is the part of ourselves that we see and others see. Room 2 is the aspect that others see but we are not aware of. Room 3 is the most mysterious room in that the unconscious or subconscious bit of us is seen by neither ourselves nor others. Room 4 is our private space, which we know but keep from others.

This went around as an LJ meme about a year or more ago, and like most memes I bypassed it. At any rate, while I don't tend to do memes I do occasionally comment on serious issues raised by my friends, so I've created a Johari window and a negative Nohari window, and I am interested in the input.

Just for what it's worth, I don't expect people to use identifiable names, don't care what they say, and won't take anything personally. You can't really NOT be critical in the Nohari window. I'm just curious about the results for purposes of research. I tend to take all things pop-psychological as interesting, but superficial. As an estimator I value roundhouse methods while recognizing they are an incomplete picture

At any rate, for anyone interested:

http://kevan.org/johari?view=James_dc
http://kevan.org/nohari?view=James_dc

Live Roleplaying Groups, Money, and Self-Destruction

2008-11-21T16:02:27Z

This morning's economic news came from Monty Python. According to the Post:

OBAMA: But I don't want to think I've not lost a Treasury Secretary, so much as... gained
    a bailout!
    [clap clap clap]
    For, since the tragic death of the economy--
PAULSON: It's not quite dead!
OBAMA: Since the near fatal wounding of the economy--
PAULSON: It's getting better!
OBAMA: For, since the economy, which, when it seemed about to recover,
    suddenly felt the icy hand of death upon it.
FEDERAL RESERVE: Uugh!
HARRY REID: Oh, it's died!

So...the best we can say about the economy is that it was coughing up blood late last night...

In that spirit, I'm going to reprint an article from back in 2002, during our last declared financial panic. I think it was a good summary then, and holds up reasonably now. I wasn't enchanted with the title, but mine was admittedly much more boring and the current title was put on it by Dave Coleman, then the Editor of the LARPer, and it is probably better than whatever I had (which may have been the subtitle)....

This article originally appeared at http://larper.larpaweb.net/no_work.html

January 2002, Volume 2, Issue 1

LARP in the Time of Cholera

Live Roleplaying Groups, Money, and Self-Destruction
by Gordon Olmstead-Dean

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with the Co-GM of my current campaign and figured out our current unemployment statistics. After a few moments with pen and paper, we came to the conclusion that about 18% of our regular contingent were currently unemployed, with about a quarter having expressed serious concern about being severed.

I shook my head, and began looking through our schedule…this game could move to a private venue we owned. This one we could cut the price on a little bit and offer more meals…and we could look towards running the season without any significant prop expenditures…we'd always borrowed where we didn't have to buy, and between that and my private stock, we could run the season till about next October on last year's properties…

"Maybe..." I said hopefully..."Things will be better by then."

My partner in crime began running games in the mid-nineties, and had never been through a recession. So I ordered another cup of coffee and launched into the dreaded old-timer's account.

I ran Live Roleplaying events through the `92 recession and lived to tell about it. So I told her what I was worried about.

It wasn't the cost of the games. We had a plan to control that.

It wasn't the cost of the food. It's a decent group and people will help cover for them as haven't got right at the moment. And my wife who heads our logistics and catering effort works miracles on a low budget with mass food prep. We could get by on a lot less money for victualing.

What I was worried about is that our community would self-destruct around us and that nothing we could say or do would stop it. That an enveloping spiral of personal quarrels, fallings out and grievances would rise and suck the entire Roleplaying community down into a black hole from which it would still be digging itself out in 2005.

Because I'd seen it happen once before.

Maybe this doesn't concern you. You don't game where I do. And different groups are constituted differently. But read a little and find out. I've seen the insides of seven different LARP communities in seventeen years, and shared stories of a dozen more. And they all have some similar characteristics that make them vulnerable when this sort of cloud darkens the horizon.

Shadow of the Past

The 1992 recession began in July 1990 and lasted through December 1992, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which declared on November 26 that the current Economy had been in recession since March of 2001.

The 1992 recession was more traumatic, because it was recognized late. By the time that the administration admitted that there was in fact a recession, it had been going on for nearly a year and a half. And during that time period, friends lost jobs, apartments, and found themselves being swamped with debts, and didn't know why. Certainly there was a slowly dawning sense that something was wrong. But by the time there was any general recognition an awful lot of people were on the rocks.

Now, in 2001, most everyone knows there is something dramatically wrong with the economy and that layoffs are snowballing. Nobody knows how bad it will get, but the best-case scenario says that if this issue sees rock-bottom, things will not be well and healed again before March 2003, though they should be a lot better by August or September of 2002. But if it isn't rock bottom...who knows?

In the face of this sort of trouble, it may seem trivial to be writing about the preservation of what is, to most people, a hobby. But I'm doing it for two reasons. First, while Live Roleplay is a hobby to those who play it, to those who create and build it, it's an art and a passion. Like any group, we deserve a chance to try to weather the storm.

Second, in most communities that I have seen where there is LARP, Live Roleplay becomes the central community. Whether it is students at a school who identify as LARPers, or middle-aged adults who don't quite fit in at Church League Bowling, or the Country Club. I think there is a very good chance that to most people reading this, Live Roleplay represents a circle of friends and acquaintances that are "the community" in a way that Church Committees or the Rotary Club might have been Mom or Dad's Community. Sure, it isn't a way of life for everyone. But everywhere that there is LARP, I see a core community of people for whom it is a primary activity outside of work.

In 1990, I was more or less on top of the LARPing world, such as it was. I was part of a handful of about three hundred people on the East Coast of the U.S. who were actively involved in building theatre-style LARP - a Live Roleplaying genre that tended to be indoors and did not entail hitting anyone with a duct tape-wrapped piece of PVC. It was new, having roots that went back no more than about seven years, and it was growing and it was exciting. The group that I worked with was producing four games in a calendar year and five games in a six-month period. By the standards of the day they were very successful - substantially more people liked them than not. Within the community of two to three hundred (mostly readers of the nascent Kevin Barrett Edited foldover version of Metagame - the distant ancestor of this very Web Publication) we were known and talked about.

At the time, I was working part time, and living at home, having lost my father to a serious illness in early 1989, and having a bit of money. Mostly I was writing and learning LARP, while toying with starting my own Desktop Publishing Business.

Three years later I was broke, had launched a string of unsuccessful or mediocre games, and had seen the community of about three hundred dwindle to a community of scarcely more than one hundred twenty five. Worse, I'd seen friends become bitter enemies, and seen a community riven by strife.

I didn't blame the economy. In fact it was 1999 before I first began to seriously assess the early 90s and realize to what a profound extent the problems and controversies of the period…and the bad feelings that outlived the period…were linked to the economic woes of the 1992 recession.

I could go on at length about all that fell apart and how it happened. Everything is a chain of causes. I quarreled because I ran bad games and felt put upon for my hospitality and resentful of criticism; I felt resentful because I had no money; and I ran bad games because I had to go to work, and do odd jobs, to make money because my badly contemplated small business went belly up. The business would probably have failed in any situation, but the particularly painful circumstances, debts, and issues were compounded by the bad economy.

But really my situation wasn't so bad. The truth is I was a college student, used to living hand to mouth, and really wasn't so bothered by my circumstances. I saw friends have their furnishings put out on the lawn at apartment complexes, saw friends have to pick up sticks and move back to the west coast, or take jobs in places whose names could not be pronounced on short notice. Saw couples that had been stable for several years suddenly marry or explode into discord and separation.

What surprised me and aroused resentment was the bad feeling and critical attitudes among so many others. It was a time of a failure of cooperation. Certainly some of it was inevitable. Many of us were involved in trying to build an organization to promote Live Roleplay - the SIL, and its successor the ILF, the ancestor to LARPA. Small group politics are always good at bringing out pettiness and vindictive behavior. I was an idealistic crusader who did not yet understand how to temper that idealism to get people to cooperate, and gave offense and injury. Yet the same people and entities had functioned before and when there were quarrels, the vicious ones that hit home and really made enemies were about time, travel, and money. There were high egos in those days too, and groups that were going to one up each other, or gloried in their own aggressive self-promotion...these things would have left hurt feelings at the best of times, but they would not have aroused the bitterness they did if it were not a time when the money involved mattered. I nearly lost my house over a LARP, a bitterness it would take me a long time to forget.

