Engineering Interaction
Creating great larps without losing your sanity
The concept of the “interaction engine” puts tools and powers into the player’s hands to tell their own stories without needing as much writer effort as a traditional narrative plot. Handing narrative power to the players can produce great play experiences and make the creation process more efficient, but does require careful consideration.
Sometimes you read something changes the way you think about things. For me, when it comes to larp, it was the book Nordic Larp. I read this book in early 2024 and it began my journey to thinking differently about what was possible in the larp creative space. Nordic Larp led me down a rabbit hole that went via a book and an essay: The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp from 2014 and ‘Documenting a Tradition of Ephemeral Co-Creative Play’ from 2011 respectively.
The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp is essentially a “greatest hits” of Nordic larp essays up till that point. While I didn’t agree with everything in that book (and in fact thought some was absolute gibberish, something agreed upon by my literature critic partner), those essays gave me a much more advanced mental framework for thinking about larp design.
‘Documenting a Tradition of Ephemeral Co-Creative Play’ was less practical, but really hit home on the philosophical underpinnings of the medium, by going into detail on the difficulties of documenting the experience. As it turns out, if you start from the position of thinking a medium is hard to document (anyone who has seen how flat and underwhelming video footage of larp can be will hopefully agree) then you can try to get to the bottom of exactly what makes up the medium as a whole.
The argument for efficiency
One article in particular stuck with me more than any other. I will evangelise about it to any other organiser who will listen, and quite a few who don’t. I am talking about ‘Basics of Efficient Larp Production’, written by Juhana Pettersson in 2022. Pettersson is one of my favourite larp writers, famous for running Vampire larps in Finland and notable weird art larp Luminescence in the early 00’s among many other games (Luminescense is the larp with all the flour and the green lighting if you’ve heard of that). Hearing that I greatly enjoy reading a dour Finnish guy writing about making fun things more efficient is probably the least surprising thing you’ve ever heard from me, but hear me out.
Pettersson starts the article by noting the traditional method of larp production. This is the “infinite hours” option, where a team entirely comprised of volunteers creates a great game through brute force of work. In a smaller larp, you can often get away with this and there’s nothing “wrong” with the “infinite hours” approach as long as everyone knows what they are getting into and doesn’t burn themselves out in the process. Such games can often feel great as a player, since you’ll be getting a lovingly crafted game with a lot of time poured into it, creating a “personal touch” experience. There are downsides to this approach though. Just because the “infinite hours” method *can* work doesn’t mean it *should* be used. Organiser burnout has been a real problem as far back as writing about larp goes; “every larp is a miracle”, as the saying goes.
The question of whether you can produce the same quality of experience with less time, effort and stress is important to me, especially as I’ve suffered from some serious life-affecting burnout in the past from trying to do too much. Efficiency in making a larp also becomes more and more of a concern as the size of your larp increases, something that is obviously key to me as a writer for Empire primarily. Part of the point of a large fest larp is that the size of the crew does not necessarily increase at the same rate as the player-base, resulting in a much lower ratio of crew to players as a smaller game. This is pure economics; if you’re trying to run fest larp as a business, you want to run as good a game as you can on as few crew as possible. The idea of how you can do that is what I want to explore here. This article is not about Pettersson’s article as a whole, but draws out a particular aspect: the concept of the interaction engine.
The interaction engine
The notion of the interaction engine is a game design that encourages participants to engage and interact with each other in a meaningful way that doesn’t require direct input from the game team all the time. In ‘The Interaction Engine’, Bjarke Pedersen writes (my emphasis):
“The main focus in an engine larp is on what creates interactions between participants. Specifically, interactions that intensify the larp experience – the aim is not to create intensity for the sake of it, but intensity that moves both the individual and the ensemble experience in the direction of the themes of the larp. This way, the journey through the experience by the player will be way more dynamic than a plot or narrative written months before the participants arrive at the location. Scenes and experiences that players create themselves on the fly will fit better into their context and into what they want to experience.”
Something that I experience fairly frequently when I read about larp is a feeling of putting a name to something you felt intuitively, and the above paragraph was one of those moments. As a writer, I’ve always been more of world-builder, preferring to “prepare a canvas” so to speak, rather than plotting out a linear narrative for the players to experience. That is what an interaction engine does, creating organic interactions between players rather than externally imposed “plot”. It puts the agency in the hands of the players.
