What is Interactive Literature?

“Interactive Literature” (IL) is one of the older terms for the tradition of larp that came out of Intercon and the Intercon community.  It’s used in the name for the not-for-profit group that runs Intercon, New England Interactive Literature, but it’s not always obvious what it is meant to convey.  Other people use ‘Secrets and Powers’, ‘Theatre-style’, or ‘Intercon-style’ for these games, but I don’t really like any of those terms for various reasons which I go into below.

“Secrets and Powers” refers to the gameplay of these games as being focused around secrets that the characters have, and powers that they use on each other and/or the environment, and, in my mind, neither of these is needed for a game to be IL

“Theatre-style” is a larger bucket, which encompasses IL, as well as Mind’s Eye Theatre games, and, really, any game that doesn’t rely on physical resolution of conflict.  It’s often accurate, but not precise about the kind of games I’m talking about when I say IL

“Intercon-style” is basically meaningless.  Every year, fewer and fewer games run at Intercon are “Intercon-style”, but as these games run at Intercon, surely they must be Intercon-style by definition.  I find this name to be exclusionary, and othering to all the excellent games that run at Intercon that don’t quite fit the mold.

“Interactive Literature” then, is a form of larp which focuses on two main things: “Interactivity” and “Literature”.   Gameplay tends to be PvP (or Character vs Character, if you prefer) with the game’s conflict coming mainly from characters who have crossed purposes.  There is an emphasis on Player Agency, the authors have set up their larp, and then give the players the ability to play it out as they see fit.  These two factors help put the interactivity at the forefront of gameplay.  At the same time, one of the key features of this kind of larp is gm-provided characters that are deeply interconnected.  The “Literature” in IL is the game materials themselves, the 2, or 4, or 20 or more, pages of character sheet and world background that we craft for each character.  IL puts emphasis on Craft, on the creation of the materials, the experience, and the storyline itself. There have been games that I would call IL that use physical resolution for conflict (e.g. boffers), but most tend to use non-physical means (ability cards, dice, RPS, etc)

Next up (probably): How I describe types of larp