Even at the time, we realized that the economy was somewhat to blame. It was openly discussed that with things tight, people were being more critical of games because they felt a need to get their money's worth, and it hurt to spend a hundred twenty bucks on a lousy weekend.

Eventually, I realized that the bottom line boiled down to no more than human nature.

In normal times, most people are friendly, and behave with some reserve. But in times of stress that reserve breaks down.

Take a stable community. Put a good third of them either out of work, or in fear of losing their jobs. Put another third in fear of being enmeshed in close personal situations with people that don't have jobs, that have their hands out for food and money...or whom they guiltily realize they should help...after all aren't they friends. Then put another third in the "unaffected" category, suddenly irritated at why everyone else is so picky and can't pull their weight. Mix liberally with boyfriend girlfriend and ex-boyfriend girlfriend relationships, because this is a social group and tends to partner off.

Suddenly this picture became very clear to me, and it was no longer strange to me that so many people seemed to have an attack of "the pissies" for the first couple years of the nineties. In fact it seemed a miracle any of us stayed friends or that a community of sorts endured at all.

Human beings, we are told by sociologists, respond to stress by fight or flight...generally flight involves the suppression of the fight instinct - the suppression of hostility. Create an environment where certainties are suddenly uncertain, and you have created an environment suffused by suppressed hostility. And that hostility will out.

At the core of that miracle was the fact that LARP is an escapist literature. As movies prospered in the 1930s, so LARP should by rights prosper in a time of economic downturn. Yet LARP is also stressful personal interaction. And in a time of great uncertainty that is not necessarily the best balm.

Looking around my own community I see the signs. I see people who are usually composed being prone to snapping and bitter statements. I see myself doing these things even when I don't mean to, because I am not immune to stress. And I look around and see that there is an observable difference in how my friends and acquaintances act now, and how they acted a year and a half ago. And I remember where I have seen this before...in the early 90s.

Thus endeth the Sociology lesson. In times of pressure and fear a community might draw together if it has to, but there is also an increase in fighting, in social hostility and in individual instability. Since a hobby community does not have to stay together it is inherently more vulnerable. If you don't believe the lesson, I can't help you. I can say with some confidence that in a general sense it is true, in the same way that it is true

What can a gaming community do to blunt the consequences?

What we can't do is avoid all the fallout that comes from people interacting with people. We can't help it if Hans fights with Lottie, or Lottie fights with Jane. But we can help to create an atmosphere which is less conducive to conflict, and which helps hold the community together. In retrospect, the political matters concerning the government of the SIL/ILF and its Conventions which were among the nastiest flash points of the fall out in my own community in the early 90s were tailor made for causing division and pain. Likewise, the very style of game that predominated - a full weekend event with a high buy in and high costs for facilities (hotels and restaurants, generally) were tailor made for provoking maximum hostility when an event failed.

Take matters seriously - it's an axiom in business that no plan can succeed unless it is taken seriously and supported by management. Unless folks who run campaigns and events take the lead, and really think about these things, nothing else here will much matter.
Recognize the signs - when you see players behaving erratically, suddenly withdrawn, or agonizing over matters you don't understand, you are seeing the onset of a reaction to general stress in the community. Recognize it for what it is, and be understanding, and encourage others to be understanding.
Communicate - create an environment of openness. Answer questions about matters of budget, time, and planning. In every LARP community there is some person who thinks that someone is getting rich off of this (microbucks!), and usually they deserve to be heartily mocked. But now is the time to give quiet, reasoned, careful explanations of where money is going, and what the status of the event is. That goes for the GMs' work status too. If you are not being able to put the time in on the events that you would like, say so, and explain why. Far better than a bluster to cover up work left undone, or worse, an autocratic refusal to take help or allow things to run their course without GM supervision for fear that "things will get out of hand."
Take Help - any campaign or event, at any time, should try to take all the help it possibly can. It isn't always easy. Trying to make use of volunteers is tough, and worthy of an article in itself. But now is the time to stretch yourself. It is especially important if the result of the current adversity is that you...or your principal writing partners...have less time than previous to give to the game.
Plan Small - figure out your available time commitments and realistic financial situation, and plan accordingly. Now is not the time to stretch. Players might enjoy a good retread of a previous event more than an ambitious and badly planned fiasco you didn't have time to follow through on because of pressing work concerns. Players might tolerate a smaller venue or less polished props if they don't have to pay extra for them.
Cut Costs - pare your budget where you can, but try to achieve real economy, not false economies. You also won't do yourself any favors by cutting your budget so thin you have to go out of pocket to fund your events. Letting one or two transition events ride with a little out of pocket or "sugar daddy" funding is fine, but it shouldn't be a regular practice (unless you are so fortunate that you are able to do it all the time). Trim prop budgets, look for cheaper venues, and borrow instead of buying to keep costs down. Above all borrow props. Your players own a huge amount of neat stuff. Telling them you want to borrow it, gives away a lot less about the plot of your game than you might imagine.
It's all about secondary costs - the really deadly costs are the ones you can't counter. I would not like to be, right now, a game that ran at a fixed site, for which I paid rent, a long way from my player base, so that they had to drive a good distance. But that's what most games are. Gas, food on the way to games and lodging if you don't provide it, are all player costs. On the other hand it's no gift to your players to cut a breakfast and cut a dollar off the price…often group meals are among the best financial deals in gaming. Our campaign is actually trying to plan *more* meals onsite, because they cost less than restaurant meals - we can provide a good dinner for less than the cost of a MacDonald's Meal Deal.
Make sure that those who have need are not ashamed - while this may be obvious, it is important. Make sure that there is no onus of shame on folks who are short on cash. This means not drawing overmuch specific attention. Nobody wants the GM to say "Joe can't really afford the game, can everyone help JOE out, since JOE is out of a job…" Recognizing folks who are currently in a tight spot as a class of individuals is better than singling out any one person.
Don't expect the "unaffected" to carry the burden - humans will be humans. Good as we are, when our friends start being unemployed, it takes a saint not to step slightly away, especially if we've ended up with friends on the living room sofa once before when we were younger. Those slight steps away hurt, and are the unspoken act behind a lot of fractured friendships. Don't make it worse by setting up a situation where anyone who is not currently out of a job feels they are targeted for almsgiving, and are expected to directly or indirectly underwrite others. The first tendency is to say "friends will help out," and they will. But some friends may draw away. Maybe that means they weren't real friends, but your campaign doesn't need to be the place people find that out. My current working theory is that it is better to establish a baseline system by which people who are unaffected can pay in a little bit extra to help out than to create free-floating expectations that friends will carry meals, gasoline, etc. People are willing to give, but they also want limits. And remember that the "unaffected" may have friends, relatives, siblings, or reasonable fears that make them much less able to be forthcoming with extra funds no matter how much they might like to.
Remember that the unaffected have expectations too - One of the things which rends a community is a sudden breach in expectations. While some people can be keenly aware of this, a certain number of people in a community blithely expect that the current pricing structure and offerings should match their capability. "Why NOT" run at a beautiful bed and breakfast that would be a perfect site, but costs $120 per person per night. "Why NOT" run at Ed's house which is a suburban rambler and cannot conceivably be made to look like a game site, but which is within walking distance of my house and free. As much as possible, try to keep up standards. Players who are used to - and still perfectly capable of - paying $65 a night for events may not be interested in a $5 game in Ed's Basement. Try to compromise, and when possible, maintain standards.
Create ways for those who can't pay to participate with dignity - the fact is that the people who probably need help the most are often those who won't take it. A lot of people are too proud to be a burden on their friends. You need to create routes by which people who don't have the ability to pay can contribute legitimately to support the event. Our group has "cast" and "technical" roles. The first group, for a small discount, play pre-written characters for us - the concept is found in nearly every system, under the name "monsters, NPCs, etc." Tech is a little different. Usually we charge tech nothing, and they work as stagehands, playing smaller roles as needed. It may not be the most fun role, but it does keep people getting out with their friends. Other ideas might be to sublet the construction of props, or costumes in return for admission. This would work particularly well if your group actually has a small budget for such things, since free admission or food generally creates fewer problems than paying members of the group money. Of course a real constraint is that it doesn't help to have all the volunteer help in the world if you can't afford the venue, and have to go out of pocket to cover the game. But most campaigns are open to some creative avenues for allowing players who are in bad financial shape to pull their own weight without accepting charity.
Consider that the need for social stress decreases and the need for escape increases. I'm the biggest fan in the world of evil psychological games that twist reality and perceptions, and often leave you feeling bleak or disappointed. In terms of action adventure literature, I'm a big John LeCarre fan. Not the stuff of happy endings.
However, when we choose to run for a broad audience, while we may challenge that audience, it behooves us to keep that audience's interest. There is no artistic law here - just sound advice. Not everyone likes the extremes in gaming, and those who want to keep a game running will temper the extremes a bit. It's not an obligation, but it is a good idea.
Here is a hint. Your players are less likely to take it cheerfully that Nyarlathotep ate them all, or that the Lich slaughtered them than they might be at some other time. Now may not be the best time to run risky experimental concepts that are not really crowd-pleasers.
Right now your players have a higher need for pure escapism, and a lower need for social and psychological stress. Now is the time to deal them a few victories. If you want to keep your group lively, you'll bear that in mind.
Now is the time for you to be laid back - this is probably the single most important item of advice I can give. There is always something to irritate you. There is always a player who can't quite get with the drill, who makes excessive demands, or mistakes, or causes problems. Oddly enough, now is not the time to take that up with them. Sure there may be issues that have to be addressed. But now is the time to say, "do I really care that much that Joe doesn't keep his stats properly."
Now is the time when you'll want to be confrontational. Because you are feeling the stress as much as everybody else, and you would love nothing better than a just cause to lash out at - someone clearly in the wrong for you to focus on and blast into mincemeat with perfect justification.
But this isn't the time for that sort of behavior. The reason you want to so badly is the reason you shouldn't. Being justified or right doesn't change the fact that you're creating bad feeling. And LARP isn't like work at an office. There, however painful, if you fire someone, they go away. In Live Roleplaying communities, they may stay around to cause you infinite amounts of trouble. And rest assured if you round heavily on someone, you have just made yourself the magnet for all of their suppressed rage.
It's easy to say "I don't care, I can take them." But nobody wins fights in which everyone feels bad and embarrassed. The best you can hope for is a draw in which it is quickly forgotten.
If you have a real problem, be as gentle as possible. Enlist others to help. And try to hold on to your temper.
Nobody ever likes trivialities...now is not the time to harp on them. Remember you can't change the bottom line. Your principal problem is not a minority of players who are unemployed, or in bad straits. Your principal problem is a majority of players who are under untoward stress, which makes them hostile and defensive. This is not the time to try and enforce the letter of the law.
Be a pillar. The core of what causes problems in social groups at times like this is fear. Fear of changing circumstances, and of unexpected reverses. What attracts people the most is someone they can rely on. The more you can be this person, the more you will earn the respect of your community and be a pillar that holds it together. Try not to be snappy, mercurial, or inflexible. In a normal time, those might be appealing characteristics for the temperamental artiste that is the GM. But now is not a time when prima donnas are appreciated. Now is a time to be reliable, calm, dependable, and helpful.

