by Lizzie Stark
Sexism also plays a subtle role in the game’s social dynamics. Chivalry and its sexist assumptions are part of knightly culture, and that culture is part of what draws gamers to larps such as Knight Realms. The rules of the game make no distinction as to gender—men and women can and do play characters of every class. While the population of larpers appears—based on my anecdotal experience of the community—to skew heavily toward men, Knight Realms has a surprisingly large population of women, one that has grown over the years, according to James. He hasn’t kept track of the numbers, but I’d estimate that not quite half of his player base is female. And yet, despite the game’s strong female population, few women have achieved titled in-game power. In the course of the game’s thirteen-year history, there have been only a small handful of female knights—six out of about forty knights—and only two women have been appointed ladies of the land, out of about twenty-five appointed lords, though five women have married into noble titles in-game.
After discussing the in-game hierarchy with a variety of Knight Realms players of both genders, three reasons for the paucity of female leadership emerged. Generally, the lord slots are filled by characters and players who have been fixtures in the game for many years, and in the early days, Knight Realms skewed more dramatically male, so the pool of experienced male players is significantly larger than the pool of experienced women. Second, many women in the game play “support-class” characters, roles sometimes denigrated as “scenery” or “girlfriend-class,” characters such as healers or priests, not the frontline fighters favored for positions of power in a medieval-esque setting. Perhaps related is the fact that many women in the game do not appear interested in amassing power or politicking their way into court.
Kristen is one of a handful of women to attain political power at Knight Realms. She asked that her last name be withheld since she works in a small academic field and thought an easily Googled connection to larp might hurt her chances of becoming a professor of comparative religion one day. Kristen began playing Knight Realms while she was still in high school. She had been a fan of fantasy literature and movies growing up, a love that grew to encompass tabletop role-playing games. In high school, a coworker at the pet store where she worked invited her to a one-day Knight Realms event, which she attended with her boyfriend. She remembers the flirtatious environment of the game; it’d been the first time anyone had really hit on her, and she found it flattering. Soon she was coming to the monthly events as the druid Elawyn, and she’d broken up with her old boyfriend and gained a new one. The split, like many romantic splits in a small community, earned her some enemies. For several years Kristen floated along in-game merely understanding the rules that directly applied to her. She thought of knowing the rules as a guy thing. She wasn’t a great fighter either. The friends she’d made at Knight Realms encouraged her to do better, she says. They told her that she could do it, that she was capable; and as it turned out, she could and she was. Kristen wanted to move up in the in-game hierarchy, so she worked hard at memorizing the rules and became one of the first female rules marshals. For more than a year, her long-time boyfriend would run her through weapons drills to help her learn to fight better, and now she’s known in-game as a frontline fighter.
Kristen has long brown hair, a girl-next-door face, and a trim, graceful body. On occasion, I’ve heard men fondly describe her cleavage. Although Kristen is all smiles, Elawyn is brash and intimidating, the personification of Kristen’s hidden temper. Inside, Elawyn’s character goal is to make her dead mother proud. My first encounter with Kristen occurred when Portia interviewed Elawyn for a story in the Travance Chronicle. I walked away from the conversation weak-kneed, intimidated, blood pulsating in my face, and with the fluttery feeling that some real-life catastrophe had befallen my family out-of-game. After the weekend was over, I e-mailed her through the game’s bulletin boards to break the tension. Elawyn was made a knight of Pendarvin two years into her game play. Kristen says serving the town as a noble is hard for anyone but perhaps particularly hard for a woman due to the way our culture perceives women leaders. Many of the women I interviewed echoed this sentiment, noting that women who yell to corral the town during battle sound “bitchy,” while men who loudly direct their troops sound “magisterial.”
Over her six years at Knight Realms, Kristen followed a traditional path to power—she entered the boys’ club on its own terms, by working to improve her command of the rules and her ability to fight—and in doing so, she gained enough respect to be named a knight in-game. Out-of-game, in overcoming the challenge of learning the rules, she gained confidence as a woman and as a person.
If Kristen followed the battle prowess route to power, Jen Wolfson amassed it through spectacular role-play, or RP. In a game like Knight Realms, combat and RP are two sides of the same arcade token, two ways to enjoy the game, pleasures that often overlap. Some people really enjoy the sport of boffer-fighting; they play to whack monsters with swords. Other players love politicking and talking philosophy in-character. Jen is one of the latter; she’s got role-play deep in her bones. It began with an intense love of medieval fantasy fiction. By her junior year of high school she’d gotten a job selling fish and chips at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, and from there she worked her way up to running the archery booth. During these five years she worked on her improvisation skills, perfected her British accent, and assembled a variety of Renaissance wear, which the community sometimes refers to as “garb.” Her friends from the Ren Faire involved her in their D&D group, her first experience gaming, and finally, after she finished grad school, a friend of a friend persuaded Jen to attend a larp called Equinox. Jen instantly fell in love with the hobby. For her, larp was an extension of novelistic escapism; instead of losing herself in a book, she could physically immerse herself in a fantasy setting, becoming a character instead of reading about one. She found the game a good way to take social risks, to try on different personalities for the weekend, to give new conversational tactics a try. In-game, there might be consequences, but out-of-game, the risk was very low. After a few years she did a brief stint as one of four directors of another larp called Nocturne, and after she left Nocturne, she joined Knight Realms, where thanks to her role-play skills, her character quickly advanced.
