Everything that I know about running a LARP, I learned from pro-wrestling.
I know I've written the above line on this blog before (entry here), but I did say that I would re-visit the similarities between pro-wrestling and live-action role-play. Previously, I was writing about endings and the effects of "hot" or "clean" finishes. Today, I read an article - "How to become a better Larper" - that Elle had posted on G+, and I was reminded again of the overlap between the skills that LARPs require, and the skills that wrestlers develop.
From watching wrestling and reading about it, I've learned that the skills that contribute to a successful wrestling show are the same ones that make a LARP game enjoyable for all of the players. Similarly, the behaviour that is most destructive to the long-term prospects of a live-action chronicle is just as poisonous in a wrestling promotion. Elle's review of the above article said something that applies equally to LARP and wrestling: "We create shared stories, emphasis on shared. It's not all about you and your character. The best games are those where everyone works together to make the most awesome story they can manage."
Wrestling is, of course, a form of storytelling in which some of the participants are very experienced and have well-established characters, while others are new to the business and trying to catch a break. A promotion's success depends on it having a number of characters and plot lines that have "gotten over" with the fans. "Getting over" is a common term that people in the wrestling business use to describe success, but they don't always mean popularity. For a heel, success is being booed and widely despised. The important thing is to elicit a strong reaction, which is described as "heat".
Of course, some wrestlers are only concerned with their own success, but the most respected are the ones that understand the need to share the limelight and not put themselves before the story.
Perhaps the most powerful lesson in the history of wrestling comes from the fall of WCW - a wrestling promotion that Ted Turner once owned. With his backing in the 1990s, WCW became big enough to rival Vince MacMahon's WWE, which had for years been the biggest wrestling company in the world. However, WCW threw away all of its money and success. Part of its downfall can be attributed to wrestlers behaving in ways that you might expect from problem players in a long-term LARP.
A major problem was that a clique of wrestlers - including Hulk Hogan - were making story decisions behind the scenes. Hogan may be a wildly popular wrestler among fans, but he made his reputation in the days when the industry was refusing to acknowledge publicly that wrestling is staged. Behind the scenes, he has for a long time had a reputation of not knowing how to promote anyone but himself. When he and a group of well-established and like-minded wrestlers had influence over the booking in WCW, they hogged the limelight. This caused WCW shows to become boring and predictable; week after week, Hogan and his group - the nWo - would always triumph. Backstage, the most influential group of wrestlers were acting like they were a class above the others. In an interview about WCW, AJ Styles - who was a rookie when he worked there - said that if guys like Hogan, Kevin Nash or Scott Steiner were arguing about plot in the locker room, then it was time for everyone not in the clique to leave and go somewhere else. This soon became not just an arrogant way to treat less-experienced wrestlers, but also an arrogant way to treat the fans.
The nadir came with "the finger poke of death". A great main event match between Hogan and Nash for the world title was promised, but the plot twist was that Nash was in league with Hogan. Hogan poked him in the chest, and Nash lay down to be pinned and ceded the world championship. The fans were outraged; sure - wrestling's fake, but the customers nonetheless expect to see an entertaining staged fight. This kind of treatment, combined with a few other terrible business decisions, caused WCW's fan base to start hemorrhaging supporters, eventually leading to the promotion's collapse. By the time that Vince MacMahon purchased WCW as a way of dismantling it, it was worth so little that Chris Jericho once said that, if he had known at the time how little it sold for, he would have put in a competing bid.
As you can tell, I've listened to a few commentaries from current and former wrestlers about the rise and fall of WCW. Shane Douglas, whom I mentioned in my last post about wrestling, once remarked "That's why you should never let the lunatics run the asylum."
I think that this is something that Larpers should give some thought: an entire multi-million dollar company that was built on storytelling collapsed, and part of the cause was people playing in cliques, plots being decided among people that had a conflict of interests, and wrestlers refusing to share the limelight with others.