I very seriously do not know if these measures in my campaign...and the fact that I'm willing to share this advice with other area GMs, will help preserve the community in the Washington Metropolitan Region. Ask me in 2005.

On the other hand, I cannot help but think that facing the current crisis with a clear vision, and a plan, is better than facing it with ignorance, activities tailor made to create strife, and no plan at all. Whether it helps a little, or a lot, it's something.

LARPA Contest Winners!

2008-11-18T05:29:28Z

Intercon Mid-Atlantic is over, and what a convention. The company was great, the games were very good, and the weather stayed fairly warm if rainy. The Con numbers never reached the usual levels, but you couldn't much tell from the party in the function space after hours. People had fun, talked shop, danced, and generally had a good time. I got several "best Intercon evar!" comments from people, and if we lacked a little in numbers we made up for it in quality of company and good spirits.

We had some new faces this year and that was very exciting. I got a chance to talk to a lot of the good people involved in producing the New England Convention about cross promoting, and pushing the Intercon name. If IMA is going to have a growth year and be a good neighbor, we'll need help and everyone I asked for help was really forthcoming and willing to go the extra mile.

I love IMA and I want it to keep its special feeling and characteristics, but it's time for us to grow again as well, and this weekend we roughed out a lot of the things that need to happen for IMA to move forward. Contest Submissions will be much earlier this coming year so that at least a few tracks of good games are up by the time the New England Convention runs.

This year’s contest proved pretty exciting. There was some real competition. I should explain briefly that all games compete in two categories. Technical Submission (a copy of the game submitted beforehand and read by judges) and Runtime Scores. A game that does not complete it’s Technical Submission may still run and Receive Runtime Scores, but is unlikely to win Best Overall since its highest possible score will be 50%. We also had a “Wildcard” category this year which only reflected Runtime.

This years winners were:

Gold - Best Overall - Time Travel Review Board by John D'Agosta, Susan Weiner, Nat Budin, Josh Rachlin
“Wildcard” – Best Runtime - Holiday Season by Mike Young
Gold – Best in Category – 6-12 Players – The Road Not Taken by Mike Young
Gold – Best in Category – 12-24 Players - Time Travel Review Board by John D'Agosta, Susan Weiner, Nat Budin, Josh Rachlin
Silver – 12-24 Players - Shangri-La by Tom Vorhies, Carol Young, Andrew Zorowitz and the Foam Brain Staff
Bronze – 12-24 Players - Finals by Christopher Buck, Emily Buck, Jennifer Buck, Elizabeth Mullen

I’m going to throw in a note here. People who were at the Convention are aware that Road Not Taken won best 6-12, but also had no competition. I think it’s worth mentioning that it was only beaten for Wildcard by Holiday Season by the same author, so clearly competition aside, it was a very worthy entry.

I think all these games were very solid and very credible, and the spread on scores was close enough to make us feel that all the games were good competitors and that everyone put in a good effort.

The real winner is the rest of the LARP playing world. There are now six new games in the GameBank, posted and ready to go!

http://www.larpaweb.net/gamebank-mainmenu-31

On a final note, I want to thank everyone who attended Intercon, and the people who worked hard to produce it, particularly Stephanie Olmstead-Dean, who handled the hotel, and con-suite, Meredith Peck who handled a lot of the admin work of the convention, and Mike Young who handled database issues.

I also want to thank the many people who came forward and made displays of generosity by donating to the Con and the Bar. Many people went above and beyond the call of duty to help out in this difficult year, and we deeply appreciate that.

Next stop – Intercon I!

Intercon Mid-Atlantic - almost upon us!

2008-11-12T20:03:08Z

So Intercon Mid-Atlantic is almost upon us. With gas prices falling and the economy stuttering and Obama elected, reg has picked up a little. More than I expected, honestly. And there are a few more people in the wind, friends bringing undecideds who will either come at the last minute or not. The games that are open now are probably going to have slots at the door, and the ones that were full already were. I'm guessing we'll shuffle up to around 80, which has us down about 22%, which given the timing on our ass-kicking is not bad. By the time people unfroze and decided they might be willing to travel again, IMA was just too close.

I'm looking forward to the weekend! For once I have the latitude just to have fun and not worry that the con is going to lose a lot of money.   Effectively this Con is paid for by LARPWriting.org and Threads of Damocles.  Enjoy the bar!   This year for all it's failings IMA will be a good set of games and a good party. I'm browsing through the attendance list, and except for a very few people who had some pre-existing conflict, we're mostly not missing the core people who we enjoy partying with and who make the Convention fun. And IMA is still bigger than Threads, which is a great party. So it's going to be a nice fun weekend, and I officially refuse to worry that the economy hurt us. We're going to rock on, play games, have fun, and maybe learn something. I'm thinking of running an informal roundtable track during the day, and seeing if anybody shows up if we actually have a TOPIC for our rambling daytime discussions.

