Harlin/Hayley Steele Netprov Interview

by Hayley Steele, Rob Wittig

RW
What is your creative background and how did you first get involved in netprovs?

Harlin/Hayley Steele
I have been a LARPer (a practitioner of Live Action Roleplaying Games) and creator of interactive narrative media since 2002. Back then, I was part of a group of cosplayers in the region of Seattle, Washington. We were Renton-based, and we were also a unicycle gang. We did have matching jackets, or t-shirts at least. [laughs] We were always getting up to interesting stuff — dressing as cartoon characters and going to the mall, trying to find ways to be weird and interesting in public.

Some in that group got interested in doing interactive narratives with characters or scenarios that we had created. For example, we had a fictional wedding one day over at my friend's house. We had all the "wedding guests" come in, which included cartoon characters we played and characters we'd invented. We were teenagers, between 15 and 18 years old, a group of cis women and queer folks, younger people. Most of us were homeschooled or doing interesting things with education and so we'd formed this artists' cosplay group and eventually some of us co-created our own LARP style.

Around the same time, the World Trade Organization conference and protests happened in Seattle, and I ended up out there amidst the tear gas. I'd been part of environmentalist efforts out in the suburbs leading up to it — I helped organize a petition campaign to save a wetland, and was really involved and really engaged in environmental activism as a teenager. So, I ended up hitching a ride to Seattle with some of my neighbors when the WTO counter-convention erupted in 1999, and I watched this incredible moment where artists, academics, and activists from around the world had descended upon Seattle and had set up these little booths and soap boxes, like under freeways and on street corners, telling stories or doing tarot readings. There were so many kinds of people there! Nuns, people dressed up as turtles in green body paint… I hung out with these French cheese farmers for an hour, learning how the WTO policies were affecting their cheese farm. I learned about cooperatives, all these things pouring into my brain as a 15-year-old! It was really joyous, but the police brutality was intense!

So, in the early 2000s, I was at the edge of this very geeky space of cosplay shenanigans and also at the edge of these activist spaces trying to grapple with post-WTO Seattle in '99, and the shutdown of the city and the media portrayal of it. This was a lot for a fifteen-year-old to make sense of, I didn't really have a way to make sense of what I saw and experienced at the WTO protests, the media was dumping a lot of shame upon the protestors for trying to resist this imperialist organization, even if just through peaceful means, like putting bike locks on the convention doors. There was this real sense of "the protestors were asking for it" that came from the media, and that shaming got echoed back to me when I'd try to talk to my friends and neighbors in the 'burbs about how I watched a guy get his ribs broken by a cop. Wild thing to watch as a 15-year-old! And then get yelled at any time I tried to bring it up! It was with this backdrop that I began to express myself with interactive narrative. My cosplay friends, who hadn't seen the police riots, knew I'd always try to sneak some political thing into our LARPs, which grappled with topics like state violence and media narratives, and honestly, co-creating stories about those types of things helped me heal.

We ended up making a unique style of LARP. I've been working with Dr. Susan Weiner, a LARP scholar, to come up with a name for this style of LARP, as she encountered some later iterations of it in the regional convention scene. It's a style based on improv acting, making it easy to switch characters and share control of the narrative. Dr. Weiner and I have started calling this style "Cascadian Collectivist LARP." At some point, we might try to document it more thoroughly, but one thing that really sets this style apart is the fluidity with which you can switch to a character of another gender. This style of LARP really helped me and others in that community build a more authentic relationship with gender – this is something I'm going to get into more detail about in my talk "Imperial Gender Bias and Play" for the GENeration Analog conference in July, 2023.

