Beyond Solitaire Podcast 189: Ada Palmer on LARPing the Renaissance

Doing great. Really looking forward to this.

Oh, I think the first run of it may have been 2008. It's been running ages. No, it must have been after 2008. I think it was 2009 or 2010, somewhere in that zone. And so I've run it more than a dozen times by this point, and every time it grows a little bit. But it's a big old LARP simulator of the papal election of 1492 and its aftermath, the 'and its aftermath' part being very important, because we elect the pope at the midpoint, and then the second half is that whoever we've elected is now in office has to make a bunch of decisions, and then there's a war, and the decisions affect who is up and down in the war and therefore affect the outcome, and then the final stage is dealing with the war's aftermath. So it's a great big thing. It's now grown to the scale of having 90 players, and I have a giant staff of people who've done it in the past and loved it so much that they volunteered to help run it. So I have over a hundred people who volunteer to help make different aspects of it happen, which is not big for a LARP, but for this, it's technically a class at a university, having a volunteer staff of over 100 people is pretty unique.

So it's three weeks. And when I run it in the class, I can also do it as a three-day intensive boot camp where we're doing it all day, every day. But when it's a class, you have to do it within class periods, and people have homework for other classes and so on. So it's three weeks. We spend a week of negotiating and voting for the pope, a week of actually electing the pope and crowning the pope and the pope making his decisions in office, and then the war happens over the second weekend, and the last week is aftermath of the war.

Yes, these are the events he talks about. He lived through all of this. And one of the things that's difficult in understanding Machiavelli is that he doesn't explain his contemporary examples. He'll just say, 'Some princes don't have to work hard to keep their power, like the Duke of Ferrara.' Period, end of chapter. And if you don't know anything about the Duke of Ferrara in that exact year, this means nothing to you, and you just sort of move on and you don't remember. A lot of people reading Machiavelli remember him using ancient examples and medieval examples, because those he bothers to explain and say, 'In case you don't remember who this particular Roman commander is, he did this thing.' But when it's contemporary examples, he just name-drops them in exactly the same way we right now might say, you know, 'So-and-so did this, like Putin,' and you don't have to explain who Putin is because everybody in the world knows who Putin is. So when you read Machiavelli, there are all these names that just flow in one ear and out the other because they don't mean anything to you. But when you've actually done the simulation and you've met these people, and then he says, like, the Duke of Ferrara, you're like, 'Yeah, the Duke of Ferrara, that jerk.' And he was raking it in, and people were giving him all of these treasures and treats because they respect him so much, and he didn't have to work to maintain his power, and I was working like a dog trying to prevent my city from being burned to the ground, and he was just selfishly taking advantage of his ridiculous situation, you know. And then people understand what Machiavelli is talking about, because he didn't intend this to be understood by people far away from him in time and space. Like, I'm sure he's glad that it's being read far away from him in time and space, but he meant it for people who had just lived through these wars and knew them very precisely. So he says, you know, 'This person did this wise thing,' but he doesn't give you the circumstances. And usually about half the people who do the simulation with me have read The Prince before, and when they read it again afterward, they always say, 'My God, I didn't understand any of this when I read it the first time. This is so completely different.' I'd like to compare it to, you know, imagine if somebody 150 years from now in a class about politics was given the Hamilton musical without an explanation of when it was written and how it's about the different events that were going on when it was written, not just the events that it shows you. You wouldn't understand anything of what the Hamilton musical is about, because so much of it is about contemporary issues that aren't even in the text. So when we try to read something like Machiavelli, or another good example of this is Candide, a ton of it just turns into gibberish because we don't have the context. But gaming can plunge you into the context. So it works the same way an immersive language boot camp works, except it's an immersive history boot camp.

