Playing the cat
Last night I attended Ethan's second LARP. He was running a published (freely available online) game, The Final Voyage of the Mary Celeste, written by the same people who wrote the Marin County New Age Society Cocktail Party game Ethan ran last time. Mary Celeste turned out to be more complex, and to have a fair tad bit more combat in it. As before, it sparked some thoughts about how best to design such a game, but I won't go too far into that except to note that it appears that one key to LARP design may be to have multiple simultaneous plots (generally involving different characters) that end up interacting/interfering with each other. (Also, though this is a point that I already knew from the time that Fran and I wrote a much smaller murder-mystery game some years back, giving each character a goal, and connections to at least two or three of the other characters.) It's interesting how much complexity the notion of having multiple largely unrelated plots going on at once adds; I always used to think (from the point of view of a longtime non-live-action roleplayer) that LARPs would be unworkably large, but I begin to see the appeal. You just have to accept that your character will probably be entirely unaware of a large part of what else is happening in the game.
I played the ship's cat. Ethan offered me the role, and I was amused because he had never seen me roleplay but had nonetheless picked a character practically custom-designed for me, quirky and offbeat and off in a world/plot of its own. (In fact, I had played a cat once before, in a high-school game, though only briefly.)
It was a lot of fun. I completely neglected to engage in certain cat-like behaviors (I had planned to do at least one "I meant to do that!" moment, but forgot, and Ethan gave me a catnip mouse to bat around but I forgot about that as well), but I did other stuff. I had a stuffed cat to place wherever the real cat would be; I occasionally twined it through people's legs while they were trying to walk, and got to hide it in various places so I could listen in on people without their knowing it. I had three primary means of communication: the meow, the hiss, and the purr. I spent a lot of time running away from the captain's wife, who I decided was Evil because she kept trying to grab me and lock me up—seems to me that's probably one of the primary axes on which cats make moral judgments. Allows me freedom, gives me fish, pets me nicely: Good (or at least tolerable). Tries to grab me, pets me roughly, tries to lock me up: Evil.
After a couple of accidental miscommunications and misunderstandings, I decided to play the cat as pretty much entirely amoral. (I know there may be disagreement about that term's definition. In this context, I mean "not bound by any human moral system" and "working toward neither human notions of Good nor human notions of Evil.") This paid off late in the game when I betrayed one of the characters who'd trusted me most, for my own selfish purposes. Fun!
I also accidentally almost helped bring about the destruction of the ship, fairly early on; later, more intentionally, I helped save the ship, helped save the entire Earth, and almost helped destroy the entire Earth. All in a day's work for the ship's cat.
Rob used to say he liked giving my characters ultimate power because he knew that, due to some minor quirk or personality flaw, they would never use it.