An interesting article from Lizzie Stark on when (and the different ways) organisers can burn out: lizziestark.com/2014/01/02/organ … coal-mine/
Thats a really interesting article. I totally agree with what she’s saying. I’ve only helped with a couple of games but I can see a few people in the community feeling a lot of those pressures she mentions.
Especially this bit:
Negativity from the community
Feedback, both good and bad, helps designers grow, so long as it is constructive. Constructive feedback comes from a place of love and wanting to help make the game even better.
I think many larp communities have trouble giving constructive feedback. In my mind, constructive feedback is stuff delivered directly and often privately (in just the player group or in an email) to the organizers and written in a tone that conveys respect for the game and the effort of the designer. It’s not passive-aggressive whining on social media, often from people who have not even attended the game.
The culture of feedback affects whether organizers and designers want to continue organizing and designing—and it often has broader ripples. A culture of negativity and hating on games and their organizers can have a chilling effect on newbies who are thinking of writing their own games. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me, “I was going to design a game about X, but then I saw how organizer Q got treated, and I don’t want to be in their shoes.” This always makes me very sad.
Even if you hated a game, remember that it is often dear to the organizers, who spent hundreds of hours creating something, typically for no other reason than the satisfaction of entertaining other people. Critique it like you’d critique your sister’s parenting style: with careful words and a loving motivation.
Having run one of thses for a while now. To me the major one that causes burn out.
Politics
Certain players want the game changed to advantage their characters and disadvantage everyone elses characters. And they are persistant, they will lobby you just about every day for years. They really do weary one.
Another one is people that do none of the work, but want to claim all of the credit for running a game/campaign.
The sense of self entitlement of some players is also very wearying. There are some players who seem to think that it is a privilege that they turn up to my game. They turn up late, then want to know why the game has to start late. They want to know why they should pay money to play. They really make you wonder why you bother at all.
In short I have always found the thing that causes burnout is people that do not play well with others. And they are legion in LRP.
This actually sounds surprisingly relevant to the large-scale tabletop campaign we’ve been running in Christchurch over the last year. I’ve been interested by the way in which it’s differed from your usual tabletop campaign*, and the discussion here makes me realise it’s actually closer to a LARP campaign in terms of the problems the GMs face. Politics and negative feedback were definitely things that came up last year (thankfully only rarely).
In a way it’s nice that I have a reference point, because for a bunch of last year’s campaign we were effectively flying blind, working everything out as we went along. This suggests that I should check out resources about running campaign LARPs, and try applying what I learn from them…
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- For reference, we had 4-6 GMs at any one time, 20-30 players, and the players were organising most of the adventures. Versus the usual 1 GM, 4-5 player game that’s common.
I think the article is really interesting - I think a lot of these things contributed to my burnout around August last year (an experience that is thankfully, but slowly, starting to lift). I think much of the negativity I was experiencing came from myself rather than from the community as a whole. That is, I was experiencing the law of diminishing returns, not getting as much out of each LARP as I had the last one, and while everyone was positive about what I was writing, I didn’t feel like what I had constructed was worthy of that response. I tended to hone in on the one person who was faintly unsatisfied and write off the whole game as a failure, particularly because I didn’t want that unsatisfied person to feel the same way I did.
I think the real canary in the coal mine, for me, is the amount of turnover the community has. The number of new players is still growing, and they’re popping up everywhere. There are more campaign games (which I have mixed feelings about, but that’s a post for another topic). But it feels like the same names are turning up again and again. The problem with positive feedback is that it becomes harder to say no to people who like your work. I think my experience of burnout is that every now and then you need someone to take over the writing part.