The Girl On The Phone was the phone larp I always wanted to write.
The Girl On The Phone was the reason I invented phone larps. As soon as I started thinking of phone larps, I started thinking of this: a woman*, kidnapped, in an unfamiliar city. She’s calling you, desperately, on a cellphone. The cellphone was a Nokia 3310; I knew the model because they’re called the “cockroach of cellphones.” They do talk and text, nothing else, but they never, ever break. They could probably survive the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs; I figured they could survive being stashed behind a toilet for an indefinite period of time.
Next: a setting. We need a setting where people are kidnapped a lot. Time to Google kidnapping statistics. First hit: Mexico. First thought: US/Mexico relations are not at the point where I want to do a story about a Mexican kidnapping. Second hit: Venezuela. Fantastic! Americans have way fewer opinions about Venezuela, especially Caracas, than they do about Mexico.
I spend far too much time trying to decide whether the kidnappee is a native or a tourist. In the middle of this mulling she’s given a name — Irene Mata, because it doesn’t sound stereotypically Anglo or Hispanic but is on both the US and Venezuelan name lists. In the end I make the obvious decision to make Irene a tourist: it provides an obvious motive for kidnappers, it lets her not be familiar with the locale, and lets her not speak Spanish, which is good, because then we can add an encounter where the player has to translate Spanish to help out Irene.
Okay, cool, Irene is a tourist. An American tourist, because I am an American and can write Americans. But why is an American tourist hanging around in Venezuela, a country from which the U.S. removed all its diplomats in 2019? Maybe she has a close relative there — a grandmother — named Claudia Mata, because again I can’t decide if she’s Hispanic or Anglo.
Now it’s time to do the research.
www.InterNations.com promises me access to the largest English-speaking expatriate community in Caracas. I join their boards and lurk a lot like a creeper and try to get a sense of how expatriates in Venezuela live, what neighborhoods they live in, where in the city they’d never go, what they do for fun. I get sketches of Altamira and Catia, the two neighborhoods where I’m setting the larp. I try to soak up expatriate gossip, to do Irene and Claudia justice.
And then I turn away, and drink a lot of coffee, and try to decide what people are doing in the larp.
I want my players to be solving puzzles to help Irene get out. Except not puzzle-puzzles. I hate most puzzles because they make no sense in the narrative. Why when you go into an escape room that’s supposed to be, say, a submarine has the owner of the submarine secured everything with numbered padlocks and then stocked the sub with brainteasers that let you figure out the numbers? This is never explained. So rule #1: all puzzles must be subordinate to storyline. They’re “puzzles” that real people might solve in the course of a real-world scenario.
Enter the internet.
Irene has talk and text but no connection to the World Wide Web; she needs someone with Google to help get her out of trouble. Ideally the “puzzles” wouldn’t even be things we suggested: when Irene doesn’t know where she is but needs to get back to her grandmother’s house, it’s time to quiz her on local landmarks, plug those into Maps and plot a safe route. Need to speak Spanish? Time for Google Translate. This should be pretty easy.
This larp shouldn’t be easy. This larp should be thrilling, and ugly, and tense.
Psssst. Let’s ratchet up the tension.
How?
First, the kidnappers. They’ll discover Irene is missing. They’ll search for her. But natively, that’s Irene’s problem. We want the player to feel like the hero, though: we want the player to be tense. We want Irene’s problems to be the player’s problems, so the players’ decisions make the difference between life and death for Irene.
How?
We need to remove agency from Irene (yup, remove agency from the damsel in distress). So okay, Irene’s panicking. She’s panicking a lot. She’s used up most of her nerve just busting out of the cell the kidnappers were keeping her in, and now that she’s on the run, she’s started falling apart. And she’s asking you to make her decisions. Right or left? Up or down? Run past the guard or take off her shoes and try to sneak past?
Better get it right!
(Spoiler: There is no right. As long as you’re earnestly trying to get Irene out and not panicking or throwing the towel yourself, Irene will stay safe. This is an illusion — escapism — it doesn’t have to be hard, it just has to feel hard. You’re supposed to end the game feeling like a hero, not like a failure who got a girl killed by trying to sneak when she should have run.)
But we don’t want this experience to just be a thriller-puzzle; we want it to have heart. And that’s where Irene shines. Irene’s panic means the player can calm her down — comfort her — to make her escape more effective.
But Irene’s also a person. She may be panicky, but it’s hard to feel like a hero if you may as well have rescued a doll. So Irene needs charisma. Even in her panic she’s sharp and funny and nervy. She needs comfort, but she’ll take comfort, and when she’s alright, she’ll make conversation.
The game needs that, because the larp shouldn’t end with “Irene’s gotten to safety, now we can hang up the phone.” The player needs to decompress after taking Irene through dangerous streets.
***
*Why a woman? Only ugly reasons. People like rescuing damsels in distress and I’m a crowd-pleaser.
The Girl On The Phone, $48, 75 minutes, https://www.mirrorworldcreations.com/bookings-checkout/the-girl-on-the-phone-2
