Together At Last

I got to play Together At Last in the Netherlands, and I’m happy that I did!

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Together At Last is set in a near-future world where extreme social distancing has been the norm for more than four decades. However, a major research breakthrough has recently occured: a once-per-lifetime jab allowing you to safely meet other people in person for a limited period of time. The Department of Marriage has decided to use this technology to enhance the government-run romantic matching programme, for the first time enabling its participants to actually meet in the flesh their computer-assigned romantic partners.

During this programme you will receive this jab and enter a sterilised, domed facility together with a cohort of other bachelors and bachelorettes. There, a machine learning algorithm will set up a sequence of romantic relationships for you, of various durations and with a diverse selection of partners. This will give your cortical implant enough data about your personality and preferences — sometimes things that even you don’t know about yourself — to enable the system to find your Forever Match, who will then become your permanent life companion. With a 99.5% success rate, the Together At Last programme is your best and only chance at true marital bliss.

I played in the very first digital Together At Last during the pandemic – it has been rerun 12 times by now. I didn’t play in any of the reruns, and I initially I wasn’t very excited about replaying it in real life, but the location was only three hours away by train, and at Reflections, fellow Karolina fanclub member Dennis gave me a big pitch on why I should join (Thank you, Dennis!). So I signed up as a last-minute and inherited a written and linked-up character.

My character

My character was a cute enby with a terminal disease. The character seemed very much inspired by The Fault in Our Stars. (Character Sheet here)

I could decide the exact nature of my illness myself, and I went with a genetic syndrome that affected my arteries. It didn’t give me a lot of external signs of illness, but meant that there would be symptoms if my heart rate would get too high, and there was always an imminent threat of death or complications.

I was quite happy with that character. It was not something I would ever decide to play by myself, and yet it seemed really fun to play. I enjoy getting that outside inspiration. Plus, the character was filled with juicy drama hooks. It was not super relevant for the character, but this was definitely the song going through my head when I read it.

The game gives you a tightly linked web of characters that you play about 90% of the game with. You get to know the other characters a bit in passing, but in essence all of your play happens in your own story bubble.

My cast of characters

• Steven Thorn – My loving brother, a psychologist, who has been supporting me and paying for my experimental treatments since our parents passed away. 
• Luna Caspar –  A celebrity client of my brother. She had a crush, sent him some nudes, and he’s been extorting her with it ever since to pay for my medical bills – Damn, bro!
• Beara Polaris  – My good friend, the VR designer, a lovely person!
• Harlin Callister – The vulture capitalist that dismantled my parents’ business, leading to their financial ruin and indirectly to their deaths (which may have been preventable with better treatments). Our family blames him for everything. He’s also been liking really mean memes about it on the financial socials

• Verity Callister – Harlin’s lovely sister who is a doctor and runs a VR pet shelter.
• Tristan Everly – A traditional family man that I went on a trial date with before the program
• Asher Couper – A jetset cook who has taken over his parents catering business. We dated online for a few months and had lots of fun, and then I ghosted him because I didn’t want to tell him about my condition. Damn, River!

These wonderful characters are all played by players I don’t know, with the exception of Harlin and Verity Callister, who are played by Volker and Julia. Volker also played my dad in Reflections! The design encouraged us to calibrate beforehand, so I checked in with all of my core cast through discord/fb.

Before we time in, we have to get fitted into the Hazmat suits that will allow our character to travel. It’s a lot of work for about 30 minutes of play, but it really sets the scene of the game.

THE STORY

We time in, standing outside and wearing Hazmat suits, while listening to Morissey. We are asked to walk out into the yard and come back with our family or alone. My brother moved out a while ago, so I walk in by myself. I take a moment in the yard to consciously deliver my life and my trust to the Algorithm that will deliver me to my Forever Match. 

I sit in the waiting room in my hazmat suit, holding my ticket. I talk to Rae, the lady next to me, and we compare how nervous we are vs how excited we are, and pretty soon we are telling each other our entire life’s stories.

It’s quite exciting to meet a stranger! I’m not too scared of being in the suit. Sure, one tear could kill me, but I’ve been outside to go to hospital treatments multiple times by now. I wrestle a new day out of the hands of death every day, I can handle a hazmat suit situation. Being surrounded by forty other people in Hazmat suits, however, that’s new.

Technicians help us undress – and then my brother is here and I can hug him! This is wonderful. I haven’t seen him since he left the house four years ago. I was supposed to be safe with my parents, but then they died shortly after each other. I had to push them out of the airlock myself for burial. Life was pretty tough and it’s the first thing we talk about. There’s nothing I can say that will stop him feeling guilty about that.

We are shuffled into support groups, my best friend Beara is in my group! We have a fun time chatting with real people around a real table. We are finally chilling out a little bit when the intercom starts announcing the matches and the mood suddenly gets super tense. There’s a little break between match announcements so you can say one or two sentences, but then you have to be quiet again. It’s a slow delivery of the sword of Damocles while you desperately try to have faith in the Algorithm.

MATCH #1

River Thorn is matched with Harlin Callister.

Well fuck. I loudly complain to my group and call over Helpbot while Harlin joins me.

River: “I need to be reassigned! I demand a rematch!” 
Helpbot: “I’m afraid that won’t be possible”.
River: “Will inflicting bodily harm mess up my algorithm?”
Helpbot: “It would. Non-permanent body harm, however, is permitted”.
River: “Good”.

I throw my glass of water in his face. God, that’s a satisfying feeling. Harlin takes it in style and asks Helpbot for a towel. We are asked to sit down and calibrate together.

[The design of the game asks you to always do the starting calibration and engage with your match, no matter how much you hate them, fear them, or want to run away. Being apart is boring drama. Being stuck together? That’s where the juicy stuff is.

We’re also asked to always have some kind of latent attraction – be it sexual or romantic or both. In this case, we established a strong aesthetic and sexual attraction. “I hate you and your stupidly attractive face” kind of situation]

For the calibration we have to mirror each other’s movements and gaze into each other’s eyes. I mouth “I. hate. you” while the computer voice is instructing me to find the beauty in this person. Fuck you program, I’m not going to date this highly attractive devil! 

The dinner is good, the conversation is acidic. I explain that we have his face on our dartboard back home. He tries to lighten the conversation by way of the conversation cards: “Where do you see yourself in 2 to 5 years?”. Sure, pick the most painful question! I throw the stack of cards in his face. “I know where I will see myself at the end of the program. Happily matched, while you will slink off alone, because no one could ever love you. I wonder if I can help the algorithm get the ending you deserve”. 

He asks for more pasta, and Helpbot says that a new batch will come in soon. “I have too much, do you want mine?” I say, holding out my plate. “Sure”, he says and moves to take it. I spit in my food, hand it to him and smile. He stops in his tracks, looks at me, and starts eating. Interesting.

Rich playboy Lux Calloway comes to tell everyone: “It’s raining, does anyone want to experience rain?”. Holy shit, real rain? I forget all about my hatred and rush outside along with everyone else. We stand in the rain and feel the tiniest drops on our faces. My friend Beara and her date Zaiden Leone join us, but I instantly start bad-mouthing Harlin to them and they find an excuse to leave really fast.

In fact, everyone’s gone. We’re standing here by ourselves in the rain.

River: “If I bad-mouth you to everyone here, will that fuck up the algorithm, you think?”
Harlin: “I don’t think anything will. The algorithm will give everyone the best match, and assuming the other person doesn’t reject the match with me, I will be good”.
River (eyes wide): …reject the match with you… That’s it!
Harlin: What?
River: All I need to do is to convince the algorithm that I’m your best match. Then I can send you packing like you deserve.
Harlin: … the algorithm could never be fooled like that..
River: Oh, you have no idea how convincing I can be.

[My pre-game calibration wish for this match was: “For our first date, I like the idea of River causing a lot of conflict at the start, and Harlin having to deal with the problem somehow. I’d love to do a bunch of Lobster-style suppressing your hate to look like a good couple. And of course the horror of being attracted anyway. Volker had said “Love it, I can totally do that!” and I knew I could trust him to come up with something to make it work. He danced me to this weird ass ploy and I was happy to pounce on it] 

We run into Helpbot and quiz it about what kind of things would raise our compatibility score. Hand-holding, kissing, sex, passion, doing stuff together, even passionate fights. “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”, Helpbot reminds us. Well, there’s our to-do list. Helpbot hands us our Relationship Compatibility form. We fill it in, while Harlin is still reeling from the 180°. We discuss our chore division, our wishes for children, how often we’d like to have sex (“Multiple times a day, right, honey?”), what kinks we would like to indulge in (“I think we will be quite primal”), and what our living room should look like.

I feel quite good with this double layered sarcastic affection and it’s kind of sexy. Lux comes to give us chocolate that we have to feed each other. We do, in perfect sexiness, and kiss. We join the sex education workshop, given by Harlin’s favorite sex worker. Cucumbers with condoms and ropes are passed around as we make out publicly (good for the score!) and argue about who would get to tie who up. One guy interrupts the Sex Ed class to ask about “What about Family Duties?”. People laugh about this really old fashioned concept.

[I will talk about kissing as a design choice after the session report]

After the workshop, we head to one of the in-game bedrooms to maximise our score. We have passionate sex. I slap him in the face in the middle of it, he chokes me, we get our tension worked out. At some point, I look in his eyes and I… I don’t know, I feel something that’s not passion or hatred and it freaks me out. I start hyperventilating and my blood pressure starts to rise and I’m starting to feel faint… and then he grabs me and helps me calm down and regulate my breathing and his face looks caring…

NO. I will NOT accept this from HIM. FUCK THIS SHIT.

I storm out of the room and collapse in a nearby corridor, panting. 

[Where a nice person comes to check if I’m okay OOC, I make the OK sign and they move along]

A few minutes later, he joins me in the corner. “You left your medication”, he says. “And your epipen. Smart to make it look like a lipstick”. I tell him what it was like, after the company perished. What it was like to have my parents die, one by one. It was like being alone in the house after. How they probably could have gotten better medical care for themselves, if my own sickness hadn’t been monopolising the bills. He tells some things of his own life, of what it was like growing up. I lean up against him, exhausted.

The rest of the evening we spent on the couch, cuddled up and exchanging barbs in a much more subdued fashion. “Did you lie to my parents?” I ask him. “I suppose I did,” he says. “I didn’t tell them the loan was bad idea, that they should have restructured and drastically reduced their operations to save it. Omission is a kind of lying, isn’t it?”. Yeah, I guess so. But I’m still not going to tell him I’m dying.

The next morning, he says he has unliked the memes that make fun of my parents’ company. No apologies, or anything. Just an unlike. I am not impressed. We are armoured up again, and breakfast is quite chill. We are relieved to say goodbye.

Match #2

Once again, we are seated with our support groups. We share our stories, and wait for the new matches to be called. 

[The first match only lasts for one night, but the second match lasts seven days in-game, which is sped up through several months thanks to the implant, and we play it in about 12 hours. Phew!]

River Thorn is matched with Tristan Everly

That’s the family duties guy! We had a trial date before the programme, and it was pretty pleasant. He was traditional to be sure, but a good guy and very attentive. After the calibration, the first thing he says is that he wants four children. Whoo boy. Hope you’re happy to raise them yourself, my new friend. I tell him I like music, and he asks if I want to go outside and listen to the birds. OH HELL YES I DO!

It’s an entire concert out there, and we can even see one of the birds that’s making the sounds! It’s pretty magical. He introduces me to his cousin, Ryka Everly and I get to know a bit about their family drama’s. Ryka is not conservative at all, and it’s cool to see that they get along so well. We get along a bit awkwardly, a bit stiffly, but all that changes during the laughter yoga.

The class is fine, but it’s a lot of bending down and getting up again and my blood pressure gets too high and I start to feel faint. Tristan goes full caretaker mode, gets me water and escorts me out of the class. We sit somewhere and he pulls me onto his lap. I share a bit more about my disease and what’s wrong, though not quite the worst details yet. He says he will manage it from now on, which is equal parts reassuring and terrifying. 

[Tristan’s player Martijn had made a dysfunctional conservative, out of his fascination but also negative outlook on conservatives. I was happy to explore it, with the request that he be a fan of his own character, because I didn’t want to date an irredeemable caricature. He was super on board with that, and played up a really nice mix of healthy and unhealthy characteristics.]

We attend the Perfect Parents class, where each couple gets a sack of flour to represent a baby, that they need to attend to until after lunch. The flour sack gets a face sticker, a diaper, a little crochet hat and a name: Daisy.

We have to sit down and make a daily routine for our baby. Tristan asks what I would like to be called, because as an enby, I probably don’t want to be a mom or a dad. Daww that melts my heart!

