You never hear about the good things

You never hear about how good the toilets are at the Lorien Trust.

You never hear about how they lay standpipes across the field so that everyone can have access easily to clean water.

You never hear about the time that Sparky Dave at Empire dropped everything to find firewood from the crew area to warm someone who was suffering from hypothermia.

You never hear about how DWM keeps the Freddos flowing in the crew hut at Profound Decision events and is always on hand to make someone a warm drink and listen to their problems.

You never hear about that time when the crew at Curious Pastimes got an ambulance on the field to deal with an epileptic player without disrupting the game outside the immediate area.

You never hear about when the entire player base at Odyssey ran towards the Story tent at 3.30pm on Sunday after time out in order to hold it down and stop thousands of pounds of canvas being wrecked.

You never hear about the time when the Empire Plot team made butterflies for children to catch in an encounter tent. About how that absolutely made their summer.

You never hear about how people learned skills at LARP that helped them in their careers or personal lives.

You never hear about how the red caps stood in mud deeper than their wellies at Tournament Stud directing traffic on and off the field. And you’ll never hear about how a team of drivers and red caps piled players wet and muddy kit into trailers for six hours straight, before being able to sit down to have dinner.

You never hear about the time that a brand new small event made a completely new LARPer with no friends at the event feel so welcome that they’re going to come back again.

You never hear about that time that HQ at Profound Decisions took my concerns about sexual harassment entirely seriously. When I was treated with respect and dignity. And you never hear about the time when the same thing happened to one of my friends.

So you never hear about all these times when things in the LARP community just went right. And as a community, we get an awful lot right. Sometimes we get things wrong too, and those things should be discussed and a way to get it right found for next time. Sometimes you can’t make things right though, but that’s not always a problem. No community is perfect. No game is perfect. But as a community, we generally seem to do alright. We’re better than an awful lot of the outside world. We’ll never be perfect.