by Lizzie Stark
They walk two by two on the road down to the town, a gravel lane that wends its way through woods and fields. Two veterans follow behind. They will give hints and suggestions if the squad really seems stuck. They will also tell a soldier when he or she is “out of play,” should one be felled by fire. The first squad to walk the lane encounters an enemy on the hill, hiding behind a tree below them and firing up through a field of tall grass. The squad drops to the ground to avoid being hit and in hopes that the enemy may not have seen all of them, Sergeant Hyatt says. He and I are strolling behind them. The soldiers gather behind one section of the grass and scrubby brush and perform a flanking maneuver, with one group establishing a base fire and another, mobile group flanking to the left, pinning the OPFOR, the opposing force, between them. The enemy is wearing a headdress and a long robe over his army fatigues for the role. One of the soldiers gets left behind. When the team splits, he doesn’t go left or right, and so he’s told that he’s now “out of play” and he mock limps down the road for a stretch and then returns to his team to get practice with the next obstacle, which is a line of razor wire stretched across the road.
Such wires can be trapped with explosives, Sergeant Hyatt tells me. The squad takes positions on the ground on either side of the road, and one member takes a grappling hook on a long rope, swings it, and sends it sailing toward the wires. As soon as he’s thrown it, he hits the ground. The hook misses the wire, so he stands up and does it again, pulling the razor wire toward him. Nothing happens. A nearby piece of carpet is placed over the wire so that everyone can walk over it and on toward town.
No sooner is the squad across the wire than a rocket-propelled grenade is fired at them from afar, in this case represented by a smallish, pale yellow football fired out of a grenade launcher. The soldiers again hit the ground. Sergeant Hyatt picks up the rubber projectile and hands it to me.
Finally, after a few more trials and tribulations, the squad reaches “town,” where a group of soldiers awaits them. There are three men in the main square, wearing their army tops inside out to denote the fact that they are, essentially, NPCs. One of them sits on top of a couple benches in front of a door that leads into the mansion courtyard, while the other two mill about with loose joints, pretending, perhaps, to be drunk. As the soldiers enter, these NPCs keep attempting to interact with them. The one in front of the courtyard door offers to sell them bullets in a mock Arabic accent. The other two do anything in their power to distract the soldiers, from walking into their personal space and gyrating to falling down in front of doors. The first group of soldiers negotiates all this with a little fumbling but eventually makes it into the two two-story buildings and successfully “kills” the hiding Taliban who are firing on them. When the second squad approaches the end of the lane, they choose to enter town through its main entrance, and one of the NPCs, one of the mock-drunk ones, runs at them, and they fire on him, killing him. He says something like, “Jeez, guys, not good. I’m an unarmed civilian!”
Sergeant Hyatt speaks quietly into my ear, telling me that if a guy ran at him like this in a situation like this, he probably would have fired too. One of the realistic portions of this scenario, Sergeant Hyatt says, is that there aren’t many people around in the mock-town. Soldiers in theater call it the ghost town effect—when a town empties out during the day, it often means that the locals have gotten wind of an impending attack and fled. We watch the second squad successfully displace the man selling bullets and cover the doorway into the courtyard. One man checks it for traps by hovering his hand a few inches away and tracing the doorjamb in the air. Someone inside the mansion fires at the soldiers in the doorway, but they make it through, one by one. Doorways like this are called “fatal funnels,” Sergeant Hyatt tells me.
With the lane successfully completed, the soldiers gather for an AAR, an after action review, a sort of mini-workshop where the officers who watched the scenario give feedback to the squad and review what happened.
In some ways, the army and larpers have similar aims when it comes to role-play—they aim at realism. In larp, this can mean a reality populated with magic-wielding elves, but it’s a world with consistent laws, while in the army it means simulating battlefield conditions as closely as possible. For larpers, the simulation is as much art as it is science—James pats leather-covered books and wooden casks into shape at Knight Realms in hopes of making the game seem more real. If he’s trying to mimic anything, it’s something that only exists in fantasy novels. The army, on the other hand, takes a more scientific approach. It examines the physical realities of life on the battlefield—the sights, the sounds, the smells—and tries to mimic them for soldiers with fake towns and moulage, smell and smoke generators, soundtracks, and recoiling guns. The less tangible portions of reality on the battlefield—the stress of having one’s life on the line—can’t be physically replicated, although the army does its best by adding a time clock and shouting instructors to medical “trainees” in hopes of amping up the stress. Larp is all about feeling the emotions of a character, while army training seeks to make certain potentially lifesaving skills reflexive so that in an emergency, the proper procedures are followed in spite of the emotions a soldier might be feeling. In this way, although the army’s training simulations do have the element of fun in them—the “NPCs” have a good time laughing and cavorting during lane training—it’s fun with a deadly serious bent. It’s absurd and hilarious that some trainees leave a fake rubber hand on the balcony, until it’s a human hand lying in a combat zone. While the army’s training simulations have some hallmarks of a game—a defined beginning and end, an intermediary filled with puzzles, and a set of victory conditions—they fail the ultimate hallmark of games, that they be without purpose and exist for the sake of themselves. Larp’s purpose is an escape from reality into a more interesting world; army training simulations aren’t an escape, but they do introduce soldiers into a reality that is hopefully more interesting than anything they’ll see in real life.
