If there was something absurd about being woken up in my berth on the Lord Amory at 7am to the opening bars of Yazoo’s “Only You,” then that was only fitting. After all, the myth of Sisyphus has often been interpreted as an allegory for the absurdity of life’s continual struggles in the face of certain death, and I was role-playing as a civil servant stuck in a time loop on a research vessel named after that Greek figure.
The Sisyphus is a science fiction thriller larp, produced by Carcosa Dreams. I was incredibly lucky to take part in the final run over the weekend of 26th-28th January 2024 (which is why I’m able to discuss plot details explicitly). I’d previously only done a few hours of monstering and a handful of chamber larps at The Smoke, so I really was jumping into the deep end with a fully immersive weekend larp. On an actual boat.
Acceptable in the 80s
I signed up late and so got assigned my character, “cold fish” civil servant Parker, without a casting questionnaire. Browsing eBay for power suits, it struck me how setting a larp in the recent past presents a really interesting challenge from a world building and props point of view. Just like your typical fantasy setting, the 1980s has its own tropes and mythology that has been passed down and reproduced in cultural products. However, unlike a fictional setting, you can actually acquire material culture from the 80s. Given my character was primarily driven by a desire to track down Ministry of Defence budget embezzlement, I opted for a gloriously chunky calculator. I can’t help but read archaeology into everything; having an actual “artefact” from the time felt like a talisman for my character and I ended up clutching it to my chest like a treasured pet.
Uncivil Service
Speaking of props, Lambert, the Conservative Minister for the Navy, had lots of them. A whole briefcase in fact, including constituents’ letters. To put this in context: I was one member of the MoD, which collaborated with the research team New World Industries on refitting Sisyphus with cutting edge stealth tech. A whole ragtag team of scientists, press and crew were aboard for the first proper demonstration of this technology, against the backdrop of the Able Archer NATO wargame of 1983. Playing an administrative assistant who prided themself on being politically neutral was probably one of the most challenging aspects of the game for me (let’s just say I grew up hearing the retort “Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher” being chanted with gleeful hatred by my mother). In any case, it was hard not to be amused when the Minister’s briefcase was almost immediately stolen by other players.
Out of the loop
We all came aboard the Sisyphus, and the game officially timed in, at around 10pm on Friday 26th. We awkwardly mingled at a buffet, trying to understand why the head of NWI, Professor Lanchester, hadn’t turned up yet. Finally at midnight we were shown into the red-lit bowels of the boat to discover where all that extra MoD money had gone…
Imagine my delight when Lanchester presented Lilith, an AI housed in a big black box. We were informed that not only was Lilith an incredible feat of science, but she was also monitoring our every move on the ship. We would be awoken at 7am the next day, and the first test of the Sisyphus would be conducted at 10am.
So now we’ve looped back around to where I started this piece- it’s 7am and I’m sleep deprived and trying to figure out who I should talk to at breakfast. I drink several cups of coffee, I go down to look at unblinking eye of Lilith, 10am comes.
And that’s when the game really began.
For the rest of the larp, we were trapped in time loops of 3 hours- between 7am and 10am. However, not only were these temporal loops, but also “jumps” to a parallel reality in which some characters had memories of a different life. The environmental storytelling that accompanied each jump was one of my favourite parts of the larp – we set sail with a portrait of Thatcher on the wall, but this got changed out each time to reflect the new parallel reality. Michael Foot, the Kray Twins and Stalin all made an appearance. What’s more, all the ship clocks got changed back to 7am each time, and with no access to mobile phones in the 1980s, this really led to a feeling of complete disorientation. Other players even started to change their analogue watches to the boat “time zone” to try and keep track.
Another detail I loved was that with each jump a new newspaper front page would be distributed in the mess hall. This led to people congregating around them, trying to figure out what fresh hell we had all sailed into. It was a fantastic way to diegetically convey information, allowing people to react at their own pace.
“Numbers always win”
One of the main drivers of the larp was situational discovery: we needed to find codes and keys in order to access hidden parts of Lilith and the boat. Another player told me that this was the most “escape room” larp that they’d ever experienced. One regret I have is that I didn’t engage more with the puzzle-solving process, but at various points over the game I would wander into the mess hall and see people listening to music boxes, playing with cipher wheels and even building a robot arm (yes, really!)
Aside from code-breaking, Sisyphus is more concerned with political intrigue and ethical dilemmas than combat, but that didn’t stop me from getting involved in some rather tense situations. In the aforementioned Kray Twins reality, I transformed from cold fish “Invigilator” Parker to cold killer “Inquisitor” Parker, who had memories of working with the mob and wanted to make a public example of the embezzler. I decided to steal a giant foam wrench and, with the help of Debrett (Undersecretary of State for the Navy) attempt to break poor Dr Thesinger’s fingers with it. A key principle of conflict resolution is that “numbers always win,” so in the end I was overpowered by First Mate Daniels and other crew members. Probably for the best.
“Incomplete data”
My PhD research is on archaeological approaches to procedural content generation in games. I’ve only larped a handful of times, but I’ve long been interested in potentially experimenting with PCG and interactive theatre, so when I discovered an AI was going to be a key NPC in Sisyphus I was very excited. In this case, the AI was actually a person in a box (as it turns out, both diegetically and non-diegetically), which is interesting on a meta level given historically there has been an AI hoax that really did involve someone hiding in a box. I loved how Lilith would frequently go quiet to “run diagnostics,” and as players we would have no idea when she would come back online again, so time with her felt precious. I spent a lot of time in the room with Lilith just so I could watch how other players interacted with her; one person read her the Tao of Pooh, others delved into their back stories to make appeals for the emotional complexity of the human experience.
Sisyphus first ran in 2018, so Carcosa Dreams were prescient in making AI ethics a central pillar of the experience given the contemporary whirlwind around the subject. The phrase “incomplete data” kept coming up in discussions with Lilith, like a song on repeat. She had to make several impossible decisions from “incomplete data” regarding the ultimate fate of a parasitic life form (literal brain worms) and a Russian boat tailing us through the metaverse. The central conceit of Lilith gaining more experience through time loops was also a clever nod to the iterative cycles of both machine and human learning. She was essentially a child being raised by a very strange found family.
Only You
Now over a week since I boarded the Sisyphus, I still wonder about the ultimate fate of its crew. Perhaps I can take comfort in Camus’ concluding thoughts on the Greek myth:
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Florence Smith Nicholls 