Language, LARPS, and Learning.

This Sunday, I headed out to my friend Marshall’s new Arlington apartment with the purpose of playing an immersive storytelling LARP game...thing. I hesitate to call it a LARP, because in my mind that term conjures up images of a large heard of nerds in renn fest costumes, hitting each other with foam swords or throwing birdseed. This was just a small gathering of friends around a table: Jack, Shayna, and Alex, all three of whom I had recently explored the MD Renn fest with, Davey, who I had never met before, Marshall, and Myself. No swords. No birdseed. No high-fantasy.

The game we were playing is one that Marshall had recently played with the game’s creator up at GenCon, called Sign. To understand the premise of the game, you need a little historical background.

Flash back to the 1970s, Nicaragua. There is no deaf community. There is no sign language. Deaf people, having only a few gestures and simple signs to communicate to their family, are otherwise completely isolated from any other person. It is a stark and lonely existence.

A school was formed, as an attempt to find a solution. The intent was to teach the children lipreading and spoken Spanish, with teachers limited to only using fingerspelling signs, and nothing else. The program wasn’t successful. Students couldn’t grasp the concept of any of the Spanish words, and they remained linguistically isolated from their teachers.

But on the playground, in the streets, outside of class, something amazing was happening. Students were talking. Sharing their home signs, and creating new ones. They were forming a shared sign language. The simpler, pidgin-like language used by younger children is now the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragünse (LSN) and the more formed language used by the older children, complete with complex gramatical conventions like verb agreement, became the Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). Both the ISN and LSN are still used today.

The game, Sign, starts off with a brief explanation of this history. From the instructions, “In Sign, we follow a small piece of their journey. Together we will share the frustration and loneliness of not having a language. We’ll slowly develop the tools necessary to express what’s important to us”

Marshall read to the intro to us, and explained the structure of the game. Two warm-up exercises, three class sessions, three recesses, and a final class. In the first warm-up, we were to go around the circle and each say “hello” in various ways that somehow conveyed more than just a greeting be it flirtatiousness, excitement, sarcasm, etc.

It felt dumb, and silly, and very much exactly like how warm-ups feel in any and all acting classes I’ve taken. Also, it was pretty abundantly clear that I was in a room full of performers, something I had already suspected. The second warm-up was much the same, only we replaced “hello” with a wave. From this point on, we were not to use any spoken language for the rest of the game.

At the end of the two warm-ups we were told to flip over the papers in front of us, which had two characters we could select from. I chose Sofia. According to my bio, I find people to be hurtful and angry when I can’t understand them. They scowl and get angry and wave their arms around a lot, threateningly. So I take to hiding from them more often than trying to understand them. I have a pet cat, Whiskers, who I love dearly, and who I miss. I didn’t know until this morning that I would have to leave whiskers at home. Below the description of her past and personality, it said: “Truth: I’m afraid Whiskers thinks I’ve left her” and two goals: “I want to tell______  a story about my cat.” and “I want to trust ______  with a secret”. These are the only ‘victory conditions’ found in the game. We’re to convey our truth to other students, and try and accomplish those two goals.

Before the game truly begins, we’re given three guidelines for language-creation: Draw from your character, draw from the setting and draw from each other. It also explained that we may have to compromise between what we want to say and what we are able to make understood. Whenever we feel there’s been a failure to fully understand, we should make a tally mark.  

The game begins. Marshall, who is playing our teacher, sternly points at a sign that said
“Sign your name. Take turns”. He points to me. No time to think. I make two air quotes by my cheeks, thinking it as something close to the concept of me mixed with the concept of cat. The class repeats it. Jack draws the top of his hand under his chin in a smile-like shape. Alex’s flattened hand shoots up across his chest like a rocket. Davey thumps his chest with a closed fist over his heart. Shayna’s hand circles and then pops outward, as if throwing confetti. We’re sent to recess, with the (written) instruction to try and talk to every other student.

It’s amazing to me how almost immediately we are able to communicate rudimentary concepts. We start with the familiar. Names. Waving to say hello. Shayna’s character (circle-pop? It’s hard to put the name signs we gave ourselves into words) and I (cheek-quotes) manage to convey the concepts of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ through the (admittedly heteronormative) drawn out curve of a tall woman’s body beside the straight up and down of a tall man’s. At some point, using mother and father, we establish a new sign- sibling, a hand held out to the side at around shoulder height. The sign only made sense when shown next to mother and father, but through repeated use became something we all understood as a stand-alone concept.

You sibling? Circle-pop asks, by tilting her head and looking curious while pointing at me and throwing her hand out at shoulder height. I shake my head no. I want to tell her about my cat. I ponder for a moment, and throw up a finger in the universal sign of ‘wait a moment’.

Sibling. No. I sign. I hold an imaginary cat in my arms and pet it. Circle-pop looks confused, and makes a tally on her sheet. Wait, I sign. I made an imaginary cat again. I take my hands and make triangle ears on my head. I then draw whiskers on my cheeks. I make the cat again. She looks excited and makes the cat too. She points at me, and then makes the cat, and then makes whiskers. I nod. We have established I have a cat.