But anyway, yes, in the Salish Sea, as the region healed from the "Battle of Seattle" in '99, I was part of this group that invented this new style of LARP. Our group eventually got sublimated by some Tolkeinesque, escapist LARP groups in the area, though. These were folks who just wanted to do Dungeons-and-Dragons-style LARPs, which are fun, and great, but a vastly different approach. There's a lot less artistic freedom in those LARPs, and you're not usually dealing with the same kinds of heavy topics … I mean, some folks critique those LARPs, I think rightly, for being accumulationist: you get your allotted amount of spells that you can cast each day, and some find that pretty icky. As I wrote in an article in The International Journal of Role-playing, those LARPs are structured in a way that resembles database management system back-end software, so you're running around in the woods playing this character that has code-like spells they can throw, and you've memorized these lines of code that dictate what happens to your character's body points, and you have to do a lot of math just to figure out what the heck is going on in the story. It's the weirdest thing. Plus, those LARPs are wildly authoritarian, so you basically have these story-generals running around who have absolute power to decide what's happening in the story, and as you can imagine, there ends up being a lot of drama around who gets what kind of story from the "story authorities." Very odd way to set up a co-created diegesis, for sure.

So I found myself part of this cadre of, I'd say, more artistic LARPers who got pulled into this group of more crunchy, code-based authoritarian LARPers. And several of us, I think, were wanting to push the narrative envelope and push the mechanics envelope — the actual structure of the rules themselves — in this game, and see how far we could go, see if we could make this crunchy Tolkien-style game more interesting and meaningful, to us at least. I became a staff member at one of the local codic LARP chapters. I'd also go to Oregon, to the mountains east of Olympia, for these weekend-long crunchy LARPs where everyone would take over a campground, build a village, and act out the social relations in that village and co-create stories happening in it.

This part of my backstory is from a decade before I started netprov: I was LARPing in the early 2000s and did a lot of experimentation with gender in a couple different LARP communities. We always remember our failures more than our successes, I suppose, and the experiment that really stands out to me is one that didn't work out too well.

In 2006 or 2007, my roommate and I were getting to be juniors and seniors in college. She'd been studying different cultural gender paradigms in her anthropology classes. As a genderfluid, genderqueer person, I was really excited to hear about this. There's actual historical precedent for the fact that I'm dressing as both genders on different days of the week and doing all this wacky stuff! We thought, OK, so we're playing these fantasy games — hobbits and elves and things — why do we only have two genders in this supposed fantasy game world? Why don't we have something a little more reflective of cultures around the world outside of our own culture? Why would there only be two genders in a fantasy world? That just seems like a repeat of the world we are already in! Sitting around the kitchen table we came up with this idea for a five gender society of elves that we launched as part of the Tolkien-style game.

Jump forward ten years to 2016. I met Mark Marino in LA when I was living there. I'd been following his work in critical code studies from afar for years, and I had been wanting to talk to scholars of code about the way code is used in some types of LARPs. There's a reason for this bizarre moment, for this sort of liquid — what Colin Wilbert has called technogenic life — when the technology in our life restructures things. As I studied code-based LARPs I was realizing the timing matched up — these are computing practices bleeding into an analog practice where we're not using computers at all, but we're using the way a computer structures data to create interactive analog stories. How cool is that, you know? I've just gotta talk about it! So I met with Mark to talk about critical code studies because I was living in Westlake, pretty close to where he works. I reached out by email. We met at this cool cafe — a nice little artsy place that had a bunch of zines and things, just the right atmosphere to get creative conversations going — and he started telling me about Netprov. And I had been like, okay, I'm going to meet Dr. Marino and I was expecting him to be more of a serious person — maybe a little engineering tie, like the 50s. [laughs] I was prepared myself for something really different, then he gets to the café and it becomes apparent right away: wait, okay, you're also an artist! I might have seen his name floating around places in relation to his art, but I thought it must be a different Mark Marino!

He pulled some things up on his computer. I got I got to learn about the netprov Occupy MLA that several of y'all worked on. I shared some things in my artistic background. I've been part of the Slingshot collective since 2011, an anarchist artist newspaper based in Berkeley. I've been part of a number of collaborative art projects. I love art that brings many voices into the fold. Mark said, 'Hey, you should work with us on a Netprov!' I was just so excited to talk about this deeply collaborative approach to creating digital art. But, as an analog games person, I was cringing a little about doing digital work. My secret goal is always to get outside and use, like, foam boffer swords. I like to create occasions to do in-person, non-digital activities. But the way you and Mark approach the digital really blew my mind. It's an approach that really opens up the possibilities surrounding digital spaces, and radicalized me in a way. Like: we need net neutrality, we need we need all these things so we can fulfill the wildest dreams of the early internet pioneers. We need to make sure our digital spaces and platforms don't get reified into boring, soulless, exclusively for-profit things.

RW
That's fascinating! I just love the paths that people travel! What are some key moments or memorable passages of play from your Netprov experience?

Harlin/Hayley Steele
Oh, my gosh, Netprov has been so interesting for me. Grace, Wit & Charm, for example, where you had some in-person components to the art piece that I think many people experienced. My experience of netprov has largely been mediated by the digital, except for the Thermophiles in Love LARP, which has been amazing, but was a standalone piece. It's almost like we were creating these pieces alongside each other for that one: the online threaded discussion Thermophiles and the LARP Thermophiles. It's funny because during Monstrous Weather, which was the first Netprov I took part in, I was staying on my foster parents' boat on the Potomac. I was having this wild boat trip in a part of the country that I'd never seen before while reading these Netprov pieces exploring the monstrous and Mary Shelley, and whatnot. I remember certain passages or lines — almost the smell of it — of being brought into that sense of the eerie while reading everyone else's posts. I don't remember any quotes, but I really remember the feeling.

RW
That's perfect!

Harlin/Hayley Steele
Something I want to say: there was a moment when I was reaching out to you and Mark in 2016 about working on a Netprov together, and it was over email. And you and Mark just started playing with the email form. You were giving me this guided tour of the internet as a realm of infinite possibilities. There was a sense of how much we get into a pattern or a habit of using our devices and interacting with the internet in certain ways, and that email thread got me realizing how my online habits had gotten very narrow and careful. It was like having been in a three-by-three foot hut and having the walls just open up and expand out and being like: Whoa, we're in this infinite warehouse! The psychological feeling of having the ceiling rise up; I'll never forget it! I remember introducing my friend, the designer and digital artist Iris Xie to you and Mark, and they reached out to me later and they said: "It's like these guys are from the Old Internet! Their way of thinking about it and interacting with it is so different, so expansive." We've gotten into what Iris calls "hot take culture," where there are just these little tweets, little hot takes, that make up cultural production. They were explaining this to me a few weeks ago. They're working on this theory of the hot take. Iris is eight years or so younger than I am, and has had a very different interaction with the Internet. I was 10 in 1995 when AOL started. I remember going to a museum as a little kid in 1989 and seeing networked computers, and then AOL happened, then I was on ICQ and the early message boards. It wasn't the very early message boards but it felt like the early Internet, even though it actually was about 15 years later. It's interesting comparing these experiences to those who grew up with a very different technological landscape.

I hope someday to thoroughly develop the language to articulate the generational differences and it's an amazing opportunity to learn from folks who saw different ages of the internet and spaces on the internet in formative periods. I'm realizing that some of the dreams that seem like they belong to the 1980s are actually still very much alive. Some of the tangents and directions that folks were dreaming about — we got distracted from them, but everything is still in place for very different ways of mediating our internet relationships. This has given me a lot of hope — I started working with y'all in 2016 on these artistic projects, and I'd say Netprov and these e-lit projects have given me a level of hope for the Internet amidst the times of Cambridge Analytica and the terribleness on Twitter with Musk and Trump's accounts — all this crap that's been going in social media spaces that that tend to be reified as "the Internet.", There's a level of doom and gloom now. In the late 90's there was so much positivity around the internet. Now: 'the Internet is destroying democracy' seems like the phrase of the day. It's exciting to see an alternative way to approach online community-building. It doesn't have to be just Twitter, just Facebook. Unless you lose net neutrality. I'm just grateful to have had the chance develop a perspective with y'all that would not have been available to me otherwise.

RW
Great! Could you talk a bit more about Thermophiles in Love and how that built on some of your earlier interests?