Also I'll add that we've run a lot of discounts and slashed prices to try to help the games by getting more reg. That was aimed at people who were hard hit. With GM comps, price reductions, etc., reg will cover about 35% of Con budget this year. I don't want to guilt anyone so I'll just remind my friends who work jobs as good or better than mine and are not starving that most of the Con is coming out of my pocket, so if you don't need to figure out how to pay nothing for the con, you know those little bits do help. I don't mind and I won't complain, but everybody appreciates the person who kicks in for the party.

We'll turn that around next year, having gotten Threads up and making ends meet.

We'll do a lot of things differently next year. Next year will be Intercon 24, and we have some big plans for Intercon 25, and if that is going to happen we need to ramp up now.   We're moving back to the Baltimore-Washington area, expanding the Convention to include workshops and roundtables on Thursday, and finally adding a real workshop and panel track all weekend. I'm expecting about twenty people the first year, and we'll go from there.

I've added an additional "WildCard" prize to the LARPA Small Games Contest this year, and that should make things interesting. We've got three competitors for the 12-24 Category, but it's likely that the one micro entrant will win that category.   We have more entrants this year than ever before, and I'm happy about that.   Next year we are going to open Contest Game Bids before we open Regular Bids and may also offer a few more Categories.

I think if IMA is going to be the art and theory con, we need to be the art and theory Convention and that means really putting our money where our mouth is and provide a real programming track. It will be lightly attended at first, but you can't grow something without planting a seed, and it's time.   We'll also move to a heavier promotional message. IMA-2008 was intended to be a "coasting" con - run our usual numbers and usual crowd during what would arguably be the most intense and difficult year for the Threads Campaign. With Threads beginning to run itself, I'll have more time to devote to IMA-2009 and to the twenty fifth anniversary in 2010.

As a side note, the 25th Anniversary of Theatre Style LARP passed without remark last year. But I think in a lot of ways that's less of a landmark. The SIL was founded as the Harvard SIL that year, but we know there was LARP before that, and there are murdery mystery events that go back as far, and Assassin games, etc. So that was a landmark, but not really anniversary worthy. I think that the beginning of SilIcon/Intercon in the United States is going to be a much more memorable date down the years.

So we'll worry about the future later

(Offtopic) Because people ask...

2008-11-05T18:36:15Z

No particular ideas on Defense other than Jack Reed. I think you could do a lot worse than that. Reed is a veteran with cred and a certified expert, who can work closely with Joe Biden, who is probably going to be the Defense/State guy.

Treasury is obviously going to be very important. Bob Rubin has been talked about a lot as well as Paul Volcker. My personal guess is going to be Timothy Geithner (President of the Federal Reserve Bank). He's worked for Rubin, who may well end up as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors rather than Secretary. Geithner is already in the middle of the bailout, day-in/day-out and that's going to be enormously important.

the_smith_e asked what Warren Buffet wanted. I'd guess if anything a role on the CEA. I'd guess Rubin or Volcker for Chair though.

State is a big one. Madelaine Albright has been suggested, but she's something like 72, and I just don't think she could keep up with the pace. I think she'll be an advisor of some sort, but someone younger will take State. You do not want the health complexities inherent in a 72 year old derailing the delicate processes State needs to be responsible for. A good realistic choice is Greg Craig. Colin Powell has been suggested, as has John Kerry. I think if we see that sort of "dream team" pick it would be in this slot, but my money is going to go on Craig or somebody like him.

At this writing, as far as I know Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Illinois) is a given for Chief of Staff and should be announced shortly.

No strong feelings about the other slots...

Election Day Rants, IMA, and Leadership Posts - III - "Modular Structure"

2008-11-04T15:28:49Z

Intercon Mid-Atlantic is coming along. Reg has started to move up a little, which may go with the easing of the financial panic. There is some thought that the likely "blue" election day will settle things more and people will get a little less panicked about spending. If you still want to come, but were locked out of the room block, please contact me directly as we may be able to get you a room.

Election Day - I haven't digressed much about politics this year, because frankly it was a very close horse-race then a foregone conclusion. But a quick early evaluation. To pull off a win, McCain would need to get every solid vote he has, also claim every leaning vote he has, claim every single tossup vote in the country AND claim 18 electoral votes that are currently leaning Obama. I won't say that's impossible, but it would take a significant miracle...the only thing I see that could possible save McCain is a surprise upset in Pennsylvania. That still means he has to carry both Ohio AND Florida, but he could afford to slip in one other place...he could afford to lose one of GA, VA, NC, MO, and he could afford to lose the Dakotas and Montana.

Today in Leadership, we visit the topic of Modular structure...

The Modular Structure and some Pros and Cons

Despotism in LARP

During most of the 1990s it was put forward that LARP only worked as a Dictatorship. The theory was that in order for a LARP to run well there had to be one tyrant who controlled everything with an iron fist. While this isn’t true, it is a product of perception. Small political entities are Despotisms (Primitive Dictatorships). People familiar with the political model of Sid Meier’s Civilization will recognize this concept. Civ players will also remember that as society gets larger, Despotism is less and less efficient. The capability emerges to support more complex models, and the Despot is a drag, not a help. In a small group a Despot gets things moving quickly. It could be argued that the Continuity Staff is a Despotic Oligarchy, but the effect is the same. In a large group Despotism slows things down because a few people have to oversee everything directly. Civ players could humorously argue whether we are moving to Monarchy or Republicanism but the truth is we have some elements of both. The Production-Company model and the “Marketplace of Ideas” model below aim to keep some of the elements of Despotism that work well. Having someone willing to take responsibility and say “the buck stops here.” But it aims to eliminate the drag of all decisions having to be approved by or blessed by a small cadre of oligarchs.

The Origins of the Modular Structure

The advent of the modular structure made it possible to consider a stronger move away from Despotism. Modular. The real origin of the concept is the 1988 LARP event The Arabian Nights. The designers of that original event, including but not limited to Russell Almond, conceptualized a structure which could support 120 players and dozens of GM writers who had little time or inclination to closely coordinate writing efforts.

Like the Pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, the architecture of, The Arabian Nights, was vastly ahead of its time and would not be repeated for some time. In LARP terms it would be a decade and a half before the Arabian Nights model was fully appreciated. One reason for this is that it takes a fairly large Event to need a modular style, and games had tended to stay in the 40-50 range with only a few large events reaching larger sizes.

The Advent of the modern Modular Style

By 2003 we were seriously looking for models that would support multiple writers as anything but assistants. . 1936: Atlantic Clipper (2002) was our first attempt to heavily integrate writers who were not the core founders into production, and it showed us that there was much to learn. Modules of sorts had existed in TS/Adventure crossover from the time of Dark Summonings, where the DS: Dreamlands game presented a modular model. The first two experiments of the current group (1936/1948/Threads) with the serious modern module structure began in 2004. In September 2005 with 1948: Washington and then in January 2006 with 1948: Shanghai we fully debuted the modular structure similar to that of Threads.

It is interesting to consider that the enormously evolved “bid and grid” system we have in October 2008 was developed in only four years. We have to bear this in mind when we want the system to suddenly change or expect to fix all its problems overnight.

It can be argued that like “Monarchy” and “Republic” in Civilization, “Bid and Grid” is a stopgap between the ideal (Democracy) and the realizable (Despotism). It is not the best possible system. It has shortcomings. However it is the best possible system we can operate within our resources. If we are to move beyond, or at least build on top of “Bid and Grid” our core staff needs to reach a higher level of training and personal discipline so that we have a model that not only supports our model, but is capable of training and drawing in new authors without alienating them. Below under “Pros and Cons of the Modular System,” we will explore shortcomings and what we can do to improve the current system.

