Labor Wars Reflection

[ultimatepsi]

This past weekend I played in Labor Wars. I don't usually play weekend-long LARPs, partially because they are tiring, but mostly because I have a hard time emotionally separating myself from my character afterwards. Labor Wars was not an exception to this. I had a good time, and am very glad I played, but I woke up this morning with echoes of the

Comments

[natbudin]

Thanks for the thoughtful post, Kate!

It's possible that one major factor that would have changed things for you is Martha being present for more of the game - I kind of expected the two of you to be the Wonder Twins, and I suspect that neither of the characters really works as well without the other one present. OTOH, both Phoebe and Martha have good reasons to hold back, both in terms of their personalities and in terms of getting what they want accomplished.

In this particular game, I think there was probably only one character (Joseph Blair) that would have really been as vociferous as would have satisfied your desire for catharsis. The "moral" of The Labor Wars, in that respect, is that extremism is irrational, and persisting with ideology tends to get you killed. In fact, the most ideological characters are also the biggest assholes in the game.

In the end, the labor groups that game out the best in the end were the ones that were most willing to compromise with management. One could have easily predicted that outcome before the game ran, I think.

So... yeah. Politics suck. I personally hate the sausage-making of the policy decision process in real life, and I imagine many LARPers feel the same way (hence their willingness to compromise rather than continue to fight for their goals).

Seen from this perspective, the real heroes of the labor movement aren't the Mother Joneses and Joe Hills, but the people who actually sat for hours hammering out the compromises of those contracts under which people actually worked.

[ultimatepsi]

I honestly like the "moral" as you put it, and the way things turned out was rather satisfying in the sense that the situation was resolved without my (character's) direct help.

Mostly, I just wasn't expecting the game to strike me the way it did, and that is totally not the responsibility of the GMs. You folks did an awesome job.