Then Tristan works out the schedule in great detail als I see my future life as a housemom of four appear on a page. Is that what I want? It does mean I get to hang out with a lot more people in my house… But I can’t take care of four kids – I can’t even work! This flour baby is adorable, though. 

We also have to meet an AI teenager and solve his problem. Our AI teenager is a rude smoking (!) bully! OMG! Tristan tries to tempt him with a reward while also threatening him with taking away his privileges, while I try to tell him that we love him. It’s a shocking encounter and I’m doubting about kids all over again. The flour baby is so much cuter!

We have family lunch with the flour babies, my brother, his cousin and the Caspers. Someone asks “What is the wildest thing you ever did?”. For me, it’s going to a VR festival where I wanted to see so many bands that I stayed up for 24 hours and was sick for a week. Tristan tells a story where he mislabeled a medical machine as a xxxx-2 instead of a xxxx-3, ensuring that it could go out affordably and help a lot of people. Suddenly I realise: this is a good guy. I mean, a tragically boring anecdote, but this is a good guy. Like my parents. Like my brother. Unlike Harlin. I’m starting to like Tristan.

It’s a shame he doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. But is that a real belief or maybe more of a guideline? I tell him I need to lie down and take a nap, maybe we can take one together? He’s more than happy to, for my health. We cuddle up into bed, and I cuddle up closer to him and we start kissing and touching and it feels really good and.. He stops us. “I really can’t do this”. Darn, well, it was worth a shot. But I’m into it now and it’s hard to stop. He stops me again. I say “But are you sure there’s no compromise here? Isn’t there a loophole?”. He thinks for a while. “Well, I guess I have no problem with you receiving pleasure”. O RLY! He goes down on me while asking for a lot of feedback, which I happily give. It works quite well! 

[A lovely example of Ars Amandi, with my hand somewhere on my thigh that he caresses and licks. Really cool!]

I am very complimentous, and he says “Well, if you like it that much, I can do that for you every day, if you like”. Suddenly, this match is starting to sound pretty good! I jump up from the bed and say “In that case: We need to adjust the couple compatibility form!!”. I rush to helpbot and say “We need to adjust the form”. It says “Do you wish to change your desired sexual frequency?” and I realise we are not the first ones to have come back to refine their information.

We have a post-sex talk afterwards. He asks me how bad my disease is and I tell him. He hugs me and he says: “Whatever is needed, I will do it. I will take care of it, we are in this together”. That’s kind of what I hoped my dream match would say, but not exactly, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

We play darts while Harlin and his date (who I keep running into) are playing table soccer next to us. I have to remind myself to aim at the board and not at his face, like I’m used to from back home. We spend the last hour cuddling and then it’s time to end the date. It’s weird. The last date was so easy to end, and this one is so difficult. It must be the nine months that have gone by.

Singles night

After the breakup, it’s time for singles night, where we are encouraged to flirt with other people to help calibrate our implants. People are very nervous about flirting, but since River has been people-pleasing all their life to compensate for being a burden, they’re pretty good at it. 

I help Verity (Harlin’s super nice sister  – Harlin must be adopted) and my brother practise their flirting, try my skills out on Finley and that’s when I find out my flirting skills are too good and need to be restrained before I freak out myself and the implant!

Lux and Beara witness my flirting run off the rails and invite us over. Beara dances with Finley and Lux is happy to finally have an excuse to talk to me. Sadly for him, I’m pretty mean. My years in my UBI windowless, basic VR cubicle have given me a dislike of rich people, and Harlin has done nothing to correct that impression.

Then I realise that I’m at a party! I’m hanging out with people and flirting and chatting and doing all kinds of party things. Holy Shit!

Match #3

This time, our matches are announced at the end of the singles party, while we all awkwardly stand around.

River Thorn is matched with Asher Couper

Uh-oh. Asher is a really cool guy I used to date, and we had so much fun together. But I didn’t want to tell him about my medical state, I didn’t want to be a burden to him, so I ended up ghosting. He’s been here all this time but he has ignored me completely. One time, we bumped into each other in the hallway and I said “Hi Asher” and he mumbled something and slipped past me. Oh boy, I will have some explaining to do, but how can I explain without telling him everything?

We sit down to calibrate together. We move together and it’s kind of fun. Of course it’s kind of fun, everything about Asher is fun! Then we have to stare into each other’s eyes, and the mood becomes very tense and emotional. He grabs my hand and caresses it. Will he forgive me?

