Grethe is currently a reader in digital and new media at the University of Lincoln. Previously, she has worked on major AHRC projects, and co-edited the book Videogames & Art. One of the subjects Grethe has studied is playground games, on which she’ll be presenting, as well as maybe teaching a couple of them.

Here’s Grant with a few words on it: “I run a game with a lot of death in; most of the player characters will die once if not more than once at every event. And that’s fantastic, it’s just what we want, because that moment of death is everyone’s character arc climax, as short and uncomplicated as our character arcs tend to be. Most of the best stories are about people dying — and the other ones are about people almost dying then surviving in the nick of time — so we’re keen to explore that. Why do people like dying in our game? Why do players keep trying to have dramatic last stands, even when it’s tactically foolish?

How can we take a thing that’s normally a punishment, and make it a reward? How can people look forward to their own deaths? We’ll have a chat about that, basically, and see if we can’t shed any wisdom onto our audience by accident.”

I think LARP is an unfortunately awkward subject for some people, and it shouldn’t be. It’s undeservedly maligned in comparison to the craft and effort people put into it. Zombie LARP take it much further than most people imagine LARP to go, with sometimes elaborate costumes and settings including appropriately abandoned shopping centres.

There are two quotes related to this, and play in general, that I think are important. The first is a line from an Achewood strip I saw via Tom Armitage:

“If you can’t have fun playin’ with a toy truck, then it’s time to re-evaluate your life. You’ve become jaded.”

The second is something Holly Gramazio said in her recent write up of the New Year Games: “The difference between trained actors in costumes, and a member of Hide&Seek in a plastic mask, is obvious; the difference between a huge maze of woodwork in a cathedral, and a mass of tape and plastic chairs in a rehearsal room, means the two versions aren’t “basically the same game”, even if they have the same rules.”

On one level, you might be running around with a NERF gun, but on another, you’re engaging with some important and deeply human things: Mimicry, symbolism, roles and projection. It’s somewhere between the two poles of complete imagination and trained actors, but what are the differences between doing this in BAC, or doing it online with Left 4 Dead? I think that’s exactly what you should ask yourself on the day.

In between the screams and melodramatic gurgling, that is.

Rob Davis of Playniac will be at Bit of Alright, running Cat On Yer Head. COYH, best explained here, is an audience experiment in game design, where the audience and the person running it constantly feed stuff back to each other and devise modifications. Here’s a video of it running at GameCity last October: