I have an excellent interview today with Oscar Biffi about Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, which is currently doing amazing on Kickstarter (that just means it’s a sure bet!)! It sounds like an amazing collection of larp scenarios – check out what Oscar had to say!
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What is Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, as a project and as your vision?
Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello is the second anthology of chamber larps written by the Italian Chamber Orchestra, the community of roleplaying enthusiasts of Laiv.it. We are doing our best to make it a wonderful book with twelve interesting games, but to us it’s so much more than that. Three years ago we created the first Crescendo Giocoso, thanks to our community and our backers on Kickstarter. It was an incredible experience, kind of similar to Pavarotti & Friends: my games and the games of Italian game designers who I esteem, developed to be accessible to a wider public, from different countries and backgrounds.
It turned out to be the show of confidence our community needed in order to focus on our own way of designing games. With a format that worked for us as a starting base, we were able to start organising conventions not only to play games, but to write them together. Our player friends became authors and the same Italian Chamber Orchestra that was born as a joke became real, going from nine authors to almost thirty. Bigger communities of Italian larpers started to get interested in chamber larp and people from all around the world got to know our way of playing.
So in a way Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello as a book is the end point of a journey (we like to say “a grand tour”) made of writing workshops, online chats, conventions, sleepless nights on graphics and texts. In another way, we hope it could be a new starting point for our community, a demonstration that there’s people out there willing to hear our voices as game designers and that “anyone can cook” as in Pixar’s Ratatouille.
What are some of the themes players will see in the different larps in Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello?
In terms of settings, players are spoiled for choice: from the Bronze Age to the Italian Years of Lead passing through XVIII° century Venice and fantasy worlds. Alzh & Imer is about a love story between tow elderly people, one of them afflicted by Alzheimer’s, and Pantheon Club is about social pressure: each player is invited to anonymously put into play a personal “silence” (something you don’t speak about with everyone, because you’re afraid to be judged) and someone else is going to play a Greek Deity who shares or hates this same silence. The truth is we put emphasis on game mechanics above all, so players will pull colored strings to create an imaginary village or scotch tape to build a prison without actual walls, they will play in complete darkness or utter silence, they will play in the same room or in different ones, they will create scene in reverse chronological order or play the same character in different moments of life. There’s only one fixed point: everyone in the gaming group is going to play and have fun. We’ve got nothing against game masters, I’ve been one for my entire life, but my days of watching one of my larps from outside, maybe to step in and just tell the epilogue in the end, are over: I want to play with my friends and as an author I’m not going to ask someone else to just stare at the others as they play. Sharing all this experiences and putting so many heads together has been a great way to explore very different ideas and everyone can find a complete list of previews for all the scenarios on our Laiv.it website here.
The concept of the Italian Chamber Orchestra and coming together to write each of the scenarios is really brilliant and feels very collaborative. How do you work together and address disagreements, conflicts, or even just overrunning enthusiasm in such an environment?
To me the keys are transparence and dialogue. We try to create the ideal environment from the very beginning: even if a hotel with all the comforts would be awesome, we prefer to rent a house and take care of things ourselves, as a group. Maria is in charge of the logistics, but everyone brings something to eat and there are no assigned rooms. Everyone knows that we put authors first in every convention: we ask players which game they’d prefer to play of course, but we also make sure to tell them that is only a preference and they could end up in another game instead. A game is written by a person who deserves space and respect, as well as a player has the right to know what they are going to play. So, when we invited our players to become authors, we found a very sensible and open-minded audience. In order to share this way of doing things with newcomers, in our writing workshops we split up people who already know each other or who have similar experiences in order to create more diverse bands.
The starting points for every collective game in LarpJam is the Crescendo Giocoso model, so we don’t have to discuss which kind of game we’re going to create, and a theme chosen by the director of the band. The director has no special creative control outside of it, they are just a veteran author with the task of coordinating work after the workshop, in order to make sure the draft is ready before the deadline of the next playtesting convention. Everyone can get involved as much or as little as they want: do you want to join in LarpJam to share ideas and then not write a single line of text in the next months? No problem, just tell it to your band. Writing a game, as well as publishing Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, is a way of giving voice to our creativity and the feeling of being heard is essential. We do our best to create a free space where people can be honest without being judged and where conflict is an healthy part of the process.
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Thank you so much Oscar for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello on Kickstarter today!
A note: Thoughty always welcomes Italian interviewees, even as my interview style will be changing soon, and interviewees from all around the world – of all races! Even if we need to find a translator, I’m interested in helping you tell your stories. <3