A plump lawyer in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length orange hair, Jen radiates confidence in-and out-of-game. She named her bardic character Mixolydia after a musical mode, a throwback to her early college years as a music performance major. Mixolydia is unfailingly polite, quietly feminist, and determined. Somehow, Jen is able to role-play Mixolydia in such a way that it is clear that she is not Mixolydia and vice versa. I think the secret lies in her voice, in the way she uses her excellent British accent. Many players, myself included, talk casually with their regular diction and in their normal tone of voice as they role-play—they sound like themselves in a costume, which can create a conflation between player and character. Jen’s accent and mannerisms make it clear that she is playing a character and not herself, which lowers the stakes in terms of in-game interactions with her. Hurl a racial epithet at the elf Mixolydia, and she’ll respond, but Jen will not get offended. Not all role-players are able to create such a consistent and clear character.
Mixolydia quickly became a knight of Winterdark, serving the count. Although Jen’s command of the rules is sketchy and Mixolydia is not a brawny character in-game, she’ll feed, protect, or advise nearly anyone, and the goodwill she’s generated is Mixolydia’s biggest asset. I got an up-close view of Jen’s role-play during an NPC shift late one January night. One of James’s NPCs heard a chance comment from Mixolydia to one of her friends, the barbarian Tieg, and he made up a mini-adventure for the two on the spot. In the NPC cabin, he tagged me and another guy on the late shift to play the parts. We were young lovers, and as Mixolydia and Tieg came upon us in the woods they’d see me poison a cup and hand it to him. They’d probably stop us, and then they would have to uncover the backs
tory; my lover’s father had killed my brother years ago, causing my father to die of grief and my family to crumble. Now, I was trying to avenge my family. James put a bench into the snow and lit the two of us with a red flashlight. I mimed tipping a small vial of “poison”—a tiny makeup jar—into a mug. Not so fast, James told me, he wanted me to tip the poison slowly and more obviously, so the players would be sure to see it. Eventually, Mixolydia and Tieg neared the scene, and as I handed the cup to my lover they interrupted us. I thought the scene would quickly end, but Jen became very interested in the well-being of my NPC. She arranged to speak to my lover’s horrible father on my behalf, ensuring that I’d be sentenced to banishment instead of death. Her companion, Tieg, gave me marvelous advice in three-word sentences, and by the end of the scene I felt as though this throwaway NPC had undergone an important life transformation. Tieg and Mixolydia had addressed the situation with earnest seriousness, and Mixolydia in particular was intense, willing to go the extra mile to talk to a character we hadn’t even cast—my lover’s father, played by James after a swift costume change. She made a convincing diplomatic effort to smooth the whole situation over. Jen’s realistic role-play made me a better role-player and made my stint as this NPC fun and meaningful. Jen’s ability to convincingly play a scene, and in doing so to elevate the game experience of her peers, definitely helped her character move up in the ranks of power. Her out-of-game talent as an actor helped improve her in-game status.
It’s not always easy for women to get ahead in-game—Jen and Kristin’s stories are the exceptions that show that it is possible, not the rule, possibly due to social pressure. As one female larper pointed out to me, fantasy games have a fairytale aura, and many fairytales feature the passive princess and active knight, roles imprinted upon our culture and psyches, roles that are not so easy to discard, in real life or in-game. While the written rules of Knight Realms are neutral, the community itself enforces certain unwritten standards of behavior in ways that differ for men and women. Dressing up in costumes is part of the appeal of larp for many players of both genders. For men, the act of dressing up and paying close attention to fashion has the whiff of transgression about it. In order to become the proverbial hero, these men engage in an activity that is traditionally thought of as feminine, an activity that breaks free of restrictive ideas about masculinity. Many women take advantage of the costuming opportunity that larp offers by wearing provocative clothing: leather halter tops, corsets that make their décolletages impossible to miss. For women, costuming doesn’t offer as great an opportunity to break out of gendered expectations; rather, it offers the opportunity to control the state of their own femininity by skewing further toward the Madonna or the whore side of the equation. Women are sometimes subject to male and female members of the bodice police, who comment, at least to one another, on who looks particularly slutty or bang-able.* In larp, as in everyday life, an unwritten code of rules governs the behavior that is acceptable for men and women, a code of rules that, as many feminists have pointed out, includes plenty of double standards.