The armed forces aren’t the only institutions that use larp-type techniques for training purposes. Medical schools hire fake patients to help new doctors learn to diagnose illness and to train them in the fine art of the bedside manner. The FBI has a town, similar to the CACTF, called Hogan’s Alley, where its agents practice drug busts and learn to interrogate “criminals,” and law schools have mock trials and moot courts. These simulations help people practice skills they’ve learned in a low-stakes environment, and the settings of these scenarios mimic the world we live in. For new units walking the lanes in the army, these training simulations are essentially drills intended to hone physical skills. However, role-play can also be subtle, its unreality used to reveal functioning truths of human interaction and to help workers practice less concrete interpersonal skills.
Stephen R. Balzac has just this aim. He is the president of 7 Steps Ahead, LLC, an organizational consultancy company. On occasion, when the situation calls for it, he runs larps for clients aimed at helping uncover and change office dynamics. Stephen has a lot of practice creating complex games—he’s been writing and running them for more than two decades. In 1983, while he was in college, he started the MIT Assassins’ Guild, a live role-playing group that helped shape theater-style improv on the East Coast, together with Harvard’s Society for Interactive Literature (SIL). After receiving a master’s in computer science from MIT in 1987, he moved to California and started a satellite branch of SIL called SIL West.
Over the next decade, Stephen continued to write and run games with SIL West, which had a lot of members from high-tech industries. Stephen noticed the connection between in-game and out-of-game behavior when his players began commenting that some in-game events reminded them of things that had happened at their offices. After playing Stephen’s games, some players mentioned that the scenarios made them recognize what was missing from their jobs. One woman quit her job as an attorney after a game that made her realize she hated it; instead, she became
a corporate counselor at a high-tech company. Another lawyer ended up running for judge, having met his future campaign manager in-game while they were trying to rig an election.
Stephen didn’t have his eureka moment until 2001, when he ran a game called Secrets of the Necronomicon. Stephen had written the game in 1992, basing it on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, a gothic horror writer of the early 1900s, best known for the story “Call of Cthulhu.” He’d run this game successfully three or four times before, so what triggered his epiphany wasn’t the game but the people who played it. Stephen worked for a bioinformatics company at the time and invited a bunch of his officemates to participate, and a whole group of them came out and played. In the weeks afterward at work, where the game was a topic of conversation among his coworkers, Stephen noticed that they behaved in the same way at the office as they had at the game. The quiet guy who had run his team ineffectually during the game had trouble coordinating and working with other people in the office. The statistician who had methodically figured out how magic worked in the game was very analytical at work. The CEO who used loopholes to bilk his colleagues out of the raises he’d promised behaved in a sleazy manner in-game.
After Secrets of the Necronomicon, Stephen realized that there was a strong correlation between behavior in a larp and at work. He left his job and returned to school for a master’s in organizational psychology and founded his consultancy company after graduating. Now he is also an adjunct professor of psychology at Wentworth Institute of Technology and sits on the boards of the New England Society of Applied Psychology and the Society of Professional Consultants.
For Stephen, creating a game to help solve a business problem is more art than craft. First and foremost, the game must have a good story, because a good story keeps people interested. Second, this good story must be constructed in such a way that the issues, whatever the group wants to work on, arise organically; otherwise the game will feel forced, like an after-school special. Finally, while the game world must be consistent and operate in a logical fashion, its setting should be somewhat fantastic, transparent enough that players can see themselves and their problem behavior in their characters, but far enough removed from the reality of the actual office that a player has the ego-saving excuse of, “It wasn’t me who did that; it was my character.” For Stephen, every simulation tries to evoke an emotional reaction or reveal an emotional truth about how coworkers interact with each other. Whatever the dynamics found in an office, Stephen finds that they will come out in a game. The game functions as a sort of Rorschach inkblot—when put in an unfamiliar situation, a group of people will revert to doing what they feel most comfortable doing. He says that it’s not important which patterns manifest but rather that something will manifest and allow for later discussion.
While Stephen has some standard games that he runs for offices to correct standard problems—too much conflict, not enough conflict, managers who don’t know how to manage, teams that can’t accept delegation, teams that are too uniform, teams that don’t know how to debate—he also caters games to his clients. If an office has trouble with too much conflict, he might write a game with a lot of factions, some of which are at odds with one another, or he might write a game in which the players have to collaborate, choosing between many attractive alternatives and developing strategies to achieve them. He usually writes games for fifteen to forty people—any fewer and there isn’t a sufficient level of complexity and politicking to keep the plot interesting and moving, but more than forty players and it becomes hard to maintain control of the situation. At the end of the game, which usually lasts no more than four hours, everyone gathers for a debriefing, during which they discuss what went right, what went wrong, and why. The compressed time frame of the game allows players to see the consequences of their actions immediately, whereas in real life, the consequences might take months to appear.