Harlin/Hayley Steele
After Monstrous Weather there was a postmortem phone call where folks were meeting up to discuss that project and think about new projects. I was up in the Oakland Hills staying with a friend and my phone reception kept coming in and out and it was the most bizarre conversation. I would get halfway through something, the call would drop, and I'd have to call back. And a decision would have been made while the connection was lost: 'Alright, we're going to incorporate that into the next art piece,' and I was like: 'What, wait, I was just explaining that thing – I hadn't meant to make the art be about it!' A comedy of errors. Mark asked me about something I'd brought up in a conversation that I had with him when we met up at a cafe in LA earlier that year, something about my early work on interactive media in LARP over a decade before. What was still nagging me all those years later, was, well, there was a five-gendered society idea that myself and a collaborator had tried to launch into a crunchy Tolkien-esque style LARP. This had had failed miserably. We were in our early 20s, and in our youthful optimism, my collaborator and I had decided that it would be easy to just write up this "culture packet" of a five gender elf society and submit it to the plot committee, and once it had their stamp of approval, BAMN!, we would have a five gender society in the game. I don't know what we were thinking. We were young, and hadn't had experiences of trying to launch new social practices yet. So I showed up for the next game as this elf character who's supposed to be a fifth gender that doesn't match any genders that we know in our ordinary world. This was like in 2005, 2006. Folks at the game really did not know what to do with that character!

It was so strange, because usually, I would go to LARPs and play these ridiculous, tavern keeper characters or the over-the-top salesperson characters that would pull people in and get folks partying or help them feel comfortable. I was usually doing a lot of performance work and emotional labor with my characters. Suddenly I'm this character that nobody knew what to do with and even I didn't know what to do with. It was strange and awkward, and I'm pleased about that! I realized how usually I relied on gender norms to have a character's persona understood by the community. The imperial gender binary was a pre-formulated palette of tools that I'd draw from. But now I was launching this fifth gender character. I had played male characters and female characters in the past. I had a male vampire with a mustache and saggy jeans, he was kind of a gangster. Everyone had liked that character enough to kidnap him and use him in as a centerpiece in the game story's plot. In a LARP, it's the highest compliment to have people kidnap your character. I got the same kinds of engagement with my lady tavern keeper character and my lady salesperson character. My binary gender characters got a nice reception and folded really rapidly into games. That felt great. And suddenly, bam, here's a character that no one knew what to do with. I'm trying to present things for people to roll with but I'm realizing that everything I present has to be articulated. Nothing is automatic. There isn't a pre-packaged set of interactions that people have spent their entire lives watching in movies, learning how to navigate. Suddenly we're in a brave new world, a strange new country. I'll just never forget the sheer awkwardness of that game. I got stung by a bee about 10 hours in, and I'm horribly allergic to bees. But I was relieved! Like 'Oh, thank God, I got stung by a bee! I go can take Benadryl and hide in my cabin!'

After that, I got busy, too busy to LARP. But there were some things related to that experience to that led my LARP relationship to fizzle. That was roughly the last year that I was doing the big crunchy coding type LARPs. A couple years later, I started doing Nordic LARPs and going to LARP conferences. These were very different styles of LARP. Instead playing in the same world over and over, you're building a new, co-created story world — a narrative space — from scratch together in every game. And it was in the Nordic LARP community that I started finding out about these gender playability LARPs. For example: there's a LARP called Between Sky and Sea or Mellan himmel och hav is the Swedish name for it, that was run in 2003 where they had a society with gender based on your eye color. And the genders also determined what time of day your character was most active. There were like, morning people and evening people. I thought, y'all were doing that around the time I was experimenting with gender in Seattle area LARPs. It was interesting to realize that other folks, in other parts of the world, were thinking about using LARP in this way as well.

I heard about Nordic LARP from people who had experienced it and came out to the NYU Games Center in the Tisch School of the Arts in 2014 for the first international LARP conversation in the U.S., the Living Games Conference. People who had taken part in Between Sky and Sea were there. They had been forever changed by that experience. And they had done workshopping as part of the launching the genders for that game! For weeks leading up to the game every player meticulously workshopped the genders and co-created the culture. So when it came time to launch the game, the community was ready. The elephant in the room is Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and this is where I started building a theory and practice of what I call "gender playability," which is the term I started using and in a talk in 2016. I'm being encouraged to finally write that into a paper.

RW
Great, great! Please, please!

