Competition and American larp

Has anyone else seen tara Clapper’s latest piece on Medium?

TLDR: Individuality and competition are core American values, but the American system is fundamentally broken. So larp designers should include competition to give players an opportunity to succeed or shine that they will never have in real life.

Which is an awfully bleak view - basicly that larp should be the opium of (some of) the geeks.

IMHO competition has its place - “play to win” is sometimes a useful design tool. But in my experience, actually competitive larps very quickly turn toxic and cease to be fun. And the idea that larp should provide psychological support because society is broken just seems… misguided.

Which is an awfully bleak view - basicly that larp should be the opium of (some of) the geeks.

That sounds terrible…and not why I’d want to do it at all. :no_mouth:

IMHO competition has its place - “play to win” is sometimes a useful design tool. But in my experience, actually competitive larps very quickly turn toxic and cease to be fun. And the idea that larp should provide psychological support because society is broken just seems… misguided.

This. So much.

I’m from a LARP culture that is actively non-competitive, i.e. people that want to win at all costs tend to become pretty unpopular pretty quickly. On top of that, I’m pretty keen on teamwork over egos in real life. So I always play to participate rather than win.

Unless it’s against the bad guys, of course. (I wish there was a pirate emoji. Can we have a pirate emoji, please? :wink: )

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I mostly do theatre-style, and a lot of games use play-to-win as a design choice to push dramatic conflict. But even then the players aren’t usually playing to win so much as give each other cool moments by fulfilling their role, and they steer to ensure that e.g. secrets are revealed or they don’t try and actively confront or kill their enemies (if its that sort of game) until an appropriate point in the game.

There’s a :skull_and_crossbones:, but I don’t think pirates are implemented in Discourse yet.