Development 03: Can LARP Not Be Tourism?

It all started when I was talking to one of my friends about a role-playing game about addiction. The intention of the game, from my perspective, was to create a LARP where the players could encounter the difficulty of recovering from addiction, and learn coping tools for recovery. My friend made the very astute point that ultimately, when running a LARP like this at something like Wayfinder, it would be predominately non-addict facilitators and staff, working with predominately non-addict participants. It would easily become "Look at how easy it is to overcome addiction, and how we can regard addicts as lesser due to their inability to do what we've done". His counter-idea was a LARP that explored the pain and agony of addiction, which would be, by his own admission, a miserable and agonizing experience. But I had issues with that myself.

In a LARP, when you experience pain, it's fun. If you're not having fun with the pain you're experiencing, you stop! Players would come away from the experience having enjoyed engaging with the trauma of addiction. Sure, they'd feel sorry for addicts, but would they have learned anything? Doesn't that make them the same as tourists who go to starving African countries to "help", ultimately learning nothing and just patting themselves on the back?

So I guess that leaves me wondering, can we ever write LARP that's about real, human suffering, and not have it in some sense be voyeuristic? I might argue that the very nature of LARP, as something you enthusiastically buy into, is one that means any suffering you experience is something you've chosen and embraced. True suffering isn't something you've embraced. 

I find myself looking at art forms similar to LARP, like Performance Art or Theater. Sometimes, artistic productions in those styles will basically "strap the audience in", and force them to engage with things that upset them. This is completely counter to everything LARP communities have built - it's non-consensual, uncomfortable, and can be downright triggering - but it succeeds where LARP ultimately fails, if we can call a lack of fun failure. 

Maybe, though, this isn't a failing of LARP. Maybe not all art needs to hurt. Maybe we should just accept that veering into the world of true suffering, exempt from tourism, is something LARP isn't capable of doing. I'm certainly not writing that addiction game any time soon (although I'm still thinking about the Serenity Prayer and the rules of AA programs as a valuable tool to teach people through LARP). 

Perhaps, ultimately, LARP is better at exalting virtues than indulging in pain. And maybe that's a good thing. But then again, I'm really not sure.