It’s probably unsurprising then that I gravitate towards games like Empire, especially as a writer. In many ways Empire is a game built of interaction engines. A lot of effort is put into setting up a detailed and varied scene for the players to experience their characters, and interactions with NPCs are relatively few and far between. The entire concept of the Way of Virtue could be understood as an engine, as can the various major bodies of state like the senate and military council. I think this is a major part of Empire’s success as a larp – the game encourages players to interact with each other and gives them tools and reasons to do so, rather than wait around for the game to tell them what the story is. Character actions can then affect the game world in a way that cascades back to other players.
In a fest larp, where you have a lot of players relative to the number of crew and especially when a lot of the crew will be dedicated to the logistics of simply running the fest rather than the game, it makes sense to structure your game in such a way to be efficient. From Pedersen’s article again:
“The most scarce resource you have in larp is the organizers’ time, closely followed by the participants’ time. When a large part of the material created for the larp is not used, you have wasted both. What I realized was that to create the best possible larp and not waste time, you need to let go of the narrative control and hand it over to the participants.”
Like anything in design though, use of interaction engines is a matter of trade-offs. There are situations where they might not be appropriate, and definitely possible pitfalls.
The potential problems
The first potential problem is that setting up interaction engines requires a lot of up-front design work, since everything needs to be in place before the players come into contact with it. Compare this to a linear narrative, where a rough framework must be established to start but individual pieces can be invented or fleshed out as needed as the players encounter them.
The reactivity of the engine can pose issues too, especially for a large game like Empire. If part of the idea is that using the engine produces outcomes that affects the game world, then this is all work that must be done and assessed. Unless the game runners are careful they can end up bombarded with requests from the players to change things. These all require assessing to see if they are appropriate and to determine the outcome, and then that result must also be communicated back to the player-base. Requests might end up being ignored or rejected due to not fitting the design principles of the game or lack of organiser time, both of which diminish the power of the engine as players feel like the promise of affecting things was false. Putting careful limits on what players can do that requires organiser effort is therefore vital, but again this adds to the up-front workload, and needs to be well communicated so that all players understand what they are buying into.
Speaking of buy-in, engine style games also put a high burden on the players to understand the nature of the game and how to interact with it. Since most of the gameplay and interaction is expected to be with each other, the game runners will likely be less “hands on” to ensure that players are having a good time and engaging with the game as expected. Depending on their game tradition, players might have a frustrating experience with an engine game, feeling like they don’t have anything to do and are having to do all the work themselves. New players especially might struggle and find that they become overwhelmed with options. They might become reluctant to take any game action at all, for fear of what might happen. Guiding people on methods for playing potentially unfamiliar games is important but once again puts more onus on the organisers to do work up-front, though in a fest game you can arrange for other players to do this work for you “in game”. In an engine-focused fest larp though, it becomes logistically impossible to verify whether everyone is properly on board with the game in the way the organisers are: you can’t check that everyone in your game attended the mandatory workshop if you have 3,500 players. Ensuring you have methods to get things back on track if necessary and guide player behaviour thus becomes more important as your player-base expands.
Engine games often revolve around interpersonal conflict as well, since the lack of a laid out narrative means that the story will likely emerge from the character’s conflict with each other in some capacity. This can be a turn off to some players who do want a straightforward narrative, especially people who are looking to enjoy a heroic story where the whole party can be victorious together against an external threat. At Empire there are certainly external threats to the player characters, but these threats are mutable and shifting. The question of whether the Imperial characters are heroes at all is a legitimate one. Even if they were, the aim of the game isn’t really to “win” against the barbarian NPCs. They are there to drive interaction and conflict between the interested parties in the player base, and provide a “dark mirror” to the characters to ponder over if they so choose.
One aspect of engine based games is that it might be hard for players to see the effort involved and the resulting value to them. While part of the point of engines is to be efficient, they do still require a lot of effort to make. This effort isn’t always apparent to players, who might be expecting a lot of interactions with NPCs or other obvious things from the game. As I said at the start of the article, a game made using the “infinite volunteer hours” model is obviously a good proposition for someone buying a ticket, but is a less welcome proposition for the people who in fact have to do the infinite hours. (Even if they *want* to put the infinite hours in, maybe they *shouldn’t*.) Hopefully the quality of the game wins out in the end and makes it clear that it was worth it, but it isn’t always super easy to point out where the effort has gone to people who aren’t larp design nerds.
That’s enough for this piece; in the future I’ll go over some examples of interaction engines that I’ve made or experienced and explore what makes them tick. Until then, have a think about whether engines might be something you want to incorporate in the games you run and play, and think about where you might have encountered one without realising.
Bye for now.