Personally, if I want a story about someone learning to share, I think about a wrestler called Rhyno. When Rhyno (real name Terry Gerin) finished his training in Detroit, he asked whom he was first going to beat in the ring. Seeing that he still had a lot to learn about shared story-telling, his coach and promoter Scott D'Amore said that he would make calls and get Rhyno into any wrestling show or promotion that he could arrange - provided that Rhyno lost every single match for the first year of his career. Partly, this was about Rhyno getting some humility and "paying his dues" - almost all of the wrestlers in the industry have to spend the early part of their careers taking losses while they learn the ropes. However, the other part was about teaching Rhyno to participate in a story without having to "win" it.
Some of the most respected wrestlers are the ones that have learned to make stories interesting without needing those stories to end in their favour, and some Larpers could learn a valuable lesson from their examples. For instance, in his autobiography A Lion's Tale, Chris Jericho describes an occasion when he was playing a heel and scheduled to lose to Goldberg - a popular face. Goldberg was winning a lot of "squash matches" - that's a term for a quick one-sided fight that serves to show just how powerful a character is - and he was due to squash Jericho too. Backstage, Jericho convinced the booker Eric Bischoff not to change who would win - but to let his character perform some promos in which he would mock Goldberg and flee, weaseling his way out of facing Goldberg directly for a few weeks. The idea was to wind up the audience, to make it more satisfying for them when Goldberg did eventually get his hands on him. The idea paid off and Bischoff and Goldberg both appreciated it afterwards - because Jericho was thinking about what would generate heat for the story, rather than what would make him look good.
LARPs rarely if ever ask players to accept that their characters are going to lose outright, so to my mind, we should actually have less temptation to ignore the responsibilities of shared storytelling than wrestlers do. Nonetheless, we still occasionally see some players that want to hog the plot and shut down others' roles.
Perhaps this is a useful analogy: in wrestling, fan reaction is "heat"; for Larpers, "heat" is player interest. Imagine that a player is blocking others' enjoyment of the game (and perhaps - as Elle mentioned - using "My character wouldn't do that" as an excuse for not involving other characters). That player is taking heat out of the game.
Before I stop drawing this parallel, I should mention one practice in wrestling that I would strongly recommend in LARP chronicles - the skill of "putting someone else over". Some experienced wrestlers - once they have become high-profile - use their prestige to benefit others. They ask to be given story lines with talented but less-experienced wrestlers that need a push to help them be noticed. This is pro-active limelight sharing.
Perhaps the best example from wrestling is the Undertaker - a wrestler who rarely loses, not because he's selfish but because his character is intended to be a very powerful monster. The man who plays him - Mark Calloway - has a lot of years of experience and input into his story lines behind the scenes. What the Undertaker has occasionally done with his reputation is use it to draw the spotlight to a relatively new wrestler by losing or having a closely-fought match with him. When Undertaker lost to Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania, it was the first time that anyone had ever beaten 'Taker at that event, and he had been appearing at Wrestlemania for over twenty years. By conceding this epic winning streak to Lesnar, Calloway was actually endorsing his opponent in a huge way.
In LARP, character patronage is even easier; it does not have to entail losing a fight with another character. No matter the form, it can be massively helpful. I spent a long time in the old Cam UK vampire game playing a relatively low-powered Ventrue, and it was hard to get involved in plot at times, because many characters in that clan were insular, only interested in empire-building for themselves. As a result, I have a very clear memory of the London game where I first met Tim Edwards, because he was playing a powerful character that actually delegated work and was interested in sponsoring less powerful characters - getting others involved. Those kinds of interactions can make a player's game for him or her, and should never be underestimated.
I guess the above is a very long-winded way of saying this: "The principles of shared storytelling are really important to live-action stories, and if you don't believe the Larpers that say this, then wrestling can provide all the proof you need."
See you all around, hopefully sooner rather than later.
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