LARPing on the edge of nuclear apocalypse
An interview with the designers of Eyeball to Eyeball: The Cuban Missile Crisis.
The nuclear clock is minutes from midnight. A major American election is looming. Between Moscow and Washington, global superpowers play a geopolitical chess match where one miscalculation can mean World War III. Whatever your motives are, a well-timed message from an ambassador, a militaristic show of force, or the wrong leak to the right journalist can change the course of history.
While this could be an excerpted op-ed from yesterday’s New York Times, this is the scenario proposed in Eyeball to Eyeball: The Cuban Missile Crisis, a new parlor LARP by Central Michigan University Press. Eyeball to Eyeball asks players to embody significant figures from one of the Cold War’s most infamous standoffs. Primarily an academic game, the LARP integrates game mechanics and online resources like Discord with historical documents and speeches. Living in 2024, in a political environment that feels just as, if not more, fraught, Eyeball to Eyeball is meant to provide insight into the objectives and motivations of various geopolitical powers.
The review copy provided to Rascal looks like a classified briefing, complete with a little string to keep it closed. Inside, each chapter has a tab, keeping with the secret document motif. Between rules, the pages are littered with political cartoons and historical photographs, creating cultural context for the world in the months leading up to October 1962. The list of playable characters spans each of the moment’s major figures like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, and Nikita Khruschev. However, this game seeks to simulate the complexity of geopolitical tension and diplomacy. There are 39 different people available for players to choose from, with the potential to step in the narrative shoes of military leaders, intelligence agency officers, media personalities, capitalist oligarchs; or politicians from Berlin, India, Turkey, and Yugoslavia.
"I'm trying to get players to understand what is truly non-negotiable for a leader versus what can be bargained with."
Rascal sat down with Eyeball to Eyeball designers Raymond Kimball and Kimberly Redding to talk through the game’s objectives as a teaching tool, what it’s like to make an overtly political academic game in the midst of an anti-education culture war, and what the LARP has to say about our current political moment.
