Why Mission Together?

‘Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information’. Paulo Freire.

For us, larp is a tool to change minds, to change the world and to learn about ourselves and the world we live in. Our vision of larping is something we call «larptivism». This means every larp we design has a political component – to speak, in a fictional context, about the oppressions and injustices we fight in the real world. Many of us are activists that also fight in the streets, with NGOs or at demonstrations. Some of us work to change laws in the countries we live in.

When we started to think about this project, our take was to have the opportunity to address complicated themes in a sci-fi environment. War, racism and colonialism are subjects that affect many people on our Earth. It is difficult to tell a story about the real oppressions happening in our actual lives every day in a respectful or truthful way through a larp. This is why we chose to use science fiction instead, and create our own world which has some of these real oppressions, but not all. We are going to explore racism through our fictional world’s races: Rheans, Keplians and Deimians, people who must work together for the first time since war decimated their populations. In order to explore colonialism, we chose a new planet that they must take resources from. Through this fiction, we hope to be able to explore these difficult themes in a unique way. 

We have also asked Jonaya Kemper to join us as a consultant, because she is a specialist in racism, larp and systemic oppression.

While we acknowledge that many different mechanisms of oppression exist alongside racism, war and colonialism, we are choosing not to play on sexism, body policing, sexual violence, and LGBTQphobia. We’ve had many discussions amongst the team, and feel that dealing with war, racism, and colonialism are heavy to play on their own. We have chosen to steer away from related oppressions like sexual violence, though we fully acknowledge their role in colonialism.

While we would hope that you engage and think about our themes, depending on your personal take on the larp, you can decide to simply play a sci-fi larp experience with pilot and military training, politics, science, living an adventure and being another person for a limited amount of time. Like our other events with political content we’ve designed, such as Conscience, Blue Flame, Silver Lining and others, players choose what they live, because players own the experience they want to live. 

However, we would like to invite you to think about these topics and themes, and allow Mission Together to be more than just a fun larping experience for you, as we firmly believe that in our time and day, only action will change the world.

Espe Montero. Mission Together Coordinator.