Harlin/Hayley Steele
I's very interesting how you can use these LARP structures while thinking backwards from the work of post structuralist theorists like Judith Butler and Foucault - his writing on normativity - and Althusser. I always cringe when I bring Foucault and Althusser up because there are so many problematic things. But at the same time, there are useful things you can extract from the theories. For example: the way ideological apparatuses work in Althusser's writings, which he stole from Gramsci. (I feel like we keep giving credit to Althusser when maybe we should be talking about Gramsci.) There are things about social apparatuses that you can play with in LARPs that turn them into an experiential learning opportunity. I had my eyes opened to how workshopping could be used to build these performative gender apparatuses. I was getting into those larpworks from Europe and figuring out how they were able to be a lot more successful than the "download approach" that that American campaign LARPs try to take. with what happened. So that led to Thermophiles in Love, which is basically a proof of concept for gender playability. You and Mark had a really enthusiastic response. We blended both approaches, LARP and netprov.

When we started co-creating the genders for Thermophiles in Love, I'd gotten stuck. I kind of freaked myself out because I was reading too much theory. I created some and they weren't very good. And then you and Mark popped in and started playing around. You started writing the gender descriptions the way astrology figures are presented. Another piece was, during the postmortem phone call for Monstrous Weather, Cathy Podeszwa, had the idea about doing something with these one-celled organisms that live in hot springs, thermophiles. We were aiming to make something featuring science for a venue: the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference. So, thermophiles got thrown in there; players would be thermophiles, and each thermophile type would have its own gender. But what does that really mean? [laughs] Thermophiles don't need others to reproduce. You divide yourself as your mode of reproduction! And there were the dances that went with the genders, right? Among the genders were Hypes, Mesos, Acidos. Which gender had the sparkly dance? Was it Hypes? No, hmm…

RW
One of my favorite pieces of writing of all time is what you finally crafted as those astrology descriptions of the five genders! They match the scientific description of the different thermophiles beautifully, biologically. They're so smart and interesting. And they're just really compelling and really instantly playable.

Harlin/Hayley Steele
The Acido gender's dance was where it would stroke it's own hair. An Acido was a sort of smarmy, sparkly salesperson gender.

RW
You ran a beta version of the Thermophiles in Love LARP at UC Berkeley. That was my first chance to see you be a facilitator, and it was amazing. It's always been, in my mind, a potential of Netprov to have a physical, performance mode. We just haven't had time and resources to do it very often. But you ran the Thermophiles LARP several times. Could you talk about that?

Harlin/Hayley Steele
It's funny, because at the run we did at the Berkeley Center for New Media, I had this conversation. I don't know where you were in the room. There were two people who got assigned the Meso gender. It's so weird that I remember these details! As a gamerunner you remember these things. The genders were actually assigned by that random gender generator, "The Genderator," that Mark wrote. But we performed a ritual of very solemnly waving something around you that 'scientifically scanned and determined your gender.' We'd pronounce: 'Your true gender is actually: Acido!' It was interesting. And there was someone who came to me afterwards, while we were mingling over wine and cookies. Remember, this version of the LARP was just an hour and a half run with minimal workshopping, like a party game almost. This person told me that the gender they had played in that game felt more real than their everyday gender they'd had for 25 years or more. As a gamerunner that gives you pause — okay, wow, I'm really glad this game was able to create that space for you!

When Mark and I brought the game to the SLSA conference, there was a very warm, receptive response. We got a good group together that wanted to do the LARP. We had the gendering rituals set up in the gallery. Mark and I were improvising pretending to scan people's gender rays. And there was actually a moment of pushback, where we offered to gender someone, a cis man, older, and he said "no!" It was very forceful. He got really close to my face, actual physical intimidation, and said: "Do you realize what a dangerous thing you're doing?!" I just looked him in the eye and said, "I know." But I was thinking: whoa!

RW
Yikes!

Harlin/Hayley Steele
I should say, though, that I don't think that what I'm doing is dangerous. I think it's the opposite of that. I think that forcing gender upon people is dangerous. In this situation he was the one being dangerous. I just felt it was fun to like, stand strong, and match whatever he was throwing at me. Honestly, the thing I should have said to him was "To whom?"

RW
Awesome.

