Children at preschool play with their stuffed animal companions as a way to work through normal troubles in their lives. This is a physical play experience, where players literally enact childsplay. When hardship comes and fears threaten to overwhelm, who supports who and how?
Long Description
Children at preschool play with their stuffed animal companions as a way to work through normal troubles in their lives. This is a physical play experience, where players literally enact childsplay. How does the child’s inner life come through make-believe play with their stuffie? When hardship comes and fears threaten to overwhelm, who supports who and how? Leave this game feeling a little more grown-up and a little more connected to childlike parts of yourself.
Story
Every character has a very common childhood anxiety or issue from their homelife outside of preschool which nevertheless affects how they experience school. Over the course of 3 days at preschool you'll escalate and surface your character's issue. Your issues will be at their most intense on the last day when a scary thunderstorm causes the power to go out temporarily. Throughout the story there are many opportunities for children to offer and receive care from stuffies, and from each other. Cause and effect or a singular plot coherence is less important than the emotions characters feel at any given moment. This is a feel-better larp experience, where many characters will come to a point of resolution about their issue, as supported by the stuffed animal and other children.
Between the days of school, players participate in a guided meditation to imagine what happens at home that raises the stakes on their story for the next day. At the end of the last day the children decide what to do with their stuffed animals as they leave the preschool: keep the stuffie for big kid school, return them to their home in make-believe, or pass them on to another child who needs their support.
Play Style
Each player portrays both a child and their stuffed animal. Players will be guided through opportunities to puppet their stuffie silently, make sounds as their stuffie, speak as their stuffie to other stuffies without the child present, and to speak to their stuffie as the child. Generally, children don’t speak to each other directly and instead use stuffies as intermediaries.
You might like this game if:
- You want to experience a childlike state of mind, with a chance to express tender care
- You want to play with stuffed animals
- You are a fan of Calvin and Hobbes or Winnie the Pooh
Accessibility
Play can be as athletic or gentle as an individual player desires. Not every child nor every stuffie likes to get dirty, play on the floor, or be rough.
Costuming
No costuming needed. If you want to wear something that makes you feel like an imaginative preschooler, go right ahead. Please bring 1 or 2 stuffed animals to contribute for others to use. To reduce bleed-in you won't play directly with your personal stuffies.
Origin
This scenario was created for Make a Scene 2023, North America's premeire scenario festival.
Image Credits
Photos by Mattea Steeke and Janosch Lino
run at 09:00 AM
GMs:run at 10:00 AM
Players: