How to make your participants care about your event

If you are a writer for a LARP or Interactive Theatre, you have probably tried dozens of different scenarios to try and reach your players, and get them interested in your plots. Some have failed, while others have succeeded. You might not have realized why yet.

Here is a wake-up call.

People care about people. They will also care about characters. Plots, concepts, organizations, objects and just about everything else only exist to serve the characters. Do not waste your time creating evil organizations; spend your time creating characters who run evil organizations. If you want to showcase a concept, do it as a relation to a character, and not in a vacuum.

A Stargate matters because it affects the life of O’Neil and Carter, not the other way around. Beating back evil organizations matter  because those organizations are run by, and affect very real characters in your setting. Gear matters because it enhances characters. Abilities work in the same way.

The reason behind this is very simple:

As a race, humans have survived only because we care about people more than we do about things and concepts. If trees had mattered to us more than people, all humans who experienced winters would have died off. If animals had mattered more to us than humans, our ancestors would have starved to death millennia ago.

We are genetically programmed to care about people. Everything that matters does so solely in that it affects people.

If you want your participants to care, base your events around characters, whether those portrayed by the participants themselves, those portrayed by your actors or, hopefully, both.

From Games to Art: the Evolution of Interactive Stories in the 21st Century

Interactive Theatre was born in the shape of Live Action Roleplaying Games, and it is still mostly limited to the gaming community. Dramatic, Anne Rice-like stories are played as a competition between players for success, and the mechanics of the game still rule most events.

There is nothing wrong with those events. LARPs are great things and satisfy their demographics.

Now, we need to conceive a parallel community for Interactive Theatre. The solution, I believe, is not in getting the LARP demographic to forgo the gaming aspect of their favored activity. They do not want to, and they do not have to either.

The solution is to get new people to try out Interactive Theatre. Some Broadway plays already have the audience interact with the actors or decide an outcome for the play. The Society for Creative Anachronism organizes many events for which participants are expected to dress and act as characters from a given era.

Bring together a crew that would like to act through a plot you'd expect from a Broadway play without scripted lines, dress as they would for the Society of Creative Anachronism, and resist the urge of competition present in the gaming aspect of LARPs, and you obtain a magnificient cultural event, one that would definitely be worthy of the name "Interactive Theatre".

 I hope I will see this one day.