After an interesting encounter between Karl, hackers & designers member user of chattypub, and Florence, researcher in poetry and fan-litterature, an idea appeared: what if a group chat could be a LARP session. then CSS can become a theater for performances.

What is LARP?

LARP stands for live-action roleplay. Like Dungeons & Dragons, it involves taking on the role of a fictional character and navigating a story run by a game-master (GM). Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, you physically embody your character rather than narrating their actions out loud. It's immersive, collaborative storytelling - with lots of spontaneity and unexpected twists!

There are many different LARP traditions, but the one we're going to focus on is parlour LARP: indoors, no foam weapons, just walking around and talking in a smallish group of people.

What is Chatty-Pub?

Chatty Pub is a design tool built by Hackers and Designers. It uses the Zulip chat interface, a messaging system similar to Discord or Slack. Chatty Pub allows you to write CSS styles in a special channel (#rules), and then apply those styles to different messages by 'reacting' with emojis. Each emoji has its own bit of code attached to it.

More details on Chatty Pub can be found on www.hackersanddesigners.nl/chattypub

Bringing the two together

On Thursday 4th April 2024, we ran a LARP with eight players and one GM to test out the storytelling potential of Chatty Pub.

The premise of the LARP was a digital seance. There had been a vicious murder - but the evidence was inconclusive enough that the detective called in a psychic. The Ghost of the deceased was summoned into the chatroom, where it could only communicate by applying CSS code to other players' messages. No one else could use CSS code.

Each player had a special role. The identities of the Ghost, the Detective, and the Psychic were known to everybody. The remaining five players - all of whom were suspects - each had their own relationship to the murder. We did some collaborative world-building to establish the details of the murder, then got straight into it.

Ultimately, although the Psychic correctly determined the identity of the Killer, enough doubt was created that justice was not served!

Reflections

While the LARP went well overall, we had a lot of thoughts on how it might be improved. Allowing some CSS code to be prepared beforehand might help the Ghost engage in roleplay more; we would love to try a version with only messaging and no verbal communication around it.

Protocols like such felt a good entry point to explore the performativity of the CSS language further. Could it become a theater piece? A video game to play with long-distances friends? Can the writting of CSS go into the world of electronic litterature?