On A.I. and Larp Marketing

Recently, my birth city went viral on the internet, but not for a good reason.  It had the misfortune to host a themed event that was spectacularly bad.

I am talking about Willy’s Chocolate Experience.

This event was aimed at families and was very clearly not a LARP but it used AI for some of its writing and visuals and had a bunch of characteristics in common with a lot of LARPs.

• Built on someone else’s Intellectual Property

• Unpaid “NPCs” trying their best to entertain.

• Over promised and under delivered set dressing.

• Clumsy Amateurish Marketing.

There is good news and bad news.  The artificial intelligence was not sufficiently good to script and market the event in a professional manner.  If you dug a little, alarm bells should have started ringing.  The website, now defunct, but archived on the wayback machine - contained spelling mistakes, un-necessary repeats of information and an excessive use of the trademark [™] symbol.  That last one seems particularly ironic.

Unfortunately,  lots of people didn’t dig a little and the marketing succeeded in enticing around 800 ticket sales.   Do I think that Glaswegians are particularly gullible?  Not really.  Do I think that Glaswegians are good at expressing themselves when angry. Yes, Absolutely, S tier, God Mode.  This probably helped the event go viral.

One can assume that the A.I. is going to get better and this has major implications for larp organisers and attendees.   Marketing a larp is comparatively easy, compared with planning and running a larp - and the A.I. Bots have now made it easier.

Whilst I have major respect for everyone taking the challenge of organising a larp it's worth acknowledging that some rise better to the experience of doing so than others.  My big concern is that A.I. is going to provide marketing and writing tools to those others.

So if you are contemplating signing up for a LARP, please don’t be enticed with cool imagery - probably taken by a ‘tog like me - then ripped apart and put back together by an A.I.  Look past the slick words promises of all good things and look for both red and green flags.

Other lists are out there, here are some of mine:

RED FLAG

• If a larp website has a lot of spelling mistakes, it can be an indication that quality is not a priority.

• If there is no player code of conduct or risk assessments, then there’s probably insufficient thinking about player safety.

• If there is no FAQ or starters guide, then the needs of new players (vs experienced) may not be properly considered.

• If sleeping, feeding or sanitary arrangements are poorly described, it could indicate that the organisation is focused on story but not on the basics.

GREEN FLAG

• The LARP organisation structure is transparent, with the key people, their track record and their roles named.