Playing Together, Apart

Just a month or so by the calendar, but seeming like an entire year ago, I wrote about time hitting warp speed as I—and many of us—were thrust into a pandemic awareness and a life of isolation.

Toilet paper sold out. Grocery store shelves were empty for the first time in my life awareness. And that’s saying something, since I grew up in rural counties that didn’t have large grocery stores. Many of us shuttered in our homes, experiencing furloughs, layoffs, and contract terminations.

Especially within the theatre industry.

But theatre as an art has survived worse. Colonial efforts attempted to erase local theatre practices throughout the world, but many of those forms adapted. The black plague and puritanism threatened the theatre industry, but people continued to create together.

And now we continue creating together, too, even though we’re isolated and far apart.

My involvement with Valha11a started with a phone call. A friend of mine—one I met with in Chicago back before the pandemic launched itself into my life—called me to ask me to join her as an NPC in this new online “larpy thing.” She had been brought on board by Otherworld Theatre and Moonrise Larp, but she’d never played any TTRPGs, let alone a larp, and knowing that’s my jam, she wanted me to join and help her figure it out.

Plus, she knew my research had been derailed by closures brought on by COVID, and this project couldn’t hurt my dissertation process.

So a second phone call occurred; I reached out to the founder and AD of Otherworld Theatre and the AD of Moonrise Larp, Tiffany Keane-Schaefer.

We chatted for nearly two hours—about theatre in Chicago, about my work as an intimacy choreographer, about my work with the Rocky Mountain Artists’ Safety Alliance, about our shared love of Sci-Fi literature and theatre, about feminism, and, of course, about larp.

“I watched a bunch of MoMo O’Brien’s videos,” Tiffany said, explaining her approach to larp. She continued, explaining that she presumed that the professors in School of Wizardry were actors, and that the larp was simply a play that the audience could, well, play. And she saw it as an incredibly fun and lucrative idea. So, she gathered actors she had worked with at Otherworld Theatre—a Sci-Fi Theater in Chicago—and created a few “larps” of her own, under a new company name: Moonrise.

But obviously, when the pandemic hit, productions at both Otherworld and Moonrise halted. I myself had already secured tickets to Chronicles of the Realm, which is still slated for this upcoming autumn. Tiffany is sure it will continue, and COVID will decrease by then. My fingers are crossed.

But in the meantime, Tiffany still wanted people to be able to play. So she conceptualized Valha11a, a space-Viking themed larp. And she wanted me on board.

Tiffany’s roots in theatre—especially in Chicago storefront theatre—intersected interestingly with my own grounding in intimacy and larp. She strives to follow the Chicago Theatre Standards in all of her larp games. She has taken training with Intimacy Directors International, and she requires players to use their intimacy choreography tactics in larp. In doing so, she says, she has angered many larpers. She lamented to me that “players don’t want restrictions. They say I’m not allowing them to have agency!” We talked about ways to create consent mechanics that follow IDI’s pillars, without prescribing actions taken during play. We talked about formats for negotiation that can help players respect each others’ boundaries within unscripted interactions, without dominating their character decisions.

We implemented consent mechanics for the game, and although Tiffany wanted to run the training without me (which ran for players, but not for NPCs), I created visuals for the website and Facebook page for instruction and guidance, and sent these visual aids to NPCs to familiarize them with the gestures we’d be using.

In planning for Valha11a, I worked with a team of actors—many of whom had surprisingly never been involved in a larp previously—and we created modules, lore, and scenarios to structure the larp, which would occur over Zoom with weekly “episodes” throughout the next month. The player onboarding session (session 1), occurred earlier this week, and we begin play next week. For these games, I created Åtta as my NPC persona. They are an AI character, the 8th generation “Oracle” aboard the Yngve Starship. I’m pumped to play them. Heck, I’m just thrilled to be playing with other larpers, even if it’s over Zoom. I’ve been alone at home for a month and a half now. Game One is tonight, and players are spread throughout the US, from Georgia to Chicago to Colorado and Washington State. And I’m really excited to see how all of this goes.