Conversations much like that go on throughout recess, using known signs like mother, father, or sibling alongside easy pantomimes like whiskers or pet to create new signs. By the time we’re called back to class, we’ve had entire conversations, told jokes, and even invented a name for Marshall’s stern teacher character (a mockingly angry face combined with three shaming points in front of the body. Point point point). I’d learned the others’ families and personalities. Circle-pop’s mother is dead and her dad is alive, but she i’st too excited about him. Chest-thump has a brother, whose name was exactly like his, but with an open hand instead of a fist. He loves his brother. His parents are farmers. Smile-hand has parents, and one is presumably very old (I was wrong on this point). Smile-hand also loves magic and being funny (I was half right). I’d shared that my parents are mean, and made me scared, but I have a cat with orange fur who i loved. Rocket-hand, or.. Uh, Alex had decided to sit out the game at this point, so we knew nothing about that character.

In the next class, Pointpointpoint lays out a bunch of cards with words on them, indicating that we should pick one, and make a sign for them- an important tool in getting across our truths to the other students. Nearly half of the words, like “Family” or “Scared” or “Love”, we had already established signs for, but now was our chance to really cement those concepts. Chest-thump picks “sibling” and tries to sign it by holding an invisible baby, but we all instantly correct him. We already had a sign for sibling. We all throw our hands out at our shoulders. Sibling. He nods in agreement. We just standardized an aspect of our language.

In the class after that, we write down our own word to sign. I write “lonely” and show the class. I sign love (which I accidentally stole from ASL; two hands crossed over the chest in a self hug), and then make a sad face and throw my hands out away from myself- no. No-love. Lonely.  

At the next recess, we try to convey our truths to each other. Circle-pop signs to me:  I mother hope read.  I look confused, and make a tally. I. Mother. Hope. Read. Hope. I. No, she says.

You… hope-read? Pray-book? I ask. No. I’m wrong. Tallies.

Mother. Hope. I. Read. Write. Read. Certificate….

OH! You mother hope read write certificate cap diploma handshake congratulations? I clumsily attempt to mime.

YES! She is excited now. I mother hope read write graduate. I afraid no hope. Her mother wanted her to graduate college but she is scared she won’t. That’s an incredibly complex concept to convey, but we did it, albeit with a few tallies.

My turn. I love cat.  She nods. I continue. I afraid cat lonely. I here. Cat away.

She asks me, cat away… parents?

I respond, Yes. Cat away. Cat and parents. I afraid cat lonely.

We join the other two. Chest-thump is afraid his brother is lonely. Smile-hand…. Is afraid of something related to old people and ears. We’re confused until he finally concludes “I afraid not funny”. We assure him that he is funny. Circle-pop and I explain our truths to them, with some help translating for each other when concepts get confusing.

By the time we’re all called back for our final class, we’re able to joke ask questions and share deep truths about ourselves. We’re able to make fun of Pointpointpoint without him understanding what we mean (at one point in a previous class, I had asked him you lonely? You no family? In an attempt to connect with the very stern and unkind character, but my peers had all interpreted my signing as ‘are you lonely without a woman’ and laughed uncontrollably. It’s still not a perfect language).

In our final class, Pointpointpoint points at us all in turn, and the entire class is to describe the spotlight student. We do so, all in sign, agreeing with or contradicting each other. We have a discussion without any words. And like that, the game is over, and we can speak again.

As we get over the jarring sound of each other’s voices after nearly two hours of silence, we go around and read our character bios, and share our impressions. Chest thump (real name Alfonso) was an adventurer and mischief maker who was scared his brother would forget him. Smilehand (real name Jose) loved his grandfather, who had large ears, and was afraid people would stop thinking he is funny. Circlepop (Violeta) was a hopeful girl who’s mother died a year ago. She was scared that one day she’d lose hope.

We then talked about how the game made us feel, and what we’d learned. Some mention the anxiety and sadness brought on by being limited in how much of themselves they could express. Jack, in particular, who’s character (and self) is so focused around making jokes and laughter, felt the dissonance in how humor works in a signed language versus a verbal one (although, during the course of that discussion, I learned that ASL puns are a thing, as are ASL poetry slams).

To me, the experience was honestly a departure from anxiety. Two hours of deliberate, thoughtful communication with three ‘classmates’, made up of people I barely knew, was a balm for me. I’d never felt more listened to or included.For two hours, I had three other people painstakingly trying to fully understand not just what I was saying, but what I meant, and I was allowed to do the same for them, without judgement of being 'too analytical'. There was no tl;dr to these conversations, or listening for keywords and then responding off of those. No one could really monopolize a conversation, and it was blatantly obvious when miscommunication happened. I felt, as I imagine the children that this game was based off of did, less alone, and for the first time in a while on an equal communication playing field with those around me. It was an intense, powerful experience of true human connection. And it was one of the rare shared creative experiences where I felt that everyone in the room contributed to the end product equally, a very very hard task to achieve in a room full of actors and creatives.

The game, should you want to check it out, is free online. It works best for small groups (3-6) and takes around 2 hours. I really, really want to find a way to run something similar to this as an event at a science festival. If you have any ideas, or want to collaborate, please let me know.