Stephen ran one of his games, called Long Ago, for his colleagues in the New England Society of Applied Psychology. He assigned the characters semi-randomly to the participants. The set-up was simple: the king’s family and advisors are fighting to take his place and to control what happens in case of his continued health or early death. Stephen also gave the characters their own small goals and subplots. The golem, for example, wants to become a person, while the genie trapped in a bottle of gin for a thousand years wants to avoid sobering up and help as many people as possible. Each character began with a commodity such as money, connections, skills, or influence. To simulate the passing of time, Stephen divided the game into four rounds. In real life, each round lasted fifteen minutes, but in-game, each round represented one hour of time. Executive coach Kevan Norris, who played one of the king’s advisers, had an overarching goal of seducing the king’s daughter and avoiding the king’s son. He’d just gotten down to the former, surprising a colleague who thought he was asking, “So, are you seeing anyone?” in seriousness instead of in-game. They both joke about it now. As an executive coach and a psychologist, Kevan felt the game reflected the core personalities of himself and his colleagues.
Stephen’s rules tend to be simpler than those that govern boffer games—instead of hundreds of pages of Byzantine rules, his longest set of guidelines was about fifteen pages, although he does write out character backgrounds for all his players. He says that his rules sets are small because his games focus on player interaction rather than on building a specific game world. In a short, one-shot game with fifteen to forty participants, he doesn’t have to write rules to cover every possible situation, in part because the game is small enough that someone could simply find and ask him. Knight Realms, on the other hand, as a campaign larp with more than two hundred players, needs a consolidated rules set for every eventuality.
The game must have a sufficient level of complexity in order to mimic real life. People know how they are supposed to behave in theory but often don’t do it in practice. It’s easy to say you’d help an old lady cross the street, but what if you come across her while you’re in a rush to get back to the office? Part of Stephen’s job is to help people practice making the right choices in difficult situations and to make them aware of what causes them to make incorrect choices. Whereas Knight Realms players have years in which to develop and sustain complexity, as a consultant, Stephen has to create games with emotional complexity right out of the gate.
He ran one such training for the Department of Homeland Security in 2006, a game geared toward uncovering problems with preparation in the case of a virulent flu pandemic. Rather than having the participants speculate about the best plans around some boardroom table, Stephen made them put their theories into practice. Some one hundred players, including local and federal officials, military officers, local doctors, and business representatives, gathered in an auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, DC. According to the scenario, the people inside the auditorium—doctors, government officials, businessmen, and concerned citizens—were attending a conference on bioterrorism. Many of the players were playing themselves, partly at their own insistence and partly because Stephen was brought into the project six weeks before it ran and didn’t have the time to write one hundred characters. As a panel on bird flu began, the cell phones of the audience started ringing, and some people stepped out to answer the calls. Stephen’s GM team was calling the “doctors” with news that a British tourist had collapsed in nearby Dulles airport, ill with bird flu. As it turned out, the British tourist wasn’t the only one who had it. One of the doctors at the fictional conference was infected, although he was not yet showing symptoms. Stephen had worked with an expert to model the speed with which the flu would spread, basing the spread of the game’s virus on the 1918 flu pandemic. They had several possible results preprepped.
Stephen represented the mechanic of infection with blue stickers. In the compressed timeframe of the game, the initially ill doctor had twenty minutes of contagion, representative of the twenty-four to forty-eight hours a flu victim has whe
n he or she is contagious but not yet showing symptoms. The first doctor put a blue sticker on everyone he touched, and those players in turn received a series of nested envelopes from Stephen. The outer envelope might simply say that nothing happened, or it might ask players to put blue stickers on each person they shook hands with for the next twenty minutes and then to open the enclosed envelope. The second envelope told infected players, for example, that they had headaches or felt sneezy, with directions to role-play these symptoms and then to open the next envelope in another twenty minutes. By the end of the scenario, everyone in the theater had been exposed to the deadly strain, although not everyone had contracted it.
In the meantime, this collection of experts had to make decisions about how to manage the outbreak. That the player characters were infected with bird flu themselves added an extra level of urgency to the proceedings, and when people realized they could die from the strain, it took them aback, Stephen said. The players made decisions and released information to the public through press conferences. They failed to quarantine the airports, which proved calamitous. As the players made decisions, Stephen released newspaper articles that he’d written in advance, chronicling the spread of the epidemic and responding to the various decisions the players made during the game. A second, smaller group of players stashed off-site mimicked the reaction of a small local community, the fictional town of “Rocketville,” which got all of its information about the epidemic from newspapers and press conferences and via cell phones. They responded to the trickle of information that members of the conference let out accordingly.