The first thing one notices about “Claire” (not her real name) is that she is beautiful, tall, and statuesque. Her eyes are blue, her hair gold-blond, and she wears a ready smile. She is polite to everyone but uses that courtesy to shield her inner self from the casual observer, giving her a slightly cold or distant aura at times, as if she is cautious about revealing too much of herself. She gives the impression that there’s a lot going on behind her smiling eyes. At Knight Realms she plays the modest elf Nina, a devotee of the earth-mother Gaia, and a healer type. Claire lives in Canada, and for five long years she’d make the eight-hour drive down to Pennsylvania or New Jersey to attend Knight Realms events. She first tried the game after the local larp she’d been participating in folded. She and her friends were shopping for a new game when they came across the Knight Realms website. Claire remembers being impressed at the level of stagecraft evident in the photos on the website—the latex weapons, the decorated sets, the high standard of costuming. In 2005 she road-tripped to an event and fell in love with the game. The fantasy fiction that Claire loves and Knight Realms offer the same escapist benefit to her—both allow her to experience situations far removed from the reality of her own life. In real life, people never get upset about dragons, so in a larp it’s possible to have fun with that anxiety and to be silly about it. For Claire, the problems set in when her real and fantastical lives started to collide.
Claire always seems to have a boyfriend. She has dated several men at Knight Realms in succession, about four in five years, with brief breaks in between. The short lead-time between boyfriends revved the rumor mill, which speculated that Claire started cruising for a new guy before leaving her old one. Whether or not it’s true is immaterial—the fact is that these speculations generated ill-will toward Claire, ill-will that often emanated from the protective friends of her exes.
One such situation came to a head in-game during my tenure at Knight Realms and involved two love triangles, one in-game, and one out-of-game. In-game, Nina was then Lady Nina, a title she gained through a politically motivated marriage to one of the lords of the four lands. The lord was absent from the game for a long stretch, and in his absence he asked his squire Darren, played by a man I’ll call “Miles,” to be Nina’s bodyguard and companion. Claire and Miles decided to play out the relationship between their characters as brotherly and sisterly, and Nina and Darren were often seen together in-game. An evil-aligned character wanted to stir up trouble for the goody-two-shoes Lady Nina and wrote a letter to Nina’s husband suggesting that Nina was adulterous. The letter circulated for some months, and the plot simmered.
In the meantime in real life, Claire was dating a man I’ll call “Leo,” also a Knight Realms player who portrayed a lord in game, though not Nina’s husband. When they broke up, Claire started seeing Miles. Their fling was short-lived, and they soon split, in part, Claire says, due to intense social scrutiny.
At the next event, the adultery plot went public, and the baron held a public trial during which he asked the assembled townsfolk if they could vouch for Nina’s chastity or if they’d seen Nina and Darren venturing off together unsupervised. Some of Claire’s friends, who also played Nina’s friends, spoke up for Nina in-game, and a couple characters played by friends of various exes spoke up against her. Lady Nina said, pleadingly, that no one had asked her what happened and that she’d gladly submit to inquisition to prove that she was telling the truth. The trial proceeded, her request was ignored, and it ended with honor combat between a knight of Nina’s husband and Darren, Nina’s champion, who ultimately won the battle. Claire felt that she, and not Lady Nina, was on trial and left the scene in tears. Miles, Claire, and Leo were all incredibly reluctant to comment on what had been a miserable occurrence for all three of them. James, who had permitted the trial with good intentions, as the resolution to an in-game, player-created plot, published a public apology for allowing it to happen. In-game, he also tried to minimize the damage—the count organized the honor combat for a time when the vast majority of the town was out fighting monsters and thus unable to watch. The count also passed a law saying that anyone found even speaking about the matter would be severely punished.
Clearly the circumstances around Lady Nina’s trial got quickly out of control, as real-life events gave what was meant to be an in-game plot a different context. That such a scene was played out to its conclusion is proof that even very experienced role-players make mistakes. Whether or not the people involved intended this as a result, the trial read as a public inquiry into Claire’s virtue—a slut-shaming, a way of enforcing a restrictive code of female sexuality in-game and out-of-game, a public commentary on a situation that really was nobody’s business but Claire’s, Miles’s, and Leo’s. Since that event, Claire has been on hiatus from Knight Realms. If she returns at all, she says, it will be after a substantial amount of time has passed, after everyone’s tempers have cooled. In the
meantime, she’s started killing zombies with boffers as part of Dystopia Rising.
Lady Nina’s trial is an extreme example of what can happen when real life bleeds over into larp, although usually, the out-of-game affects the in-game in smaller, less explosive ways. After all, any community of a couple hundred people is likely to produce some sort of drama and gossip. But in a larp, that drama has the potential to be reenacted, echoed, and explored in public. To me, that is the chief danger of larp, that life will imitate art too closely, and that once everything is out in the open, once the fiction is stretched to its breaking point, there is nowhere to hide.
* Officially, the game’s policy on costuming for all players is that it be “publicly decent,” and the costuming rule admonishes players not to “dress in a manner that is overly revealing or provocative,” giving rules marshals the ability to “insist that you change into different clothing or costuming.” My sense is that this rule exists mainly to keep the game PG-13 and players un-naked. I’ve never seen a marshal enforce this, probably because truly indecent dress occurs so rarely.
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