The Theory Of Boxes – a key concept

In the modular system we talk about each Writer’s Box or Boxes. The things that are in the Box are things that the Writer has complete control over. A Writer’s Box may be his own personal creations (where they do not interface with others) or tasks he is a Czar, or Custodian of (concepts we’ll explore more below in “A Free Market of Ideas”)

Connectors extend out of the Box. A Writer does not control the connectors coming out of his box. Some connectors are automatic. A Thread may have any internal politics a Writer designs, but its SPEM ratings and gate outlets are connectors that must be checked with others.

Make money on IMA - Leadership Posts - II Background A

2008-11-01T15:44:27Z

Intercon Mid-Atlantic will Pay you Money!

We're broadening the Intercon Economic Incentive Program, and you can make money!

We need to encourage people who are COMING to the con to push to fill up their car with people who can afford $35 to crash, eat, and drink for the entire weekend. We're getting some response but it isn't enough.

Get ten people to sign up for IMA, and show at the door. Crash space or full hotel and $25 rate. I will hand you a $100 bill at the door
Get five people to sign up for IMA and show at the door. Same deal and I will hand you a $50.

Sorry we can't quite do a $10 refund for "bring a friend" but coordinate...fill a car with people, come to the Con and get paid.

Just as a side note...every time we've been in tough financial times and been trying to hold out a hand to help, we get one or two people asking technical questions like "so if I bring my friend Bob and he shows up but leaves because he was really just coming to see his sister, does it count..." My answer to all questions is, "we're fair, generous and trying to help. Do well by us and we'll try to do well by you."

Now on to the next segment of the Leadership White Paper. Remember you can read the full White Paper here.

II - Background – How Things Have Been and Are Now

We can’t move forward without a good grip on where we are now. Some things about our current state are obvious. Some others are known only to a few people who deal with them, or are “principles” which get enforced only because I enforce them.

Structural Facts – How Threads is Organized

Most people see only a little of the organization of the game. Even many writers do not deal with it in much detail, preferring to ask me for “yes” or “no” answers. To act as leaders, we need to know why we do certain things, and how our structure is set up.

Executive Producer

As Executive Producer, my job is to assume all financial risks associated with the game. If, for example, we had paid nearly all the costs associated with the game – food insurance, etc., and hurricane Fay had slammed through our area causing a cancellation, it would be up to me to absorb the losses. The same with a winter game being cancelled or very unprofitable because of snow. I also accept the hazards of loss of the physical plant, etc. If I cannot cover a cost, which happens only rarely (the generator four years ago, the GP, a few other items), it is up to me to go hat in hand and get the money together. That’s what Producers do. Alongside that, I set overarcing policy and general goals. In setting direction and goals, I work closely with Eric Johnson, and several other members of the Continuity Staff, and some of the more experienced writers.

VIA – Our Servicing Agent

Virtual Interactive Arts is a Delaware based LLC that exists as a service provider for LARP. This is my personal “production arm.” VIA acts as the insurer for Threads events, limiting the liability that can accrue to the senior volunteers. VIA also keeps me or someone else from having to pay income taxes on the $12,000 - $14,000 a year of traceable “income” Threads generates. In reality most of this money is rolled directly into the event. In the future it is possible we will move to a 501 ( C) (7) “Social” Non-Profit model for Threads. VIA is also important because those viewed as “officers” of the event could be sued directly by anyone injured at a Threads Event. Because VIA exists it is likely that a legal action could be directed against the LLC not one of our volunteers. This may be more important than you think. You may think you’d never sue Threads. But do you belong to an HMO, or have other Group Insurance? Read your service agreement carefully. You probably signed away your right to sue in the event of a major injury to your insurer. Your HMO would probably sue Threads, even if you didn’t want to.

Continuity – the current and “old” model for Leadership

The term “Continuity” is a little confusing. In most games, “Continuity” is the staff of copy editors that make sure that one scene agrees with another. In our group Continuity picked up the meaning of “the leadership group.” This makes sense if you think about the usage as being similar to “Editor.” An “editor” is technically a person who looks at copy and changes it. However an “Editorial Staff” is the management branch of a Magazine or Newspaper, and the “Editor” is the manager.

The concept behind Continuity was to avoid terms like “leadership” that tended to breed the sort of hellish small-stakes envy and bad behavior so common to volunteer groups where the lowest of stakes seem to spur the most bitter of fights. Our goal was to be a functional group that got things done, not to have titles to lord over others. This is important because our experience teaches us that LARP groups are often perceived as small and flaky and tend to be targets for ne’er-do-wells with the need do “climb to the top” looking for a suitably small hill they might actually be able to be king of. Often these people aren’t very socially adapted, and may not care how messy or unpleasant their climb is. We don’t want to be attractive to that sort of person, and not offering a lot of “titles without jobs attached” is an important part of that.

Continuity is currently the decisionmaking body. I cannot unilaterally change anything about this group that lies outside the direct sphere of the Executive Producer. The process must be that these people accept what changes are put forward, and agree to move forward, or that we must vote. I think that it is the case that we’d all prefer to accept changes with acclamation. But for that to happen these people have to feel they have been respected and included.

Founders – the People who Started or Inherited Threads

The Continuity Staff is not synonymous with the founders of the game. Hank Kuhfeldt was a founder but no longer sits on Continuity, and Colin Sandel was not a founder but does sit on Continuity. Various founders became involved at various times. In many groups being a “founder” has sparked bitter acrimony. We have seen groups torn apart as an original founder decided to “take their marbles and go home,” or threw their weight around to demand changes that were of interest to them and a few supporters but not in keeping with the overall direction of the group. Since none of the original founders wanted this, we agreed to a Creative Commons license for the game, so that there would never be any question that any individual, including myself, had the right to suspend or derail the campaign for everyone else.

That said, I think it’s realistic to suggest that these people are owed some respect.

I’d also like to note that the other person who has a special relationship with the group is Adrienne Gammons. Just as I bring a great deal of the infrastructure to the table (not only the actual physical infrastructure, but the cumulative costs to store and transport it), Adrienne brings our summer site to the table. This suggests that particularly in regards to the summer games, she has an important position and is someone we need to respect and listen to. She also has the ability to mandate certain things about the site which brook no argument.

Our Volunteer Base

The core of our group is made up of volunteers. Even players who mostly pay Money do some volunteer work cleaning up the camp and undertaking other tasks. We are a community based group, of and for, volunteers. Some people volunteer more time, others are contributors who provide more money. We use the TERM system to describe this. If you aren’t familiar with the Time/Expertise/Resources/Money model, you may want to catch up by reading: http://wiki.Threadsofdamocles.org/index.php?title=TERM.

Understanding Why People Volunteer for Threads

It is not very fun to do paperwork or hard labor for Threads. But people do it. It is easy to assume that people do the hard jobs because they “want to,” and assume they’ll just keep doing them. But that’s not the case. Everyone must get some gratification or payoff. To retain our volunteers we need to understand what they get out of working for the Group.

The right to “sit at the table.” People who are not writers get the right through work to act as Chiefs instead of Indians. Getting to sit in, kibbitz, and have a hand in the creative process is a reward they get for being one of the “doers.”
Friendship. Many of the people who do work for us do it out of personal friendship with one of the principals. These people probably wouldn’t work with the group or support it nearly as much if their friendship changed. Their reward is the reward of their friend feeling they have supported them. This is not something to discount. Probably more service to Threads is motivated by direct personal friendship than any other category. When we “dis” or penalize on person, we may alienate their friends who support the group.

The privilege to “do it right” and “be my own boss.” Many of our volunteers do work for Threads similar to that they do at the office, but are frustrated with superiors in day to day life. In working for Threads there is a chance to do things “my way” and get to be the one who sets processes and makes plans. That’s very gratifying to a lot of volunteers.

Leadership Posts - I Introduction

2008-10-28T22:32:19Z

Hey folks. The GMs of Intercon Mid-Atlantic still need reg. We've had a few new reg, but we really need to push the free crash space, the other deals. Please push information about the Intercon Economic Incentive package out as far and wide as you can. I wouldn't ask for myself, but the people who have bid games deserve good full audiences, and there are some events really hurting. You can help. You can offer to drive people. With $10 crash space and $25 food, people can afford Intercon if they can get there. Help me with that.

