Actual Play- #Feminism Sampler: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby by Julia Ellingboe

#Feminism Sampler: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby by Julia Ellingboe

You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was a challenging game for me, both in terms of the ideas it presented and in my ability to effectively portray the character I was playing. To explain why, I want to talk a little bit about how I use larp, both as a designer and a player. 

Contrary to many people, I don’t think of larp as theatre. I do not do it to entertain an audience or to develop my acting ability, but rather as a tool to reflect upon ideas and experiences, generally with the goal of trying to access some new insight or perspective. Because of this, I often create and play characters with which I have transparently intrinsic connections. The idea that I might purposefully aim for a character I have little in common with is generally very strange to me, though I recognize it as a common practice for players who engage with larp strictly as performance or as entertainment. 

You’ve Come a Long Way Baby occupied the space between those stances, using the difference and distance between the context and characters of the game and those of my quotidian reality to highlight an intersectional understanding of how absurd many cultural norms are. This is a complex concept to put into words, and while living it through the game is no less complex, I believe it is more understandable specifically because of the embodied nature of play. 

In You’ve Come a Long Way Baby the players are take on the roles of actors making a movie, but the world they occupy and the movie they are in is housed in an inverted Bechdel-Wallace understanding of the positions occupied by men and women. Thus Virginia Slim, the female lead and principal actor, gets all the best lines and scenes, while the various male characters mostly look pretty and act as McGuffins to give Virginia a reason to perform awesome stunts. Even off camera, the empowered world of the females means they can do things like sit and chat about their next film or which men look attractive while the males are sent grab drinks. 

In our game we had seven players, including the facilitator who played the director character. Among the players were two men, and I was the only male, white, cishet player involved. I played a woman of color who longed for the kind of pull the leading ladies had, an intersectional identity made all the more complex for me to understand because of the inverted Bechdel-Wallace world we occupied. Were my actions right? How was I supposed to feel? Normally when personal experience fails in games we lean on stereotypes, but what point of reference did I have here? The nature of the game was to play and find out.

Over the course of the movie shoot my character used her gender to get what she wanted, ogled the young male ingénue, slept with and abandoned the older male talent, and generally tried to hobnob her way to the top. She was not bad, or even mean, but ambitious and willing to sacrifice (both of herself and others) for stardom. However she was eternally a B-lister, pushed to the side for unstated reasons, and her character was inevitably sacrificed so that Virginia Slim and her best friend could look up and see her ghostly face in the sky as they moved on to another adventure. We took a cast picture of the climactic scene, and in that picture you can see me being visibly and intentionally upstaged by the real stars of the film while the ingénue hangs from a rope behind everyone.

Being sidelined in several scenes was upsetting to my character, who believed she was capable of and deserved more, and for me, as I was anxious for a chance to do what I thought of as roleplaying. I recognized my own privilege in that emotion however, as asserting myself is not something I typically have any trouble with. Indeed, given the presentation J. Li did at the conference about the internal immersion possible in role-playing games (a factor that helps differentiate it further from theater), having to play an actress anxiously waiting for her shot while also fretting over my own boundaries was incredibly fruitful.

It is tempting to think that this game is most especially for people like me, but thinking so is just another assumption of privilege. To be certain, my context affects my perceptions and how I played, but the game itself looks at society as a whole. The wonderful diversity and intersectionality of the world, with all of the vast creative potential it produces, is often obscured by the sheer number of things we take for granted. By flipping the script on the context and granting permission to explore that world through different eyes, those assumptions are highlighted and thrown into question.

In our debriefing we not only made sense of our emotions and experiences, but were hyper-aware of our tendency to refer to characters in the game with the wrong pronouns, the ones we associated with the privileges the characters experienced or lacked. We also were able to use the diversity of our players to make connections- what was novel for one person was daily life for another. I cannot say it was a game in which I ever completely understood my character or one in which I played a role as effectively as I may have done, but rather that it was a game that provided a unique opportunity for me to shift my extra-diegetic perspective and to shift those of my fellow players. Uncomfortable perhaps, but in many ways one of the best thing I think larp can offer the world.