Everything that I know about running a LARP, I learned from pro-wrestling.
Heh; well, okay - not everything, but the behind-the-scenes logic of American wrestling has informed some of the better, smarter decisions that I've made as a storyteller for live-action roleplay.
Being a role-player and being a wrestling fan is a strange space to occupy. I have plenty of friends who - like me - spent a number of their teenage years having to hide their interest in all things gaming-related, because the phrase "as cruel as school-children" is well-deserved, and few things could attract derision as readily as expressing interest in Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer. I know that some of us are still wary about even telling adults about the interest.
However, I have discovered at times that expressing an interest in wrestling can sometimes attract the kind of mocking responses from my fellow nerds that they used to get for being into games. Mention an interest in wrestling and I've often had to suffer some condescending jack-ass who feels the need to tell me it's stoopid, and ask me whether I know that it's not real*. I'm far from being the only gamer in my social circle with an interest in wrestling, but it can be a risky thing to admit.
I find this ironic, because if you take away the audience, pro-wrestling is similar to LARP - uncomfortably similar, some might find. Let's face it, if you like running around in a costume, playing a melodramatic character and swapping pulled blows from latex weapons, that's pretty damn close to pro-wrestling. Both activities have the notion of in-character and out-of-character, although wrestling uses the terms "kayfabe" and "shoot" respectively. Wrestling also has its storyteller behind the scenes ("the booker"). I've had some of my gamer friends literally stick their fingers in their ears and say "lalalalala" because they didn't like finding out how similar the activities are in concept.
However, the more I learned about the terminology and planning in wrestling, the more I began to notice concepts that are very useful for LARP. Pro-wrestling doesn't just have gimmicky characters, over-the-top speeches and staged fights like LARP does, it also has to sell those things to an audience on a regular basis. So maybe bookers and wrestlers might know a few things that gamers don't about making LARP a success.
The last time I used a wrestling idea was for Upwick Manor. I was watching a shoot interview with a former wrestler called Shane Douglas, and he was talking about the difference between a Clean Finish and a Hot Finish. When a booker puts on a wrestling show, he can have one or the other. In a clean finish, the Face (the fan's favourite) wins the last match of the evening, the main event, and the audience gets to go home happy. In a hot finish, the good guys get a raw deal; some sort of betrayal, cheat or ambush takes place, and the Heels (wrestling's bad guys) end the night standing in the ring with their arms raised in triumph, to the boos of the crowd.
As Shane Douglas explained, when a wrestling show is trying to get started and build up interest, hot finishes are actually far more useful to the promoters than clean ones. Clean finishes sound popular, but part of the problem is that they satisfy the audience, and so they don't necessarily feel an impetus to tune in for the next show. On the other hand, the point of a hot finish is to create a sense of unfinished business, so that the fans come back, wanting to see whether the Faces get revenge on the Heels.
Before seeing this interview, I had never really thought about the relevance of this logic to running a LARP that entails a series of games. It caused me to reflect on the different games that I had attended in old-World of Darkness Cam UK, pondering whether some of them had clean finishes, and whether some of their resolutions had made it easier for me not to go back to that venue on the following month.
I imagine that the equivalent of a clean finish in LARP are those games where the monster-of-the-week shows up at about 10pm, the players fight it, get to show off their characters' capabilities, and then the game wraps up and everyone goes home. But how many games had I attended where the storyteller took steps to make sure that the players were sent home with a sense of unfinished business or a need for revenge? How many games had I run without thinking about how useful a hot finish would be, as a way to bring players back?
So, when Elle and I were planning Upwick Manor, I wanted the reading of the Will to be one of the last things to happen during the first game. Part of the reason for this was because the players would have time to get used to the social gulf between guests and servants, before any upheaval occurred. The other reason was because I wanted a Hot Finish. I wanted the game to end while the players were off-balance, before they had enough time to recover fully from the surprise announcement and get to grips with the Will.
We were lucky during the second Upwick Manor game, because I think that it also had a Hot Finish, even though Elle and I had a lot less control over plot developments at that point. Two major revelations came out just as time was running out, both surrounding Adrian's character. I think that those controversies helped the game to keep its momentum. The third game had the Clean Finish, but of course it was the finale, and so that was the right time for it.
So, that's one of my stories about how pro-wrestling - specifically the way that bookers think about the pace of their story arcs - helped my creative process for a LARP. I think I might do one or two more wrestling-meets-LARP posts on this blog in the future, because more can be written about wrestling concepts that translate well in live-action role-play. My experience is that they have made me more considerate as a storyteller and as a player. Who knows? Maybe this post might get some of my friends thinking about whether they play in or run games that lure players back with hot finishes, or make it possible for new players to attend just one game and not show up again, because it ended cleanly.
Leave your thoughts, questions or mocking jibes about wrestling in the comments below....
*The wrestling industry became a lot more open about the fact that it's pretense in the 1990s, but wrestlers still react badly to being called "fake" in interviews or by journalists. A large part of this is due to the fact that their frequent stunt work nonetheless puts them at genuine risk of injury.
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