Long Story

Time for a Long Story! This one is as long and deep as the history of the Earth. Join a multi-species cast on a journey into the future in search of better pastures. Travel hundreds, thousands, and millions of years to explore a changing, restless world: hot and swampy one era, cool and arid the next. What will you and your companions make of this shifting, fluctuating landscape? How will you adapt to its changes, and most importantly, will you find what you are looking for? 

This LARP is about imagining the future at different intervals in time. To reach these intervals, we will be using a time machine to jump ahead in time. From 5 years into the future to 50, to 500, to 5000, to 50.000, up to 5.000.000.000 (billion) years from now. Also, we will not be playing ourselves. We are playing a stakeholder species. Your mission is to represent this species, and to scout ahead to try and find an interval that suits them, where they can flourish. If you find a time you like, you may choose to get out of the time machine to stay behind while the others continue ahead. This process is called fossilization and it should be every player’s goal. Once all players have fossilized, the game ends

This booklet includes everything you need to play Long Story: a deep time LARP, as well as an introduction to the research project from which it spawned. It was written by Laura op de Beke with lots of help from collaborators, and funded by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, 2022.  

A hypertext based of this game is available here: https://lodbeke.itch.io/long-story-short