So it's the middle. We have nine weeks, and it's the middle three weeks. The first week is the chaos of people starting and dropping, and I'm giving background on, like, what did it mean for the Roman Empire to fall. The second week, I'm giving them the vital background information. The third week, both classes are entirely devoted to Q&A about the rules, because there's so many moving parts, and because this is an educational LARP, it contains a lot of parts that you wouldn't necessarily include if you were making this up just for recreational purposes. But it means that, like, it has a 90-page rulebook, which for a LARP is enormous, and I spend a lot of time doing Q&A because different sections of it only apply to certain characters, right? If you're in the Inquisition, you need to know a lot about how the Inquisition works. If you're indifferent to the Inquisition because you don't care, you just want to invade Milan, you don't need to read the rules in detail about how the Inquisition works. You only care about debating the law, but you sure need to read the war rules in detail, whereas the inquisitors don't care about the war rules because they're busy reading books at the time instead of carrying arms. So a week of Q&A about the rules, a lot of which is technical stuff, balanced with, you know, it's always the case that the vast majority of the people doing this are first-time LARPers, many of them are first-time role players, and so there's a lot of sort of the basics of what will it be like. But there are always a few experienced gamers in the class, and usually two or three who've LARPed before. And one of the things it's really neat to watch on the first day is that, you know, I say go, and everyone just sort of stands there awkwardly in silence, except the couple of gamers who will, like, immediately start role-playing and talking to each other, and then everyone else will pick it up. And by the end of day one, everyone is sort of watching them and seeing what they're doing. By day two, everyone is doing it fluently. It's really amazing how quickly everyone picks up and starts calling each other 'Your Eminence' so naturally. The role-play gets really lovely and intense with amazing speed. One of the things about a first-time LARPer is that they're in the process of discovering how wonderful it is, and so there's that effervescent energy of discovery of, 'I didn't know anything in the world could be this fun, this is so great.' But you get it 50 times over with 50 first-time LARPers.

Yeah. So one of the things I always say to the students at the beginning of the game is, no matter what happens, you're going to feel like you're out of the loop, and that's because there are 17 loops, and that there are many mini-games working within the game in which different people are deeply involved in certain things. So about a dozen of the characters care deeply about the new classical literary movements and the revival of Cicero and all of this, and a major decision will be made by the pope about whether the Inquisition will crack down on or stop persecuting this. And so the dozen people who are involved in that subplot work very hard on it, make that pass. There might be a whole bunch of other people who aren't even thinking about the fact that that's going to happen. So there are games within games, and some people are part of the Inquisition game within a game, some people are part of the war game within a game, some people are part of the rivalry between monastic orders that are trying to exceed each other in the glory and expensiveness of their churches subplot, so that everyone has one facet of the game in which they're one of the major powerful people. Another is that the game, I do the casting really carefully, and there is a 60-question survey for casting it, which asks a lot of things quite different from a lot of LARP casting surveys I've done, actually, because a lot of LARP casting surveys focus on asking, like, what do you like, you know, do you like romances, do you like, you know, bad guys, etc. May has a few questions like that, but a lot more of the questions are about how you would enjoy spending your time. Would you enjoy being on a team, working collaboratively? Would you enjoy being solo and making your own agenda and pursuing it on your own? Would you enjoy being in a duo where you and a friend who's in the class and ask them to get their name, like, work really closely together? Would you enjoy leading a team as opposed to being on a team? Would you enjoy having a high-risk, high-stakes situation in which failure is likely? Does that stress you out? And do you want something where your character's goals are not going to result in you burning? Would you enjoy a head-to-head, you have a zero-sum rival where one of you must rise by the other falling, or does that not sound fun to you? Would you rather be in a situation in which there are mutually beneficial compromises? See how none of that has to do with, like, your taste in characters, right? All of it has to do with how you would enjoy spending your time. Yes. So that I cast people very carefully so that the palette of activities they'll be doing is something that they've opted into and said they're excited by. Another thing that helps bring everyone into the spotlight in turn is that we've got the 65 living human characters who are doing their stuff, but we've also got a couple of dozen what we call celestial chroniclers who are playing either ghosts, saints, or angels, or Greek gods, the kinds of beings that populate Dante's Paradiso. And they're given instead of a 'here's the politics of your' at this time, a 'here's what's going on in heaven based on Dante's Paradiso at the time.' And each of them is the guardian watching planet or watching angel or patron saint of a particular couple of characters, and they aren't participating in the earthly politics. They're a witness to the earthly politics. There's angel politics going off in heaven that the angels get to do on their own, but their job is to watch a particular faction or a bunch of people and chronicle them and be the observing star, which means that at the end we then get 25 histories of what just happened written by the 25 different angels, each of which has followed a different group. And in every one of those histories, that group seems like the protagonists, and everything revolves around them, and we see the narrative from that point of view. So that when you sit down and read that, it feels very much like, oh yeah, this is the center. But then you read another one, you're like, oh no, wait, this is the center. Wait, there is no center. There are actually 17 loops, each of them literally gets a history written by the students in the class who are sort of shyer about politics but excited to tell a story, and many of them are creative writing students who enjoy producing a really interesting history of what happened. But it means that there's a lot of sort of team building and solidarity within the little groups that are followed by a particular celestial. And so if you're, you know, the Sforza faction and the planet Mars is your guiding star and is writing your very martial, war-centered history, that feels really cool. And if you're the Dominican theologians and St. Thomas Aquinas is watching you from heaven, chronicling what you're doing and being slightly judgmental but also encouraging of his successors in the Dominican order, you enjoy that, right? And so it helps every faction, even though there are lots of people, be the center of a story in which they're the protagonist, even as all of these stories weave around each other.