Today I'm starting a modular release of my White Paper on Leadership in LARP groups. You can read the whole paper at LARPWriting.org, but for people who want small, digestible bits, we're going to serialize it here. While it was unashamedly written for the Threads of Damocles group, it has a larger significance.

Since it was released the most common response I've had is for someone to describe a basic business management model, and suggest that maybe instead of this hare-brained amateurish stuff we try doing it like the "real" folks do it. It may be worth explaining that we began with a straight business model for LARP back in the 1990s and have evolved to this level of specialization. I summed up the differences by saying:

<i>Volunteer management and leadership on an NPO level does not work like real business leadership
Volunteer management on the organized suburban community/soccer mom level does not work like real NPO leadership
Volunteer management on the gamer-geek/LARP level does not work like organized suburban soccer mom leadership...

So once you pass through that filter...really the model we need is DRAMATICALLY different from a real business model. I've seen groups apply that model and seen them fail. Where they have worked it is only because people have carried out the pretense of that structure as an elaborate LARP while actually running on a much less sophisticated model. Where they have failed that structure typically shot the group in the foot, became a huge stumbling block it could not work around.

It's a great ideal to break the project down into blocks, etc., but that MUST happen along organic lines driven largely by the volunteers and personalities involved. If it doesn't, it's going to be a resounding failure.

What most business people want to build is a business structure that works if you fill it with people. That will, in no uncertain terms, fail. <i>

I - Introduction

This White Paper is intended to kick off a planned discussion on the future of leadership in Threads. It is long. I have tried not to repeat myself or use too many big words, but this is a big subject. If it seems I’m writing too much about it, consider the hours that many groups have spent miserable because of failed choices about leadership and ask…”is it too much to spend an hour reading to avoid weeks of misery and a failed campaign?” I figure it will take about two hours to read through the 45 pages of this discussion.

It isn't just a blueprint of leadership. It is a detailed discussion of every challenge and problem facing us. It presents a new model for production based on a "Free Market of Ideas."

Despite jokes that are made at my expense and which I may indulge because I'm good natured. I do not write or talk because I like to hear my own voice. This has been hard work, and I have put a great deal of thought into it. I collected and in some cases invented the ideas and principles here because I think that the players and volunteers of this group deserve well thought out and reasoned leadership. I could have done many of these things unilaterally, but I chose to write them down for two reasons.

First I think that our group is made up of intelligent, educated, people who can easily read fifty pages, and understand it. The ideas in it are an attempt to crystalize much of what I have learned and observed into a form that others can benefit from.

And that leads to the second reason. I think the ideas and concepts presented in this document could benefit many campaigns and many writers, and as much as I want these ideas to benefit our group, I want our group to serve more than it already does as a model for other worthwhile endeavors in the future.

Our group is fortunate enough to have an influx of younger LARPers who are active, and have the interest and background to do significant work. It is not necessary for them to spend twenty years learning the same lessons I have learned when I can write them down in summary so they can spend the next twenty years learning new things. LARP has too much "reinventing the wheel" because no-one has any impetus to write down lessons learned.

I've said jokingly that when people begin bitching at about Threads in the coming year I am going to ask if they have read this paper, and that if they have not I think they should be limited to two and a half hours of bitching, cumulative, for the year.

Joking aside, how much time do we waste reading flame wars or bitching when a group's leadership slowly fails, or we grapple with problems.? More than two hours. Much more. Some people are not interested in the leadership of the group. They pay their money and play and accept what comes. This is fine. Just remember that this was your chance to learn, respond, discuss and have input, so if you don’t like the leadership you get, don’t complain about it. I have no doubt there will be “summaries” of this information posted. Remember that when you read the summary, you lose the detail.

We are not at a crisis point of leadership. We do not need to have this discussion now. But right now we can have it at a time when we are not in crisis. If we wait for a crisis, emotions will be high and endurance stretched to the breaking point, and some of us will be approaching the table with a list of grievances and a will to do harm. We have the luxury of being affable and relatively detached now. So this is the best time to have this discussion.

This is also not a coup, or an attempt to overturn the existing leadership. I have said that the current leadership is “broken” but that is not because the people leading, including myself, have done badly. It is because our group has grown both in size and knowledge. To risk a historical analogy, we have had the Articles of Confederation, and it is now time to have the Constitution. But this is a constructive change brought about by growth, not a negative one brought about by bad management.

Finally I want to point out that the group is not in anarchy and does not lack leadership. The model that we currently have has served well. We have an Executive Producer (myself) who handles money and overall direction, and we have the Continuity Staff (Kate Bunting, Adrienne Gammons, Eric Johnson, John Kammer, Lawrence Lee, Stephanie Olmstead-Dean, Colin Sandel) who either as writers or Administrators have worked very hard to produce this campaign. None of those people will be excluded or marginalized under this plan…but we will bring more new voices into the mix.

next:

II - Background – How Things Have Been and Are Now

Intercon Economic Incentive Package

2008-10-23T20:39:08Z

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO YOUR GAME LISTS!!!

So every year, IMA reg is about 105. I suppose it could be bigger if we advertised more. It's true we're sort of the "best little-known secret of LARP." A small, quiet convention that is serving free food and booze at an incredibly cheap rate. But we like being the "thing you have to know about," and it's been a great place to run cool experimental work. Not trying to be snobby just figure you have to be around a few years to hear about IMA. We don't compete much with the Boston Convention.

I track registration. And I know when it should peak. The Con runs up to 70 and then during the period that would be the last two weeks

On the Day the stock Market first crashed, Intercon Reg was 70. It had been steadily gaining and was in the period where over about two and a half weeks it should run up to about 110, with a few drops taking us back to 105.

Today Intercon Reg is 71. The curve didn't just slump, it shattered. Never seen anything like it. Healthy, healthy...BAM!

The good news is, MOST OF THE GAMES HAVE MINIMUM. Most of the games are going to run, only a few are in danger, and there are players who haven't signed up yet. I think we're going to get everything run. I've been working on that.

But it's clear we need a larger solution. By now it is clear that this is not a normal time. This is not 1992. It may not be the Great Depression, but you may have to remember Nixon as a President to have been through worse. The solutions that worked to keep the con afloat in the last two recessions are not good enough now...THIS CALLS FOR MORE!

It's not clear to me that the crisis is really affecting our attendees all that much. But I suppose with people talking about staff cuts, people are reluctant to travel even if they don't actually have less money than they did last month.

I also understand that "it's the travel and the expense not the Con Reg."

But it's time for some "Economic Stimulus" of our own. This is a one time emergency provision to operate the Convention at a loss in order to make sure the LARPA Contest games run.

http://ima.larpaweb.net

1) The Con Rate is $25. If you paid $45 I will hand you a $20 at the door. I am resetting the rate. If you paid $25 I will hand you a $5 at the door. We are officially the cheapest place to eat and drink that weekend. PERIOD. You can hardly eat and drink at HOME for less than that.

2) We are creating "Crash Rooms" Crash space is $10 payable to me, per person. Rooms are going to be segregated into "Girls" "Boys" and "Couples." There is no guarantee of bed, it's "first come first served." That doesn't mean "get there and stake out a bed" it means the first four people who fall asleep get bed space. Bring a bedroll. If you can get to the con, we have space for you. So far that's $35 for the trip. TELL YOUR FRIENDS!!!!!

3) PLEASE DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT DROP A ROOM RESERVATION. IF YOU DECIDE TO DROP YOUR ROOM CONTACT stephanie@vialarp.org. The Con may take over your room. (This doesn't mean we pay for your room, but we may use it for one of the crash space rooms). We realize that if people have a room and some room-mates bailed they may elect to go to the "Crash rooms"

4) Gas is fixing itself. Travel right now is cheaper than it has been at ANY POINT THIS SUMMER. Gas is the one thing declining. Pile into a car and COME TO INTERCON!!!!!

This is going to be a great Con and I don't want to see it ruined by bad Economic Timing. Come down and help us push Intercon that last 30!