Harlin/Hayley Steele
So we did two runs of Thermophiles in Love at the SLSA. Then, and then two years later I took it to the Living Games conference, the last Living Games conference, that was in Boston. That was where game designers, — it's kind of a LARP conference — and folks who are just really into game design had a chance to play it. And there, I have to say, the feedback I got from it was pretty incredible! To my knowledge, it was first time someone had run a gender playability LARP at that game conference. There had been this legendary game in Sweden that everyone talked about at the first conference. But when folks asked for that game to be run again, the Nordic LARPers said: 'oh, no, Nordic LARPs are ephemeral things.' Like netprovs. They were: 'we could never run that again, our feelings about it are foreclosed.' And I was really excited that Thermophiles is a game that can be repeated.

There is a semi-random name assignment procedure in that game that I won't describe because I don't want to spoil it for future players. But once you have your thermophile character name, you've got it for the rest of the game. At Living Games 2018 the responses included one individual who started using a thermophile name… and wanted to keep it! I still see them using it like on social media! They'd created a character in a fictional, five-gender society that was that meaningful to them!

There's another piece of feedback that really sticks with me from that game, which was somebody was playing the Fac gender. Fac is a gender that has its own dance, but it can also mimic the dances of the other genders. Because these are game designers they are sometimes testing the game, trying to break the game, there was somebody whose character felt they'd been assigned the wrong gender, and came to me while I was playing the Meso of Ceremonies — Mesos are the matchmaking gender — to have a discussion. 'Ever since I emerged from the void, I've been this gender, but it just doesn't feel right,' they said. When they first approached me, I was in facilitator mode: 'alright, that group should go there, this group over here,' leading the room. And there's always that moment when someone comes up asks you something you haven't thought about yet. The rest of the room is watching. 25 people are waiting for what you're going to say. I said: "Oh, yes, of course! Here's the procedure to do that!" I invented it on the spot and acted as if it always existed. We improvised a ritual of gender reassignment so that this individual got to have the game gender they were aligned with.

Well, while all that happened, there was somebody else in the room who was playing a Fac. And in their debreif after the game, this person told us about this beautiful moment their character had: that they had been standing watching this ceremony quietly in the corner and they did the Fac mirroring dance, full of joy, feeling their own emotions. Nobody noticed them in the corner but the player realized how much their character cared about this other character getting to be who they needed to be! It was the only time they used the Fac dance, rather than mirroring the dances of the other genders. It was their character's first moment of feeling something from within. Getting the feedback that came in over the next few weeks, I realized how many amazing things came out of that run that I didn't see as a facilitator. You can only feel honored to be able to hold a space for folks to have those very personal experiences.

RW
How has participating in Netprov impacted your own creative and scholarly practice?

Harlin/Hayley Steele
That's like asking: 'How have books impacted your work?' [laughs] It's a medium. It's a vessel for holding big worlds. It lands somewhere between genre and platform. It's hard to imagine what the last six years of my life would be without knowing the possibilities of this medium. Thermophiles in Love was not the first netprov I'd played but it was the first I got to co-create with you and Mark and Cathy.

Another netprov collab that really influenced me, as an example, is one that emerged in a moment of a semi-crisis for me, and it turned into Destination Wedding 2070. Basically, I was housesitting for the sister of a polar ice melt scientist in Seattle in summer of 2019, having an adventure up there. After finishing my preliminary exams down in Davis, CA that spring, I decided I was gonna go back to my old stomping grounds and figure things out. I had just gotten a research award to develop a science game for the UC Davis ModLab and I hadn't yet figured out what direction I wanted to take. I thought "probably climate science," because I wanted to learn more about it. So, I ended up hopping between circles of folks doing climate science in Seattle, and it was just a lucky coincidence that someone I was housesitting for was related to and could introduce me to someone well-connected in that scholarly community. That's how I met Dargan Frierson who does computer climate modeling. Dr. Frierson gave me this amazing, generous tour of the Earth Games lab. When we were talking games together in Autumn 2019, the climate science community was in the midst of a once-every-seven-year climate data dump, getting ready for the big, every-seven-year IPCC AR report. It's like the Oscars for climate science: all the best, newest, cutting edge climate data is released during that time because everyone wants their lab's data to get into the report. So, there was data actually popping up during our meeting. Dargan's computer would ping, and I he'd be like, "Oh wait, this data from Canada just got released! Oh oh!" And before I knew it, I was looking over the data sets with him. It was really exciting and also existentially terrifying.