Yes, they learn different things, and then they teach each other, right? Because by the time you're at the end, we spend the whole week after it ends just talking about our secrets and sharing our points of view, and with me calling on different people to reveal what they were up to and talk about their perspective. And so in that phase of the class, the people who learned a lot about France talk about what they learned about France, and the people who have learned a lot about Venice talk about what they learned about Venice. It's sort of like how in any given class in which there's a research paper, you of course learn a lot about the topic of your research paper in a way your peers don't. But often when you're doing research papers, you don't then share that information with each other. You're just doing your paper on your own. But here, they're diving deep into their corner of Europe and really getting to understand the politics around, you know, the Greek-speaking Republic of Ragusa on the Dalmatian coast, and no one else cares except the three people who really, really care. But then they're excited to tell their classmates about it afterward, and so it becomes a process of mutual sharing of the joy and excitement everyone had about their special little bit of the game.

I mean, it's always very clear who's really working hard and throwing themselves in and enjoying it, and there was a couple of people who sort of phone it in. And the first time I offered it, I was a little worried that it would be hard to do the grading, but then I saw, like, okay, you know, 90% of these people are putting in tons and tons of energy and totally deserve an A, you know, and are great, and the others, like, know perfectly well that they're not and won't be surprised if it's a less good grade. You know, I take careful notes on what's happening. I also have four teaching assistants who help keep track of how people are, more looking for people who are struggling and need advice than anything else. But LARPs and gaming bring delight and love out in people, and, like, when you're sitting down to play a game, you're all in, otherwise you wouldn't be bothering to play the game. So I would say that much more so than in any other class, everybody gives it their all, and everybody earns that A that they get at the end, right? Because they really did work that hard and have a lot to do and a lot to say. It's also a carefully structured class, and this in terms of pressure cooker, because the intense part is the game in the middle, right? And most classes, as you will recall, get really stressful at the end, in the final three weeks when everything ramps up, right? And in this one, you're mostly done with this class by that point. You've put in all of your effort in the middle of three weeks. It has its peak intentionally designed to be not when the other classes are hard. So it gives you intensity when the others are light, and it gives you a break when the others are heavy. And that's just part of, you know, good practices for mental health syllabus design of studying and learning when the intense parts of the year are, and then saying, can I stagger so that my intense parts are at a different point.