We got food, we got soda, we got a bar...now we got crash space...Join us!

http://ima.larpaweb.net

Threads Leadership White Paper - Introduction

2008-10-21T02:03:15Z

I've put together a White Paper on plans to revise the Leadership and Production Model of Threads of Damocles. I think it has a lot of value to anyone running a sophisticated campaign with a genuine commitment to a broad-based leadership.
This White Paper is intended to kick off a planned discussion on the future of leadership in Threads. It is long. I have tried not to repeat myself or use too many big words, but this is a big subject. If it seems I’m writing too much about it, consider the hours that many groups have spent miserable because of failed choices about leadership and ask…”is it too much to spend an hour reading to avoid weeks of misery and a failed campaign?” I figure it will take about two hours to read through the 45 pages of this discussion.

It isn't just a blueprint of leadership. It is a detailed discussion of every challenge and problem facing us. It presents a new model for production based on a "Free Market of Ideas."

Despite jokes that are made at my expense and which I may indulge because I'm good natured. I do not write or talk because I like to hear my own voice. This has been hard work, and I have put a great deal of thought into it. I collected and in some cases invented the ideas and principles here because I think that the players and volunteers of this group deserve well thought out and reasoned leadership. I could have done many of these things unilaterally, but I chose to write them down for two reasons.

First I think that our group is made up of intelligent, educated, people who can easily read fifty pages, and understand it. The ideas in it are an attempt to crystalize much of what I have learned and observed into a form that others can benefit from.

And that leads to the second reason. I think the ideas and concepts presented in this document could benefit many campaigns and many writers, and as much as I want these ideas to benefit our group, I want our group to serve more than it already does as a model for other worthwhile endeavors in the future.

Our group is fortunate enough to have an influx of younger LARPers who are active, and have the interest and background to do significant work. It is not necessary for them to spend twenty years learning the same lessons I have learned when I can write them down in summary so they can spend the next twenty years learning new things. LARP has too much "reinventing the wheel" because no-one has any impetus to write down lessons learned.

I've said jokingly that when people begin bitching at about Threads in the coming year I am going to ask if they have read this paper, and that if they have not I think they should be limited to two and a half hours of bitching, cumulative, for the year.

Joking aside, how much time do we waste reading flame wars or bitching when a group's leadership slowly fails, or we grapple with problems.? More than two hours. Much more. Some people are not interested in the leadership of the group. They pay their money and play and accept what comes. This is fine. Just remember that this was your chance to learn, respond, discuss and have input, so if you don’t like the leadership you get, don’t complain about it. I have no doubt there will be “summaries” of this information posted. Remember that when you read the summary, you lose the detail.

We are not at a crisis point of leadership. We do not need to have this discussion now. But right now we can have it at a time when we are not in crisis. If we wait for a crisis, emotions will be high and endurance stretched to the breaking point, and some of us will be approaching the table with a list of grievances and a will to do harm. We have the luxury of being affable and relatively detached now. So this is the best time to have this discussion.

This is also not a coup, or an attempt to overturn the existing leadership. I have said that the current leadership is “broken” but that is not because the people leading, including myself, have done badly. It is because our group has grown both in size and knowledge. To risk a historical analogy, we have had the Articles of Confederation, and it is now time to have the Constitution. But this is a constructive change brought about by growth, not a negative one brought about by bad management. Finally I want to point out that the group is not in anarchy and does not lack leadership. The model that we currently have has served well. We have an Executive Producer (myself) who handles money and overall direction, and we have the Continuity Staff (Kate Bunting, Adrienne Gammons, Eric Johnson, John Kammer, Lawrence Lee, Stephanie Olmstead-Dean, Colin Sandel) who either as writers or Administrators have worked very hard to produce this campaign. None of those people will be excluded or marginalized under this plan…but we will bring more new voices into the mix.

HTML Version http://www.larpwriting.org/essays/leadership_white_paper.htm

Word Version http://www.larpwriting.org/essays/leadership_white_paper.doc

Intercon Hotel Block Closing!

2008-10-14T06:33:46Z

Apologies if you receive this notice more than once, but it's ~~impoirtant~~ important (and apparently my spell checker is not working).

The deadline to reserve a hotel room in the Intercon Mid-Atlantic room block is tomorrow, 14 October 2008!

After that time there is no guarantee that you will be able to get a room at the reduced rates for IMA, or indeed, that you will be able to get a hotel room at all. November is actually a pretty busy month for the sites that stay open in Rehoboth Beach! I can't make more hotel rooms appear where they don't exist, so grab yours today while it's still available!

IMA 2008 room rates are $80/night single/double, $95/night triple, and $110/night quad, plus 8% tax. To make your hotel reservation, just call the Atlantic Sands Hotel at 800-422-0600 (302-227-2511 outside the U.S.), and be sure to mention Intercon. PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG TO ANYONE YOU KNOW WHO'S PLANNING TO COME TO THE CONVENTION!

See you there, and thanks!

Real Risks to the World

2008-10-12T16:27:13Z

I've generally stuck to LARP here, but after my comments last week, I thought I'd add this article on "The Next World War? It Could be Financial" At the risk of upsetting people who think that ideology is something other than a dying entertainment for people who grew up in tents or Red States, I think this speaks more to the realities of current day warfare, and economics can drive instability that results in miltary adventurism.

I'll go one step further, providing a vague LARP link, and say that I think the current crisis, and its political issues are of interest for players following the political game in Threads. The political game is constructed largely by three or four lifelong Washingtonians including a guy who can't say what he does but knows military and political analysis better than your average bear. It's certainly worth keeping your eyes open...the Threads political game is not a simple "us/them" set of conflicts, and it will shape up considerably over the next six to eight months. Not everyone is involved, and we've worked hard to create a modular game where not caring or being interested in those plots does not leave you without interesting things to do. But it's there for people who are interested and entertained.

6th Annual LARP Roast

2008-10-08T19:02:20Z

Welcome to the Evite for the 6th Annual LARP Roast. This year's honoree is Eric Johnson. Please join us for a night of fun and bad behavior as we recount Eric Johnson's "exemplary" career.

Dinner will be catered, buffet-style, by That's Amore. Price per person is $40. You can vote for menu items using a surveymonkey form which we will send out when you respond to the evite.

http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/MBZVUDKKOIIMFQMXMMOG/roast08

The DEADLINE for signing up is Saturday, October 11. If you want to speak, please email gordon@vialarp.org right away!

This year we are starting the Roast in the afternoon, before the meal, in order to make better use of the day and allow for a more extensive afterparty. This year's afterparty will be onsite, and will be run in the style of a Threads party with the Threads bar, but less roleplaying. We have the site to ourselves all evening and even booked it for the next day so we don't have to clean up. You can probably still book a hotel room so you don't even have to drive home.

The roast is a light evening of good-natured, if ribald, entertainment to honor a member of the LARP Community who has done a great deal to forward LARP in the Mid-Atlantic Community. We welcome our friends from everywhere, though we don't expect folks to fly to attend.

Past Roasts have tended to be rated "R" for strong adult language and references so the roast is probably not suitable to children.

You need to select your entree by answering the questions, or we won't know what you want to eat, and the past honorees may amuse themselves by randomly selecting an entree for you.

To reduce the chances of noise complaints from other guests, we have blocked the rooms on the lobby level of the hotel. Two King-bed rooms remain at $89/night. If you would like to reserve one of these rooms for the night of the Roast, please contact the hotel at (301) 428-1300 and mention Threads.

Please feel free to add others to the invitation, or tell your friends! We cannot accept +1 Guests, because we need everyone's entree order.

Writer's Block: Day of German Unity

2008-10-06T18:31:40Z

It’s the Day of German Unity, marking the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. In our current period of global instability, do you ever feel nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War?

View 500 Answers

No. I think that yearning for the Cold War is very similar to romanticizing the First or Second World War. Great from a vantage point of watching movies and wanting an artificially simplified struggle, but not so great if you are dying at the Somme or Malmedy. I spent most of my teen years growing up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Was that reasonable? Possibly not. There is no well defined suggestion that the U.S. was in serious danger of a real nuclear war after 1962. But we read about computer errors like the 1979 Exercise Tape and 1980 Computer Chip failures, and were concerned that a war might start accidentally. We also knew that Soviet systems were technologically inferior to ours and that based on their WWII experience Soviet logicians might potentially consider a catastrophic nuclear war that broke U.S. military power a "win."

