The tragic passing of Pope Francis combined with the recent movie Conclave has turned minds to the notion of a Papal conclave larp. Think of the clothes! The pageantry! The intrigue! The voting! A Papal conclave larp is such a good idea, in fact, that it’s already been done many times.
Willow Palecek’s Conclave is set during the historical events of 1268, when the election took nearly three years and the Cardinals were only able to resolve their bitter divisions when threatened by starvation. Players receive a pamphlet detailing their characters’ positions on issues like the Crusades and poverty, and have to decide which beliefs to stick with and which to compromise. If they don’t reach a two-thirds majority, there’s a Papal Schism and Christendom is divided in half. Apparently things can get intense.
But the most impressive and rigorous conclave larp must be Ada Palmer’s annual event at the University of Chicago. For three weeks, 45 students are transported to the Papal Election of 1492 and engage in complex politicking that extends to royal marriage alliances, naval manoeuvres, and outright war (Palmer has also run compressed three-day versions for the public). The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel provides a suitably olde-tyme background, while numerous NPCs add depth to the simulation. The point is to explore how much individuals can make a difference in history:
Do people determine the course of events, or are we locked in by structures of wealth and power? The papal election simulation helps students see how both these models can be simultaneously true: political, social, and economic networks can guarantee some kind of crisis, and yet individual actions do shape those forces, resulting in the particular crisis that comes. Having a chance to personally take part in shaping such a crisis makes it easier to understand the dynamism of the three-dimensional political world of a past era, and our own.
While it’s possible to imagine an online conclave RPG, the embodied nature of larps allows sensations like exhaustion and hunger – though hopefully not starvation – to register, a reminder that politics is not merely a mental exercise in power. Players can feel overawed by their monarch’s magnificent costume and threatened by their guards; they can look for tells that someone is lying or that their mind can be swayed.
Historical re-enactment for educational and academic purposes is not new. Mike Pohjola has described how anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner and theatre director Richard Schechner collaborated on “performative anthropology” in the 70 and 80s, aiming to simulate life in a Ndembu village, a Btantu ethnic group in Zambia with whom the Turners had lived for 15 months. This was, of course, problematic in many ways, but led to subsequent “enacted social dramas”, including a contemporary Virginian wedding run by Pamela Frese, one of the Turner’s graduate students, in 1981, and many more since then. These are not larps in the strictest sense, but they’re not not larps either.
In recent years, interest in role play has been eroding historians’ long-standing skepticism towards re-enactment and larp, partly because larps can be more engaging than lectures and documentaries, but also because of the “affective turn” in the humanities from the mid-1990s, where scholars became more interested in emotion, passion, and embodied experience.
In 2022, historian Jenni Lares ran Talvikäräjät, a two-day larp depicting a 17th century Finnish court of justice, based on actual court records. 35 players from a fictional village dealt with cases like a priest accused of being drunk during a sermon, or a wealthy farmer drunkenly agreeing to swap properties with a new settler, or a fatal tavern fight between soldiers:
Following modern-day historical research, Talvikäräjät highlighted the role of reputation, community, and wealth in early modern society. We managed to create a multivocal community with various needs and hopes, some of which were met in various manners. Some of the accused escaped a sentence with the help of powerful friends and their own status in the community, and although some received blows to their reputation, it did not affect their position. Economic inequality became an important theme, since some characters could pay their fines or get somebody else to pay them, while others had no choice but to receive corporal punishment.
There is risk in larp trivialising history, or providing a mirror rather than a lens. But it can also illustrate the intricacies of power and prejudice and money in ways that books and lectures can struggle with.
Crucially, they can also be fun! Whomst among us would not want to vape in the vestments of a Cardinal?
mssv 