Yeah, I mean, we have all the histories written by the celestials ever since we added them, which was six years ago, maybe. And so those are wonderful. There's also the living institutional memory of the fact that a lot of people love this so much that they become permanent staff for it and so are always around to say, oh yeah, I remember when a similar thing happened before. And then I always remember the unique sort of big arcs and outstanding and unexpected moments of each run. One of the things that's actually been very powerful about running it over and over for me as a historian, in addition to as a gamer, is getting to see what's the same every year and what's different, and what is predictable and what shifts. So, for example, at the beginning, there are two really well-entrenched frontrunner candidates who have big power blocks and nothing will stop them being among the finalists for the papacy. They have their ducks in a row, their sort of unstoppable momentum at the beginning. There's always a third wildcard candidate who is backed by the people who hate both of those two people, and it's always the same group of people who back them, but it's a completely different person that they actually back every time, depending on individual choices and the personalities and affect and interactions of the different people. So we have two candidates that are always the same, one candidate that's always completely different, and then it's really neat to see those three vie with each other until one gets knocked down, and then there's two, and then there's a final, or two swing together to make the final block. And I pay a lot of careful attention to game balance. Every time I add new things, I try to add new things which slightly help the people who did badly in the previous year, trying to keep the balance of it as far as I can to be very, very well balanced among the different factions. In terms of those big factions, the one can win or lose, although of course every character has a unique goal list, and, you know, if your goal is protect the region of Navarre, then who does or doesn't end up conquering Naples is completely indifferent to you because you're off in Spain, and so you can't be said to be part of winning or losing that, but you can be part of other things. And we also try to, I mean, usually when I add new characters is because I myself have gotten access to new research about people and discovered how cool they are, right? Which is sometimes that, you know, a book about X person has finally been translated into English that was only available before in Portuguese, and so I can now lovingly depict somebody who was only partly present before. Or I'll realize that there are different interesting facets of history that people reach out to that I want to add, but always trying to make sure that anything that is a competition within the game, any of those zero-sum moments, are kept as razor-balanced as possible, even as new external directions get added. So, like, this year, one of the things we're adding is much more detail about the relations with the East and the Eastern Church, and with Andreas Palaiologos, who is the Byzantine emperor in exile, because this is after Constantinople has been conquered by Mehmed, and now his son Bayezid who rules it. But Andreas Palaiologos, the claimant to the throne, the, you know, powerless, landless, broke emperor, is nonetheless around, and he's a non-player character, but he's somebody that the player characters can interact with, and he's going to be a big new subplot this year whose existence neither helps nor hinders any faction, right? If we're talking about the rivalry between France and whether there is or isn't an emperor in exile, doesn't help one side or the other unless the players are clever and make it help them. And so it's a whole new sphere of here are just new tools and new toys that will be present, and everyone is in great suspense as to who will pick those up and follow them.

So I've been playing D&D since I was little enough that I had to stand on tiptoe to see over the table where my dad's minis were. And, you know, I have our ancestral set of original D&D First Ed books as well as Second Ed. So I've been doing that kind of gaming for a long time, and I've been going to science fiction conventions since I was twelve, so also trying out other systems like GURPS and White Wolf and, you know, having various tabletop campaigns as I went. It's when I was in college that I ran into circles that did what one would call theater LARPs, so LARPs of the style where you receive a pre-written character sheet, you don't design your own character, and a preset group of characters are going to interact in a preset time, usually one day, doing something that's themed around, you know, a fantasy or a fairy tale. Or I know we did one that was a LARP crossover between Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which cross over surprisingly well so long as you remember to make Kaworu and Rei be one person, everything suddenly makes sense. And that kind of LARPing was something that I did throughout my PhD process when I was at Harvard, which has a really robust gaming club, HRSFA, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, and I really enjoyed those games. You know, we also did a Babylon 5 themed one and a Metal Gear Solid themed one, and one that was a gamified LARP version of Clue, these kinds of things. And as I was doing those, and I was also doing my PhD and therefore thinking about teaching, I was thinking about how well one could do history in one of these formats where you receive a set character sheet as a historical figure. So I already wanted to do it before I started teaching, as I was finishing up being a student, and the first test run of this I actually ran for friends in my gaming club to try it out and make sure that the fundamental structure worked before I tried running it for students. So, you know, long development, but I really liked the theater LARP structure of, you know, it's really cool to create your own character for a game, but it's also really powerful to receive a deeply worked-through character. And, you know, these characters are based on historical research, but also very deeply thought-through craftsmanship of also having to make judgment calls about their personality and motivation, you know, because we don't know why X historical character did X, but I have to decide as the game designer that there was a motivation that the person is pursuing. And one of the things we talk about afterward is the subjectivity that goes into history, and we read a discussion of how historians do this as well. You often use the character of Lorenzo de' Medici, who's a character who is in some non-fiction histories absolutely a terrible villain figure who is, you know, the bad guy of the book, and in others is this heroic philosopher prince, and the same information can be constructed to make a radically different version of the historical figure. We talk about that when we talk about, you know, the judgment calls that went into deciding whether your character did this thing that they did for selfish reasons or altruistic reasons or romantic reasons or vengeful reasons. And I really love the process of giving someone a character and a chance to taste and embody that character and get deep into the emotion. It's fun how consistently I'll have at least a dozen people every year say, 'I can't believe you cast me so well. I couldn't imagine being any character other than this one.' Not because of typecasting, I intentionally am avoiding typecasting, but that survey that is what kinds of activities would you enjoy, and then making sure that every single character has a lot of depth and complexity so that once you meet your character, you fall in love with them.