Velveteen Heart

By

Be-Con (2023), Sheraton Suites Chicago Elk Grove, Illinois, United States, United States

Jon Cole

Description

Children at preschool try to make sense of their stresses at home with the help of their stuffed animal companions. This is a physical play experience, where players literally enact childsplay with plush toys.

Velveteen Heart is about children giving and receiving tender care from stuffed animals in response to stress; it aims for a bittersweet tone. You play little kids with mild and unremarkable problems at home that are nevertheless impactful in their lives. Through play answer the questions: How does a child’s inner life come through make-believe play with their stuffed animal? 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.

Genre and Tags: feel better, bittersweet, introspective, physical play, guided visualization

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 visualization 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. Stuffed animals are provided, no need to bring your own.


Content Warnings
Children characters experiencing distress, anxiety, grief. Stuffed animals puppeteered to be mean or physically rough to other stuffed animals.

The issues that children face in this game are intended to be universal and something children can begin to face during play. Some examples are being picked on by older siblings, feeling ignored due to a new baby sibling, grief over the loss of a grandparent, fear of crime in the neighborhood. The issues take place entirely off screen and are not acted out in a scene. Nothing written into the children characters involves abuse or would warrant a call to child protective services.

Played at

Trivia

• This scenario was created for Make a Scene 2023, North America’s only premeire scenario festival.