Castle Veldenz, where the most recent runs of The Castle were played.
I recently played Reflections Larp Studio‘s The Castle, which has left my mind buzzing over various elements of it – the intensely narratively dense and thematically rich gameplay I experienced, the interesting exploration of identity (especially with me getting to play a trans man), and also the way in which the game is to a degree about the players’ characters playing their own unsafe larp. This latter strand is especially interesting to me as, during the afterparty of the game, I found myself reflecting on some of the similarities between the in-game events/dynamics/relationships, and things I’d experienced as a performer or audience member of immersive & interactive work…
So I want to talk about safety.
The best place to start is how The Castle works: set in contemporary England, it is focused on a group of people who live as if they are a medieval court. Every player therefore has a ‘persona’ – a figure at the court – and a ‘character’ – the modern-day individual who is pretending to be that ‘persona’. (I’ll continue to use this language from the game to help distinguish between the two, with ‘player’ meaning the actual real-life person participating in the larp.)
So, as a player, you’re pretending to be someone (the character) who is in turn pretending to be someone (the persona).
It is entirely possible for you as a player to play in a way that’s safe, respectful, conscientious and suchlike, whilst your character is playing in an unsafe, abusive, exploitative, manipulative way. It is also entirely possible for The Castle as a game to be (comparatively) safe, whilst the charade (the in-world name for the pretence of the medieval court) is not.
I say comparatively safe, because I don’t want to suggest that safety is about making things 100% safe, both because a) I don’t think it’s possible to make something 100% safe and b) an important part of ‘safety’ is what kind of net – what responses and support – is in place after something’s happened, not just trying to prevent something happening.
Back to the differences in safety of The Castle and the charade – how do they work? I’ve gathered them under some broad headings, to capture the primary ways that the two different games at play – that played by the players, and that played by the characters – function.
The magic circle’s permeability:
- The ‘magic circle’ of the charade is treated as sacred beyond any character and their wellbeing. Even talking openly of the real, contemporary world could get a character physically attacked, socially ostracised, condemned as mentally unwell or sent to the dungeon. (This is huge as you cannot give enthusiastic consent in a context where you can’t meaningfully withdraw it.) However, for the players, the ‘magic circle’ was something you could readily step in or out of at any time, for any reason – the players were more important than the game.
- This rippled out into things such as the characters sword-fighting with anything from wooden training swords to sharp, able-to-severely-harm actual swords – but players only ever using larp-safe weapons. (I can imagine some people reading this and wondering ‘wait how does that work?’ – the only physical weapons we actually had available were larp-safe weapons, but upon picking them up you might say ‘don’t worry squire, we will simply use the wooden training swords, you have not earned a more dangerous weapon yet’ to indicate what the characters were using.) Because the magic circle was impermeable and prioritised, the characters and personae‘s weapons were a one-to-one match, whilst players were suspending their disbelief and pretending to use something other than they really had.
Availability of tools:
- The characters have no safety techniques for de-escalation, calibration or being ‘off game’, unlike the players (who had ways to initiate/signal off-game talks, means to physically leave scenes/move through spaces without others acknowledging that, and a mandatory player-wide break on the final morning to check-in on how everyone’s play was going and calibrate on the final hours of play). Whilst characters could talk out-of-persona, doing so was risky and taboo, as opposed to it being normal and reasonable for players.
- The charade had an opaque support structure (that still had to be cloaked in the fiction/language of the charade) when it came to responding to characters being in unsafe situations (eg there was a character who led on any contact with the outside world, like driving ill characters to hospital – but this was not an openly available avenue to characters, and this character was heavily stigmatised at a persona-level for their interactions with the ‘mundane’ world outside of the castle). Emotional/psychological support and suchlike was not structurally available to these characters outside of the charade’s fiction. They might be able to confide in an individual privately, but there was no way to seek any wider support or even required change to make participating in the charade safer for them. However, players could always approach the organiser if they needed help; first aiders were identified before the game started, as was a ‘quiet area’ and off-game kitchen players could use; there was an optional facilitated debrief after the game concluded.
- A big part of tools being ‘available’ is information being available. Players were sent design documents and character sheets long before the game, there was a discord where questions could be asked, there was a pre-game workshop, an off-game kitchen where a copy of the game’s schedule was available, and so on. Characters didn’t really have this same access to communal information, and were operating with wildly different information about what was going on between them all (see ‘the game’s purpose’ below). Steps were actively taken to make sure players had information (and the ability to access/seek out more) they needed to play well together; characters were actively prevented from playing well together (or even playing at all) due to information being concealed on both personal and collective levels.
Structural pressure:
- As the characters were playing out a medieval court, there are very stark imbalanced power dynamics which they can’t re-negotiate or overrule in the moment. If the king tells you to do something and you don’t do it, the natural upshot is punishment. Therefore characters could make each other do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, or generally without enthusiastic consent. However, the players were equal, all simply there are co-players and all with the same rights/opportunities/tools to re-negotiate or opt-out scenes, and the ability to do it without social stigma or punishment.
Physical interaction:
- The characters had in-persona sexual relationships (which could often be subject to the kind of above power dynamics/imbalances, as well as influenced by drug use, and coloured by the fact that, as mentioned, characters did not have tools to meaningfully withdraw consent during their play). Whilst players could simulate sexual acts (and include actual kissing in their play if both players involved agreed to it), there were strict, clear and communal guidelines around this. An expected baseline of physical interaction in the game (eg hugs) was established before play (which players could flag if they weren’t comfortable with), as well as the fact that simulation of sexual acts was to be explicitly calibrated between the players involved beforehand, and ways of simulating things (eg larp kissing techniques) were demonstrated to all players beforehand.
The game’s purpose:
- Many characters were playing in the charade for what I’d deem to be unsafe reasons – some were criminals who were basically using the charade as a place to hide out and avoid legal attention or repercussions (meaning they cannot play the game as a game, since their freedom and physical safety depends on participation); some had been brought into the fold to use the charade as a form of therapy, with other characters oblivious to this (again preventing them from playing the game as a game – and doing so alongside others who were engaging with it as a game, putting them on an unseen but wildly different footing). Some characters weren’t even engaging with the charade as fiction, but had lived in it since they were nine years old and so viewed it as reality. However, the players were larpers who were there to tell a story together.*
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So, that’s an overview of how players can play safely whilst characters don’t. The second part of this post is how, after the game had ended and the players were chatting, debriefing, exchanging stories and suchlike, something that scratched at the back of my mind was how immersive/interactive productions I’ve participated in as an audience member and performer have been far closer to the charade than The Castle when it comes to safety. And the above list of elements helps to express why.
That time where I had to comfort a fellow audience member who was in tears because they had been made complicit in the suicide of a character we’d been speaking on the phone to for the past hour? Well, no one knew before that moment that the ‘game’ we were playing was one about suicide (it was the ‘dramatic peak’ of the piece and clearly its ‘point’); the show was presented with an impermeable magic circle and the level of pressure to ‘not disrupt the performance’ can so often result in people doing things they’re not actually comfortable with; there were no tools to de-escalate or step back and there was absolutely no support structure to help someone out after, beyond other audience members (as there were zero in-person performers or members of production at the performances, by design).
That time where I was blindfolded and at one point, without warning, was grabbed around my throat with a hand that had just been dunked in an ice bath? Well, the magic circle had already been implied to be more important than me (I’d already been trained by the show not to speak, or to act like an agent in the world, but simply to be a body) and I had zero means or tools to express if I wasn’t comfortable, and in this case I was alone with the performer (it’s always far harder to speak to someone about feeling unsafe if they are the person creating that feeling). Later in the same show, food was being shoved in my mouth by someone standing over me as I sat down – the performers were always leading, I was always meant to follow, and at no point was there open negotiation about what was going to be done – I was just a body for things to happen at.