We talk about it, and I explain that I didn’t want to be a burden for him. He is so great and amazing and he doesn’t deserve someone holding him back. It doesn’t make much sense. One of the things that made us work so well together, is that we weren’t joined at the hip. I never told him he was working too hard, because I was absent a lot as well. But he chooses not to question it, he just wants to enjoy the time we have. Well, so do I!

With my previous matches, I’ve been quite absorbed and insular, but now it’s time to chill out and have some fun. We hang out on the swings and swing as high as we can, before we realise there’s no stop button in reality and it’s hard to stop swinging without getting mud all over our shoes.

Our old banter picks up really quickly as we go to the karaoke party. We cozy up on the couch and it doesn’t take long before we are kissing again. He sings a very good duet with Beara and I’m only slightly jealous. It feels really good to be at a party, to interact with everyone with this supercool guy at my side.

After the karaoke party, we sneak off to have sex, narrowly beating Harlin and his date to the room and slamming the door in their faces (satisfying). We have sex and it’s so much better than it used to be in VR. Good damn, we are back. This is amazing!

The next day, I get a letter from Helpbot. It’s from my doctor about the extra medical costs incurred from my being in the programme. It comes to 100,000 dollars. FUCK. That’s a lot. Helpbot recommends that I show the letter to my matches, as financial debt is an important variable in the algorithm. FUCK FUCK FUCK.

I show the letter to my brother and he says we will find a way to figure it out, as always. I don’t show it to Tristan yet, he has all the information. And I don’t want to ruin my good time with Asher. Plus, I don’t think he has that kind of money. Should I show it to Harlin? Uuuuuuugh…. I try to compromise by showing the letter to Verity and asking her advice. “Harlin would love this, he would give you the money and pay you off that way. It would make him really happy”. Just as I thought. Part of me would rather die than see that smug look on his face. She asks me to forward the medical file so her parents, renowned doctors, can take a look at it. I do, and ask her to definitely not tell Harlin. I show the letter to Beara as well, and she is sad to hear it. She thought I was doing better, and I was happy to have her think that, happy for light fun conversation. 

We go to the tango workshop. It’s really fun! Asher is a good leader and we do some cool steps. “Do you want to be the best in the class?” I ask, ready to fight. “Nah”, he says, “Let’s just have fun”. Damn, what a breath of fresh air compared to my previous two matches.

Then it’s my turn to lead and I go completely crazy on the turns and we are spinning through the air and then I’m spinning to the floor. Asher helps me to the side, gets me water and is quite supportive.

I encourage him to keep dancing, and he takes a spin with Zaiden and then with whoever needs a partner. Me and my brother watch them from the couch. “I like this guy, River. He seems to make you really happy”. I like him too. I like that he supported me, and then went to do his own thing. We fill in our couples calibration form. “We should get a sports room”, he says. “So you can work on your stamina”. “Yeah, I should do that”, I say.

Is omission lying?

I go take a shower and when I get back, Beara is holding my letter from the doctor, and says “I told him, River. He deserves to know”. Uh oh. “Was is because he deserves to know, or because you were jealous?”  I hiss, even as I know she’s right. Asher comes to get me to talk and he’s looking… I don’t know… angry or sad, which one is it? 

We talk out on the terrace, under beautiful real rays of the sun that we don’t give a shit about. He finally catches up to why I ghosted him, and exactly how long I’ve kept this from him, and that I’m dying and that I don’t know how long I have. “I should have been dead about seven years ago, and now they give me three to five years but no one knows”. He cries as he tells me that he has to admit to having selfish thoughts about all of this. I have those too, I wish I could ghost him again, so I wouldn’t have to see the pain on his face, and we wouldn’t have to go through this. 

As fate would have it, it’s time for his five senses workshop. I sit and watch and he says “We can do it too, it’s fine, it’s fine”. So we sit, and for the first sense we just look at each other. I instantly start crying and he soon follows – a neighbouring couple gives us handkerchiefs and people turn their heads to see what the problem is. Then we go through sound and so at least we can whisper things to each other. Smell is just goodness and his familiar scent. For taste we feed each other food. I bite into a candy and we fight over it – a temporary light moment that instantly makes the next moments heavier again. The last is tasting each other, and we kiss for a while, and then he pulls away. 

