Selling your event

There are multiple ways to sell an event. Most of all, I recommend using any and all networking resources at your disposal to hype your event. This networking is very dependent on your personal contacts and social skills, so it is very hard for me to write about.

The presentation of your event, however, can be helped.

The first thing you need to work on is knowing your audience. Think about the people you want playing your event and about what type of roles they enjoy. If all they want is to play is a game of modern-day heroes killing zombies with diamond-tipped chainsaws, don’t try and force a psychological drama play on them. It is not going to work. If you cannot find enough players that would fit your event, think about redefining the event in question.

The most common sorts of publicity for this kind of event are posters and websites. Websites will usually also contain information for your established players, but that is cause for another discussion.
The first thing that will grab your player’s eye is the graphic design. If you can get a talented artist to cook up something nice, use it. Make sure the theme of the event is well represented by the design. If you cannot find a talented artist to do it for you, go with a simpler design rather than use a bad one that draws too much attention to itself.

The next thing the audience will notice is the title and the introduction text. In a poster, 3 short lines is the maximum you should put to detail the setting. In a website, you can use the standard 6-line introduction used in most current-day novels. The best guide I ever found to write those introduction lines is available on Will Greenway’s website, The Ring Realms. I could never tell this as well as he does, so I suggest you just follow the link to his own description and examples. Will Greenway is awesome. http://www.ringrealms.com/rrmainindex.php?PAGE=inspiration&SUBPAGE=dfictech_07

At the bottom of the poster or website, you need to put the date, time and location of the event, and your contact information. Make sure that it is easy to read, but mostly out of the way. It’s not there to sell your event: just to inform potential participants who were sold by the rest of your publicity.

Julie: an antagonist you feel for

As I have said before, the best antagonists have to be human for players to care about them. When the players investigate their backstory, they should find torment that would make them think that they, too, could have wound up like the bad guy in similar circumstances.

Take, for example, Lug’s Clockwork, a Kafkaesque organization I created for a LARP where the players embody the rare humans fighting to be freed of the influence of an Orwellian society. If the main leaders of Lug’s Clockwork are just faceless men in black, the players are going to grow bored fast with them.

That is why I created Julie.

Julie was a bright kid. Her mother took good care of her until she started to go to school. Her mother taught her everything she knew, from home. Protected her from the local bully a few times. Then school started.

Julie wasn’t good with other kids. They bullied her pretty much from day one, and life soon got miserable for her. Her only respite was always with her mother. She came to learn that anything she did well was thanks to her mother, and everything she did wrong was because she tried anything by herself.

By the time she became a teenager, she was grounded most evenings for reasons that had become more and more pointless. Then her mother saw a boy try to flirt with her and, to protect her daughter, sequestered Julie in her basement. The imprisonment lasted a whole summer and ended in November when the school authorities alerted the police about Julie’s disappearance.

Julie was at first traumatized by these faceless policemen who came to take her mother away and send her to a foster home away from all she knew. With time and therapy, she ended up understanding how her mother wronged her, and how much society had failed in protecting her. She knew how much society needed to be more informed, and more in control, about the actions of its people.

Julie was indicted into Lug’s Clockwork because she believed that humans cannot hurt humans if society watches everything all the time, everywhere. “Freedom” is nothing but an excuse to let the bastards and criminals ruin the world for their own ends. The chaos that the players cause in their fight for freedom is nothing but a self-interested fight for anarchy and the world’s end.

This character is right to act as she does when she attacks those things that the players’ characters cherish the most. Some players will even agree with her. At that point, you get real conflict in your event. Dramatic conflicts like this one create the best stories.

A root in the real world part 2

I said in the past that I would like interactive theatre to exist as an activity by itself, independently of the gaming aspect of LARPs. Because the LARP community is a community of gamers, by definition, this seems like a very daunting task.

The idea of creating such a community from scratch is, indeed, daunting. Creating bridges with existing communities of simulationists is another story altogether.

Did you know of the Boys’ Work Movement of the YMCA and the numerous parliament simulations that have spanned from this for more than half a century?

Did you know about the numerous experiences of classical theatre troupes to make their plays more interactive?

Did you know that the term role-playing predates role-playing games by a decade?

I claim that creating a solid community of interactive theatre events that would span various themes and objectives is possible. A solid entrepreneur with significant networking resources could make a solid business out of this in any large city of a western world.  Interactive theater can be used to teach the inner workings of parliament, economics, entrepreneurship and a host of other professions. It can be used by a company to bolster confidence in its products and services. It can be used, and often already is, to teach history.

A root in the real world

Recently, the news have grabbed my whole attention. We just underwent an election in Canada that completely changed Canadian politics, by basically throwing out 2 political parties that have been entrenched in Canada’s parliament for decades and centuries, respectively. On an international level, Osama Bin Laden has been killed.

Look at the people who have gone to the streets in New-York to celebrate the American victory in Pakistan. Look at the NDP partisans celebrating the ascension of the party as official opposition, and how they are overjoyed even though they don’t even form the government. Look for similar events in your own local history. Find those events that people have cared about. Especially, find out what made them care!

Once you understand why people love this and that man, why they are overjoyed by this and that event, you will know what to put into your interactive plays to make them care. Look at what made Osama Bin Laden so hated, above and beyond anyone else in the world, by the American people. When you make an antagonist, look at such people whom people truly hate, and incorporate what makes them hate those people into those antagonists. 

How much an event impacts the world is irrelevant. How much people care about it is everything.

The news are a wonderful tool for an author of interactive plays. Look at the way the sensationalist media tug the emotions of people to grab their interest, how they take pains showing how this-and-that major fraud has left a poor widow without the money to keep feeding her young children anymore. If you want your players to care, use the same tricks the media use. Those tricks work.