Autumn 2019 was a hard time for climate scientists, because the optimistic predictions they'd made seven years earlier had not come to pass. So Dargan and I had a really good, serious discussion about media strategies and some of the problems that get baked into presentations of data. Climate scientists are often shamed out of talking about the path we're really on and instead get bullied into saying, 'Yeah, but things are gonna get better in five years, because we'll all figure it out magically, there'll be some Deus Ex Machina that'll come down and make the line on the graph go down.' Our discussion was: maybe there needs to be a better approach — being more honest. What would it look like to make a game that just takes the actual path we're on — the rate that emissions are accelerating — and says 'if you're driving towards the cliff, you want to see the cliff, don't you?' We reached a consensus in that maybe we could be inspired by the amazing work of the afro-pessimists like Hortense Spillers and others who are thinking about the importance of facing the monster, facing the issue of racism head on rather than putting on a mask of false optimism. Maybe we need a climate pessimism movement, or climate realism movement. It was an amazing strategy session with a leading climate scientist, and it also broke me.

Riding back to my housesit on the Seattle light rail, I started panicking and I ended up writing emails to pretty much every media maker I know.

So there's, there's an amazing thing about Netprov: it allows a lot of leeway in playing with experimental, high concept ideas. For example, I reached out to a couple of filmmakers that day, but there are issues with getting that much labor on your project. How do you get a studio to greenlight that? How do you raise independent funds to do that? If a project isn't fully formed, is just a direction towards a movement, a paradigm shift, it's better to use a lighter medium to get it out into the storytelling sphere so people can play with it. Netprov is perfect for that. Mark got back to me right away - within three hours of the conversation with Dargan. And Rob, you hopped in within a day - you wanted it to be about a wedding. Weddings wrecked by climate change. Such a perfect premise!

RW
Credit where credit is due. I'm a great believer in half ideas that meet up to form a whole idea. You were presenting us with this whole climate data processing ability. That was half of something. But Jean Sramek, one of our great featured players had texted me recently about a somewhat calamitous destination wedding. She said: "We gotta do a netprov about destination weddings!" It was another half-idea sitting there. We're looking at a reality that's really scary on one hand, but there's guaranteed comedy in a wedding that goes awry.

Harlin/Hayley Steele
I never would have thought to take something as calamitous the 'path we're on' climate scenario and put a wedding on it. It's like Portlandia: 'put a bird on it.' Destination Wedding 2070 opened up a way of understanding the future. Since then, I've presented some work critiquing certain approaches to presenting climate data at IPCC partner events. That Netprov got me interested in ways climate modeling applications – and even parameters - could be better. One of the big problems for future-facing data modelers making climate scenarios is that folks just have a hard time visualizing it. It's a bunch of lines on a page. 'That's not the future.' But 'Our wedding! Ruined by climate change!' That's real. That hits home.

If I were to run Destination Wedding 2070 again there are certain modifications that I think I'd make, especially if it's a LARP. You'd be descendant of yourself, or your nephew, or whatever, who would be alive then.

RW
That would be perfect. You, the real-life player, would be the millionaire who's giving the money for the wedding with the stipulation that it has to be at this specific place. In the first version it was an imaginary grandma who had funded it.

Harlin/Hayley Steele
Yes! I love that your actual self would be a historic figure in the narrative! It's fun to brainstorm this. And think towards what happens next. I may try and throw together a play test or a run together of DW70 in the next year or two. So yeah, to get back to your original question, netprov helped me turn a moment of personal crisis – the existential crisis caused by a close encounter with climate data – into a creative collaborative artwork, and it was the perfect medium for all that. An experience like this is forever going to change my work as an artist and as a scholar. Thank you for opening this this space up. I'm really excited to share netprov with my students and explore what the internet can be, to see past some of the ways it's been reified wrong and try to reclaim the vision of the internet as a space to play with networks, in the many forms they can take.

RW
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time! Well, I'm gonna stop the recordi

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