My brother pulls me aside and talks to me about the option that I would be unmatched. In which case, he would want to refuse his match to come live with me. Oh my heart! He also confesses that he’s been extorting Luna Caspar to pay for my medical bills, and that he feels like a terrible person. I want him to be happy with his Forever Match, but agree that we can make a pact to live together if everything goes south.

After that, we are whisked away to a Meet the family with Luna, Chase, Chazz and his date. We don’t have so much to talk about and I pick up one of the conversation cards on the table. “What have you learned from previous relationships?” Asher looks at me and says “Always say goodbye”. Ouch.

We spent our last hour hanging out with the others, playing dick wrestling, watching movies and hanging out. It’s bitter sweet, but I’m enjoying the time anyway. The speaker tells us our date is over, and we kiss goodbye.

My forever match

Harlin is there, and he wants to talk to me. He says his people looked at the Thorn situation and that we have a case to sue, and that he prefers to settle. There’s a heap of money coming my way. Tears of anger fill my eyes: “I. don’t. want. your. fucking. pity. money”. He sticks to his story, and people come to usher us upstairs.

We sit with our support group, and we wait for our Forever Matches to be announced. I don’t know what I’m hoping for. Whatever it is, I’ll make it work. I’ll steal happiness wherever I can find it, along with every day that I steal from my diagnosis.

Beara is matched with Asher. I’m surprised that the first emotion I feel is relief. They will be happy, they will have time to work it out and grow together and they will be happy. My best friend and the man I love will be happy. I go over to hug her, while she is crying over having lost her third match. Harlin is matched with Irina. River Thorn is matched with Tristan Everly. That’s okay, I’ll be in good hands, and I’ll make it work.

I see Asher and we sit together to say goodbye. We will miss each other so much. Crying, he admits that he feels relief that I’m not his Forever Match and I feel the same. “At least this way you can’t leave me at the altar”, I joke and he says, “No, I would never do that. If it had been you, I would have supported you”. Then the tears really start flowing, even when we know it’s for the best. The algorithm is right. Always depressingly right.

The debt situation

I see Tristan, kiss him and I show him the letter. He’s upset that our kids might not go to college, but he says the same I did. “We’ll make it work, we’ll fix it”. I tell him about Harlin’s offer and he says “We’ll accept that, of course”. Instantly, I feel like 20 times weaker as all the life drains out of me. I need my pride to live. I need my pride to live. I don’t say anything, because he’s right and because I’ve gotten in the habit of only speaking up about the important stuff. Death kind of puts things in perspective. But not this.

Luckily, I don’t have to wallow in my dilemma for much longer, as my brother has matched with Luna Casper and she really likes me and is happy to help me pay for the costs. Oh, thank god. I’m not exactly sure what their relationship is, but that’s their problem and I’m just so relieved. Harlin comes over to congratulate me on my match and I say “I don’t need your pity money”. “Okay, good for you”, he says, “send me the name of an NGO”.

Death: the ultimate Forever Match

It’s wedding time now, and I’m wearing a kick ass suit. Everyone is running around congratulating each other, and Tristan wants me by this side, but my head is spinning. I tell him I need a few minutes and head outside. I just want to be by myself, but there are tons of happy couples getting their wedding photos taken. Fuck. 

Suddenly it hits me, suddenly I know why my heart is breaking. It’s because I am going to die. I had two possible matches that would have let me live in denial. With Harlin, my pride and anger would protect me from ever feeling weak, and with Asher I would be this distracted by all of the lighthearted fun. But with Tristan, it’ll be different. I’ll be with the man who will shove my frail dying state in my face every day. I can’t escape this anymore, there are no more distractions. The full knowledge that I’m going to die is descending on me and it is crushing. 

We are ushered inside, and say our vows. In sickness and in health. Until death do us part. I cry all the way through them. 

Then Hang The DJ plays and the game is over.

Hooooly shit. I want to walk into the wilderness to recover from my last minute hit from the emotion stick, but everyone is nice and kind and calm and instead I just talk to people until I feel like I will keel over from sleep.

Game design

TAL is a complex game to play

The design of the game is quite interesting. A lot of the online skeleton is still there, but the play experience is a little different. Larps you play coupled with one other players have become quite popular in the past years, I guess Baphomet and Daemon are prime examples. I haven’t played any big couple games yet (the stress of finding a partner to ask always got to me), but I played a strong couple part in the Castle, and played Midsummer Disco psychologically chained to another player.

I guess the difference with Together at Last is, that you are not discovering a world with two: you are the world. Your relationship is literally the larp – well, one third of the larp. You need to keep the tension in your relationship for 9 to 12 hours. 

The design encourages you to calibrate and that seems vitally important, but it also just requires a decent set of larp skills. You need to pace your secrets and your drama carefully to make it work. You need to think of creative and interesting ways to play conflict that allows you to have fun together instead of avoiding each other. And your relationship needs to evolve, ideally, so you can deepen it and optionally accentuate conflicts that can’t be resolved. The game looks very accessible and easy, but somehow it’s one of the trickier ones I’ve played to pull off well.

In the end, you as a player also kind of go on three dates, because you are co-creating these relationships worlds with one other player, and you have to figure out how you can work together to lift each other up, and how your play styles can complement each other.

I was lucky to have three solid main players that I felt very at ease with! With Volker, I know he’s a bit more narrative and I’m a bit more immersive, and that I can count on him to give a story a good twist – and in the end our match ran like a fluid intricate tango. Martijn’s character was so strongly defined up front that it was very easy for my character to react to him in different ways, and he brought the malleability to make all of those reactions meaningful. With Nick and Vicky, we had a continuous calibration before and during the game to make a great canvas for our emotions. 

Kissing is a powerful larp tool

Kissing is a large part of romance tropes, and the use of kissing was finely calibrated. You were specifically asked to discuss this with each of your partners. The suggested mechanic was the thumb on the lips theatre kiss (a player told me “Yeah, but it doesn’t really work, your lips still touch anyway”), but real kissing was allowed and me and all of my partners opted for that. I enjoyed the subtle triumphant irony of being able to kiss relative strangers in a larp inspired by covid.

Derrida has a banger quote that says: “To pretend, I actually do the thing. Therefore, I have only pretended to pretend”. Is kissing still a mechanic for kissing? It’s certainly a powerful tool to add emotional resonance to your relationship. Does it add a lot of romantic bleed? Our minds can use the alibi of being in a larp, but I don’t think our bodies have alibis. 

I wonder if it doesn’t also add another neurochemical aspect to larp drop. Getting that amount of physical touch must give you a ton of oxytocin, which then drops away after the game. I was already feeling the drop at the afterparty, and that normally doesn’t happen. 

Another thing I wondered about: Is kissing so powerful a larp tool, that players who opt to not use it, feel left out or at a disadvantage somehow?

Not playing on attraction

The game design asks you to not play on real-life attraction. After all, it’s not speed date event, it a larp! But I feel that there’s an interesting side effect here. When you are discouraged from focusing on appearance and physical attraction, there is much more room for connecting. The connection between players takes center stage, and that in itself becomes a great source of attraction. Does that make sense?

One of my other hobbies is Tantra (the spiritual type, not the sexy type), which is another place where we unweave the threads of attraction, connection, repulsion, and find the love underneath. The game reminded me a little of this, and I wonder if that’s partly the reason the community is so warm and loving.

Bleed

I imagine I won’t have much bleed from the game, but the week is only just beginning, so who can say? I certainly have a few similar themes in my life, like a strong sense of pride and very conflicted feelings around accepting caregiving. I also overcompensate for perceived defects by being fun and adventurous. And since I’m HSP and easily get overstimulated, I also identify with River’s not being able to keep up with their own lust for life.

It was nice to play an enby character and get treated as such – I felt a lot of euphoria when people said I looked dapper in my wedding suit. I’m currently not enby, though I did recently cut my hair to look less feminine. For now I think gender is a stupid little box and it’s fine that it’s a box, because the box means a lot to people, but the box should be MUUUUCH bigger and made of some kind of transparant permeable material.

Feeling the impending threat of inescapable death was a very unexpected emergence from the game that was very interesting and definitely type 2. I like that, though, when a game makes you feel things you didn’t expect that you would feel. 

Community

I travelled to the game by myself without knowing more than a handful of players superficially. I was afraid I would feel a bit lonely and disconnected pre- and post-game, like I did at Bruidsprijs. But this game had a great group of players that were warm and welcoming and I felt happy, safe and belonging. A very nice warm bonus to a good game!