Loving a Hobby Is Not a Contract to Eat Shit

I have spent more than twenty years designing and running LARP events. I have done it for a living, and I have done it because I love the hobby. Here is something both versions have taught me: you can love making something and still reach a point where dealing with the people you are making it for makes you want to stop.

When this was my “livelihood”, I was effectively being paid at or below minimum wage once you accounted for the hours. Four to five of us were paying the rent on a single place we shared. The workday never really started or ended. There was always another conversation, another problem, or another piece of work waiting behind whatever I had just finished. Nearly any other job would have paid more, and plenty of those jobs would have let me actually be done when I went home. Sure, I got to do something I loved. That mattered, and I am not pretending it didn’t. But “doing what you love” is also a remarkably effective way to convince yourself that your time does not need to count. Apparently, enjoying part of your job means the rest of it can be paid in vague ideas of “living the dream”.

Eventually, I did this as a passion project instead. I have a full-time job and larp loses money or breaks even instead of making it. I do not need to keep designing LARP content to support myself, which means the time I put into it is time I could spend enjoying the life that job pays for. I keep choosing to make things because there are experiences I want to create and people I want to create them with. A lot of game runners are making some version of that choice. Their game is a love letter to a hobby they grew up with, or an attempt to build the experience they always wanted to have. That does not make their work perfect. It does mean there is a person on the other end of it who had other options for how to spend their weekend.

And it fucking sucks when that person finishes something good, puts it in front of the community, and watches the same handful of people show up to be nasty about whatever it isn’t.

Not everyone. Not even necessarily even a notable number of people. But the same names, doing the same thing, often enough that you recognize the pattern before you finish reading the comment. Something new becomes another opportunity to complain that something else has not happened. An improvement becomes evidence that the creator apparently could have been working on your priority all along. There is no room for the thing that was actually made. There is only the next demand, delivered with the assumption that someone has been withholding something you were owed. “I want” becomes “you should,” which becomes “what the fuck is wrong with you that this isn’t already done?” Somewhere in that progression, the person doing the work stops being a person and becomes an obstacle or a vending machine between you and your entertainment.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Players should be able to say that a rule does not work, an event fell short, or a safety concern is being ignored. Paying for an event creates reasonable expectations, and working hard does not excuse failing to deliver what you promised. Nobody owes an organizer a compliment sandwich before reporting a problem. The distinction is not between praise and criticism. It is between criticism and contempt.

“This change does not address the problem we raised” is criticism. “Of course you wasted time on this instead of fixing anything that matters” adds an accusation about someone’s motives and dismisses the work outright. You can be disappointed without making someone your target. You can be angry about a real failure without deciding that every subsequent interaction is another opportunity to take a swing. There is shit people say to game runners that they would never say to a stranger at a bar unless they were looking for a fight. Put it in a Discord channel, though, and suddenly the person receiving it is expected to demonstrate excellent community management. We all apparently understand what disrespect looks like until the person being disrespected is responsible for answering a rules question.

And yes, after enough of that, there are times when I look at the next thing I was going to make and think, “Why the fuck am I doing this?” Not because somebody disagreed with me. After twenty years of design work, disagreement is not a shocking development. I mean the exhaustion of knowing that whatever I make will become another surface for the same people to grind the same axe against.

I could just not do it. I could finish my actual job, close my laptop, and have an evening. I could enjoy a weekend without spending part of it managing somebody’s resentment and deep emotional issues about a recreational activity. That is not some desperate last resort. That is a perfectly good life I am choosing to spend portions of on this hobby instead. That choice needs to remain worth making. It does not need to produce universal applause, and it does not need to be comfortable every minute. But there has to be something on the other side of the work besides another obligation to absorb someone’s hostility.

When a community keeps tolerating that hostility, it is gambling with somebody else’s willingness to stay. Maybe the runner keeps going because they care about the players who are having a good time. Maybe they keep going because they made commitments, or because walking away from something they built hurts. None of those reasons should be mistaken for an unlimited supply of patience. I do not think this always ends with a dramatic announcement. It can end with someone deciding not to develop the next project. Then they stop offering the extra thing nobody paid for. Eventually, when the question of running another event comes up, they realize they would rather have their weekends back.

The hobby does not have to disappear for the part you love to stop existing. It only takes the people making that part deciding they are done. By the time that decision becomes public, the opportunities to make staying worthwhile may already be gone. This is also on those of us running communities. We cannot keep responding to the nastiest person fastest and then act surprised when nastiness becomes an effective way to get our attention. We need room for complaints to be heard and boundaries around how people are treated. Those are not competing goals.

And players can help without turning every disagreement into a public trial. You can agree that somebody has identified a real problem and still tell them the personal attack was out of line. You can refuse to join the pile-on. You can stop excusing repeated cruelty with “they’re just passionate,” as though everyone else involved has been doing this out of a casual interest in paperwork.

I still want to make things for this hobby. There are players who take what we build and turn it into experiences I could never have created alone. There are people who disagree with me directly, help identify what needs work, and remain people I look forward to seeing. That is not a demand for obedience. That is what being part of a community can actually look like. Those people deserve a community that does not keep spending its goodwill on the same handful of people’s permission to be assholes. The runners deserve to participate as human beings, not as designated targets. Neither group should have to accept that the price of keeping the game alive is letting the nastiest behavior set the terms.

You do not have to love everything somebody makes. You do not have to keep attending a game that no longer works for you. But loving a hobby does not obligate anyone to keep producing it while being treated like shit, and we need to stop building communities around the assumption that it does. Because eventually, “I could just spend this weekend enjoying my life” stops being a frustrated thought and becomes a plan. The person making that choice has not necessarily stopped loving LARP. They have stopped accepting what we allowed to come with it.