The show where someone was cajoled into coming out as trans to a parent via voicemail? Well, the social pressure (it was the climax of the show, and they were the last person who’d mentioned having something they wish they could say to someone close to them after everyone else had backed out of making the call, so there was an unspoken pressure that led to their not-so-enthusiastic consent) left a horrible taste in my mouth, but another point in the above list is what often gets to me when I remember it – the game’s purpose was not the same for everyone. Barely anyone in that audience was prepared to take the risk that person did. For them, the game was entertainment. It was an evening where they could feel an ultimately not-threatening rush. There was a huge imbalance where someone’s emotional vulnerability and risk was other’s evening out.
I could list things that happened to me on productions, but I’ve realised how angry it makes me on behalf of my younger self. The younger self who worked on productions where actors used ‘maintaining character’ and in-world ‘tests’ of my character’s mettle to initiate sexual dialogue, charged acts of humiliation or intense physical proximity – often without anyone else around. Never asking me, as a real person, if I wanted to do that. Never thinking that, being fresh out of university, I might not feel confident in pushing back on more established company members. Never considering that they were modelling deeply harmful behaviour.
The younger self who went years and years before the idea of safety tools being just as available to performers as to audiences/players was made explicit to them/offered at all. (I want to do a huge shoutout to Fire Hazard Games for this: a street/pervasive game company who regularly made me feel safe, protected, considered in situations that could’ve been risky were it not for their regular and active consideration of their actors’ wellbeing. I think it was on one of their gigs that I first concretely experienced the idea of ‘you being safe is more important than maintaining x part of the game/we don’t simply keep performing through y’.)
That’s what I keep coming back to: so much immersive work (not all, it’s important to stress) fetishises the magic circle, the creation of this other world, this perfect escapism, this impressive maintaining of character, and this can have knock-ons for safety of those involved. This might sound like an extreme take, but it’s one shaped by 15 years working in the industry and seeing how other adjacent fields like LARP and TTRPGs handle the whole ‘play pretend’ thing. The more I think about it, the more I think a lot of issues I have with productions I’ve experienced tracks to creating an impermeable magic circle – really, there I should be using a different term here, it doesn’t feel fair to talk of an ‘impermeable’ magic circle, because any genuine magic circle should be one people can move in and out of at all – it’s not play if you’re being forced to do it. In some cases, it’s shows seemingly both asking people to pretend (no one actually committed suicide in the above-mentioned show, for instance) but also finding some pretending (that there isn’t a member of support staff in the corner, for instance) too much. In others, it’s about wanting to confront people with ‘reality’ (eg the show where someone came out over voicemail) but not taking proper responsibility for the fact reality exists outside the bounds of the show.
Often, I say that LARP asks people to pretend and immersive/interactive theatre asks people to do – it has a strange, stronger commitment to ‘reality’. I’m not saying that immersive/interactive theatre needs to stop asking people to do, but I do think that there’s a lot of work out there that needs to reflect more on how readily people (performers and audience) can choose to not do (and, if I was in a certain mood maybe I’d suggest that some makers are scared to offer this option because they don’t trust people would still actually enthusiastically do the things those creators want them to…). The Castle offered a fascinating way of exploring the unsafe – with us seeing/experience it happen in realtime, but to people other than ourselves. Exploring dangerous things doesn’t require putting yourself in danger.
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*Yes, there is a degree to which you can’t be 100% certain that another player isn’t, for instance, using a game as therapy and therefore creating an imbalanced, non-transparent dynamic where different people are treating the game as a different entity. It’s a very difficult thing to guard against and arguably one of the reasons that games can’t be 100% safe. I’m not digging into it here as a) I’m looking at ‘safety’ from a more specifically structural/mechanical/design focus and b) doing that level of psychological analysis feels way beyond what I’m qualified to speak on. This also links to the fact that various characters in the game were playing in explicitly manipulative and abusive ways – exactly genuine revenge, drugging others into situations they could use as blackmail, and so on – and whilst nothing of that severity happened between players, it is again hard to 100% prevent someone being a bad actor, even if there are often things built into larps to minimise and de-incentivise such behaviour. But this feels like a whole other piece of writing and not one I’m sure I can write.