When international tensions rose, we feared that there would be a catastrophic war brought about by human failure.  I don't think I was as prone to this as others, because I was very familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and knew there were a lot of checks in the loop. But that also meant I was aware of the potential for real misunderstandings, or simply a real conventional war. I'd read Gen. Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War," illustrating a Fulda Gap invasion of Europe. It was also conventional wisdom that if 3 or 4 "hotspots" ever detonated at once, it could trigger an international situation so completely chaotic that a nuclear attack might be expected.

There was tension there because all of us knew two things. We were suburban kids, not survivalists, and we were not going to drive to cabins in West Virginia every time things looked a little rough. None of us wanted to behave like imbeciles. But at the same time we knew that realistically only people who guessed well which crisis would be the "big one" and got out of town were going to live. We lived in the DC suburbs, and there was not going to be any "running away" after a war started. In a way you hoped for the conventional war scenario, because that would give plenty of time to get out of town. I'd planned to meet my friends in Austinville where my grandmother lived, which we felt might be a target because of the lead mines, but we also felt had a lot of mountain coverage that would contain a subsurface blast, so that even a blast that destroyed the mines would probably leave the area habitable.

We hadn't worked these things out in detail but it was understood we might have to if "things got worse." I was also the political kid and basically the person in my peer group that I think people counted on to tell them whether or not things were "bad enough" to warrant "doing something."  I never panicked or did anything stupid, but I think we did. Other people might have the bliss of thinking a blast would kill them outright, but we'd all read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" and we knew that at extended range, most of us would live, and it was a coin toss depending on what was a target whether you'd die horribly or be stuck having to live in a world without infrastructure.   We knew the bombs were bigger than the Hiroshima blast, but we also knew a lot of them were subsurface penetrators, and smaller warheads...more accurate but less "beefy."  Only a small handful of "city busters" were supposed to be deployed.

I'd just entered College when the Soviets shot down a KAL airliner for violating their airspace at Sakhalin Island. I called my girlfriend of the time, and we had many hours of conversation.  We all agreed right then that things weren't "really bad" but that they might go south quickly and I made plans to leave school if the situation really deteriorated.

I don't miss not responding to every international crisis by waking up thinking "is something going to start a nuclear war today, and if it does, is enough information going to leak out that I can second guess right, and not give a false alarm and make an ass of myself, but also actually successfully second guess and get out of the way.  Even if I do, will it be worth it?"

The nukes are still out there, but nobody seriously thinks they are going to be used.   At least not in a big way.  There's still Russia-Ukraine or Pakistan-India.  That's meant that there is more fighting in the world today. Maybe the nukes were good. They made everybody behave. The U.S. would not have conducted a resource-motivated seizure of Iraq during the Cold War, nor would it have had to. A lot of people in a lot of the world have lived in misery since the Soviet Empire fell apart and every two bit power can fight over the scraps. But...I don't miss not living under the shadow of death, and I think if it came back, very few people around today would be happy about it.

Please Help! - IMA Games Beginning to Fill. Hotel Block Closes in Two Weeks!

2008-10-05T14:50:40Z

Hi folks. I don't send out mass mail very often or without good reason. IMA is entering the "serious" phase of reg now, with the hotel block closing in two weeks, and games beginning to fill or close to full. If you are a GM, or a player on any LARP or gaming-related lists, Please pass along a note about IMA. You can cut and paste this, or make up your own promo note. This "word of mouth" helps more than anything else you can do for IMA and I deeply appreciate it:

Intercon Mid Atlantic 2008 - Nov 14-17, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware

http://ima.larpaweb.net/

This year we have more function space than ever along with the traditional open bar and Con-Suite and Intercon parties! Don't you owe yourself one little vacation at the beach this year. Registration for games is open, and we have a great slate of games this year. Sign up now before our hotel room block fills. One game, Screwed, is already full and others are close to full.

The Intercon Party!
Two nights of Intercon Party. Open Bar provided in a convenient nearby hospitality suite by Threads of Damocles. Party till you drop! Dance, and a good selection of non-lame music.

A First Look at Lullaby of Broadway: Another Openin' Another Show

2008-09-22T03:03:41Z

Lullaby of Broadway: Another Openin' Another Show ran September 19-21, 2008 at the Days Hotel in Timonium Maryland. The game is credited to Interactivities Ink, but was largely a solo effort in writing by Mike Young with editing by Suzanne and Paul Wayner and others. Karl Musser ably assisted with onsite production. I'm not going to try to reproduce the full production credits here, as I'm sure Mike will post them to his blog shortly and if you aren't getting it on the Planet LARPA Feed you ought to be. I worked with Meredith Peck on Technical Crew and Cast.

I think before I talk about Lullaby, I ought to be honest about where I'm coming from in talking about it. I have a lot of respect for Mike Young as a producer and writer, and he's been in the game for years. But I admit I had concerns over this game, and I don't think they were unjustified. Solo work is always risky. The genre seemed...wonky...at best... Mike's 2006 Nightmare Before St. Patrick's Day can be fairly considered to have been a troubled event, and while Brassy's Men had high points, I'm on record as feeling in some areas that when it ended it had not yet achieved its full promise or conquered all the challenges that needs must face any campaign.

So this was an ambitious project, and I had concerns. I want to make that clear, because I don't want to come off as writing a very fluffy "positive" review.

Lullaby of Broadway: Another Openin' Another Show was in my personal opinion a first class production and a significant success. It ran well and on schedule, and would be a credit to any writer or producer. It was a pleasure to be a part of the production.

I'm not in any shape for a full length review here. I stayed up until 4:45 one morning, and about 6:45 the next, drinking and gossiping with various of the usual LARParati, and generally behaving badly. There were a lot of old faces I was happy to see again and some new folks I hope we'll see more of. It's been a long time since I burned the lights at the Days Hotel Timonium till the sun rose, and it brought back some happy memories.

The short version is that Lullaby combined a very structually sound framework with a successful genre concept.

I could muse a lot about the "theatrical LARP" sub genre. By this I mean LARP where the players assume theatrical roles and are empowered to take a very active director stance. I think there's a very strong tonal difference in a game where the player is associating the event with a threatrical production, whether or not they are playing an actor playing a character. Lullaby disposed of that unecessary complexity as have most theatrical LARPs, but keeps the feel...even if you aren't playing at being an actor, I think for most players theatrical LARP promotes a very strong feel of being able to "play the plot" rather than "win the game."

I'm still mulling what made Lullaby work so well, but I thought it was notably less rough than the 1997 Timonium run of Shakespeare's Lost Play. The 1997 SLP. was generally considered to be a very good run, but I think Lullaby is one of the smoothest theatrical LARPs I've seen. I certainly think that the success may be rooted in the fact that this was a very polished and technically competent game. Everything was prepared, playtested, and done in advance, and there was good cross checking and editing. That's certainly a very big plus. It may be no more than that Mike is a talented writer, producing the sort of material he excels at.

But I do tend to think despite being a strikingly proficient game technically - and I don't want to detract from that, there are probably other things that help. I think the audience of 2007 is more mature than the audience of 1997, and the general level of player sensibility higher. The art is more advanced overall. I also think that the musical genre is a good find. I think it allows for a certain ritualization that takes the focus away from the gamist "win win win" drive. It's hard to play Max Bialystock to "win." If it had been an old school theatre-style full length it would have been underplotted. But musicals are underplotted, that's the way the genre works. And for whatever reason it works in LARP.

I'm sure I'll have more observations later, but that's a quick first look. This was a well run production and I was pleased to be able to help with it.

The next run All That Jazz will be Oct 2-4, 2009. While the official calendar is not out yet, we know it will not conflict Threads or IMA. Signups will be open in a few weeks, and it is definitely worth checking out.

Greetings to everyone I got to meet, or renew ties with at Lullaby!