Over on facebook, there’s been some discussion about Sahara Expedition, an Italian-organised larp which will be run in Tunisia, a 4-day camel trek around the Sahara desert in the guide of the 1933 Miskatonic Sahara expedition. It looks like an interesting game, but it costs 350 - 550 Euro, which is enormously expensive in NZ terms (though quite cheap for a European blockbuster). And its quite easy to see where the money will be going: they have a team of guides, an authentic Berber camp to sleep in every night, and camels to carry it all (so they grafted a larp onto a package camel tour? Neat!)
But this has raised questions about how many people in NZ would pay that amount of money for a (suitably high-end) larp. The market is probably quite small: larping is a niche hobby after all. But there are already people who spend a small fortune travelling to games around the country, and the low-end of Sahara’s price range - about NZ$600 - is about what they’d spend a year on travel and game fees for a single campaign. So its not necessarily beyond people’s means. The problem is convincing them that they should spend that amount of money in one hit on one weekend, rather than on two, and on a one-off game rather than a campaign. Which would still be a hard sell, but not necessarily insurmountable. You just need to make your larp twice as cool as the others on offer…
