#Larp “Rój” (Swarm)

Rój (Swarm) is a sensual, movement-based experience of community, where the “I” dissolves into “we”. It is an ecological act-based game: it leaves participants with a broader knowledge of bees and invites reflection on the tensions between the individual and the collective.

Players symbolically embody bees and, drawing on a shared experience of movement and touch, tell the story of a working hive. Scenes emerge as a consequence of their choices.

It was a hot, late summer which the three authors spent at Patrycja Kamaszuk’s family home. There was a lot of laughter, a hammock, a grill being set up — and the little whitewashed houses found in the yard drew particular curiosity. The Kamaszuk family has kept bees for three generations, starting with a gripping anecdote about a neighbourly feud and a certain stolen queen.

It quickly turned out that what was everyday normality for Patrycja was, for the other two authors, a kind of magical mystery full of unknowns. How do you collect honey? What happens when a mouse gets into the hive? Why are drones cared for their whole lives, only to be thrown out into the cold by the very same bees? In a single evening an astonishing, intricate, interdependent story of the swarms living in the Kamaszuk yard opened up before them — along with the edge of the gulf dividing children raised in the city from those from places where forests and fields still surround you.

Childlike wonder grew into long hours of conversation about social systems and belonging. In Poland’s 21st-century reality the culture of the individual and of rebellion reigns, bred on romantic insurrection myths — self-sacrifice for the sake of optimisation and losing one’s own “I” sound like a nightmare. And yet there are cultures, such as the Korean one, closer to the system of bees than Poles are.

The authors are good at writing character sheets and creating games with mysteries and a classic plot. This time they are throwing that away to use the possibilities that larps offer and that they have not yet explored. They are very curious whether the tools they have chosen will make it possible to build an atmosphere and a sense of community, or whether the players’ culture-driven mindset will prove impossible to shift. They are glad to be making something fresh — exploring games that are about experiencing, not just about telling, and prototyping and rebuilding this system until it works well enough.

They expect that not every run of the game will turn out perfectly. That is okay. After all, they are making something excitingly new. And they are not bees.