The Bathhouse
A downloadable Larp
This is a game about gods, queerness, the power of shared myths, and the intimacy of bathing together.
A group of old friends take a trip to a bathhouse together, to reminisce and share stories. In the intimate sanctuary of the bathhouse, as protective layers and long held feelings are stripped and encrusted dirt is washed away, who will they become? Will the gods awaken?
This is a 3 hr LARP for 4 or 6 players designed to be played online in the comfort and safety of your own home. Players take a bath together in the middle; this section is played as an audio only experience, which can be surprisingly intimate and immersive and allows you to lean back and wallow in your bath. It is also possible to simulate the bathing experience with a warm blanket if you don't have a bathtub.
Winner of the Southern Way 2020 Awards for 'Out of the Box' game
Honourable mention in the 2020 Golden Cobra Awards: http://www.goldencobra.org/2020winners.html
Photo by Cloris Ying on Unsplash
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I have unfortunately not played this LARP, but I found it incredibly impactful when designing the game that my friend and I submitted to the Golden Cobras this year. It's a game about intimacy that was released in 2020 when intimacy was so hard to come by. To play, you take on one of the 6 roles from the game (a combination of one member of a group of friends and the god they used to pretend to be as part of a game) and go take a bath together. Well not together together. See, you're all playing on a voice/video chat and taking a bath separately, but you're pretending that you're unpacking your past while bathing together in the titular bathhouse.
The fantasy that this game sells to me is being the kind of person who would go to a bathhouse with their friends. As a USian (derogatory), I was not brought up in a culture that sees that as a particularly normal thing, and I wish that weren't the case. There is something really titillating and almost taboo about the idea of taking a bath 'with' someone, like the mediating element of the voicechat gives it a particular thrill. Games like this that explore new ways of being with other people, whether in person or not, are extremely my shit and I'm always looking for things that play with my expectations of what's possible.
Unfortunately, as someone who hasn't played many LARPs, I do think I would have some difficulty with this. The prompts given for what to talk about with the other players, while poetic, don't give much direction for how to actually spend the 1.5 hours or so of the meat of gameplay. More experienced LARPers probably wouldn't have too much of a problem here, but I have a hard time imagining exactly what is supposed to happen in each section. That said, the game works almost exclusively on the level of having you take a bath with friends via voicechat. I don't think it needs much else.