Nordic Larp

Author: Juhana Pettersson

  • The Death of Hamlet – Deconstructing the Character in Enlightenment in Blood

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    The Death of Hamlet – Deconstructing the Character in Enlightenment in Blood

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    Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is one of the most famous fictional characters of all time. He’s the protagonist of a play by William Shakespeare, conveniently also titled Hamlet. The play has been made into a movie over twenty times. There’s also a well-regarded larp version called Inside Hamlet in which the story is transposed onto the decadent court of a mid-19th century fascist Denmark.

    In Inside Hamlet (Pedersen et al 2017), one of the characters is Hamlet himself. If you play that character, you’re larping a role that has been defined by centuries of artistic practice. Hamlet casts a long shadow, and your interpretation is but one of many takes on the same character.

    In short, Hamlet is a role. You can make an interesting Hamlet, a boring Hamlet, a conventional Hamlet or an idiosyncratic Hamlet. Your Hamlet is always in dialogue with every other Hamlet, whether you like it or not.

    Although Hamlet is an iconic example, pre-written larp characters often follow the same idea: the writer of the character has a vision, and the player must ful l that vision in the larp. The role exists independent of the player.

    In the larp Enlightenment in Blood, we set out to create a new way of making larp characters. The first step on that road is to murder Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark.

    Access to Fiction

    What’s the purpose of a character? Why do you need a character to play in a larp? When we started designing Enlightenment in Blood, our answer to this question was that the character is a tool the player uses to access the fiction of the larp.

    The larp presents a fictional environment, and the player needs something to be part of that environment. Without that something, they’re just a non-player: someone without agency inside the fiction.

    Note that in this conception of character, this something can be extremely slight. For example, I worked on a larp series called Baltic Warriors, where the larp events were also public events where anybody could walk in and sit down to listen. In the design of the larp, these people were automatically granted characters: They were to play members of the public who’d dropped by to listen to the debate.

    In this example, the character consists of only two things:

    1. A rudimentary identity: You play yourself, but in a fictional context.
    2. A simple interaction code: Act like you’d act listening to a real political debate. Sit silently, or maybe ask a question.

    A character can consist of many things, and there’s no list of mandatory character elements that must be present in all larps. The requirements a larp’s design places on character depend entirely on the creative vision of the larp.

    This means that when designing characters for a larp, it’s necessary to consider what the player needs to properly access the fiction of the larp, and then provide these elements to the participants.

    The main theme of the larp was revolution, but we sought to provide opportunities for quiet scenes as well. Photo: Suvi Korhonen, in-game.
    The main theme of the larp was revolution, but we sought to provide opportunities for quiet scenes as well. Photo: Suvi Korhonen, in-game.

    Cut Up the Body

    In the Finnish larp tradition I come from, the organizers typically write characters for all participants and cast the players as well. In Finnish larps based on Vampire, I’ve seen both purely organizer-created characters and characters developed together with the organizer and the player. The same method is used in Nordic-style larps such as College of Wizardry and Inside Hamlet, although College of Wizardry allows the players significant leeway in how to use or discard the written material. When I talk about larps with pre-written characters, I mean it in this context.

    In larps with pre-written characters, the role is conceived as a unified whole, a complete concept, but you can break it into the pieces that a player needs to access the fiction. Although no character element is mandatory for a larp to work, many of the components that make up the role of Hamlet are typical of the elements used to construct larp characters. For example, Hamlet has a background, a personality, a motivation, a social role, and connections to other characters.

    Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He has a clearly defined social position in the milieu of the play: he’s the son of the murdered king, a royal scion of a distinguished family. His perhaps most famous trait is indecisiveness. We know that he studied in Wittenberg and he’s motivated to find out whether his uncle Claudius killed his father.

    If we see Hamlet as a collection of elements instead of a sacred whole, we can start playing around with them. We can change an element or two and see what happens. Perhaps he’s not indecisive but cruel, waiting for others to debase themselves before making his move. Maybe his background is not academic but military. Once we give up on the integrity of the role, we start to notice that while some character elements are structurally necessary for the larp (this could be Hamlet’s social role), others can be changed with no broad consequences to how the larp works (Hamlet’s personality and background). As always, which elements are necessary and which can be arbitrary depends on the larp.

    The player usually absorbs the character as a written text with all the character elements laid out. In traditional written characters, the writer sets these out to fulfil their vision: this is what Hamlet is like, expressed in words trait by trait. This is the character’s background, personality, and so on.

    But what if the larp’s writer didn’t make the choice of how to combine character elements? What if the player made these choices instead?

    An Internet Personality Test

    Enlightenment in Blood was a larp based on Vampire: The Masquerade about the revolution that brought down the Prince of the city. Because of its size of approximately 200 participants, it was conceived as a simulation of a supernatural city during the night of an insurrection. Some characters were central to the revolution, while others were more on the periphery, pursuing their own stories. It had multiple locations in the Friedrichshain area of Berlin.

    In Enlightenment in Blood, our players assembled their own characters using a software tool called Larpweaver (created by the Texan company Incognito Limited). They got an email inviting them into the system, logged on, and started making choices. Our inspiration for this was the endless array of internet personality tests: you answer questions and the test tells you whether you’re a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw, an Autobot or a Decepticon.

    We wanted to build that same breeziness, the fun of making little choices about who you want to play, into a part of the experience of character creation.

    Key goals of pre-written characters created by the organizers are to allow a cohesive vision of the larp, and to make sure that characters are connected to each other thematically, in groups and through personal connections. This same goal is also behind the motivation to use Larpweaver instead of allowing people to create their own characters from scratch.

    The core design element of Enlightenment in Blood is the group. All characters belonged to three groups, and you could select which groups you wanted to be part of during character creation. The most important of these groups, and the defining choice of using the character creation system, was the primary group. This represented the principal social context of the character. It determined the character’s starting location, allegiance, and who the character hung out with.

    Examples of primary groups in Enlightenment in Blood are the Stirner Group, comprised of old school anarchist vampires, and the White Eyes, who are junkie werewolves. In both cases, the group also provides the broad outlines of a character concept.

    Because the primary groups formed the superstructure of the larp, most of them were limited to ten members. We decided to make the primary groups the main design structure instead of the supernatural Clans and Tribes traditionally used in World of Darkness larps for this purpose. This way, you could choose your supernatural type more freely. In the system, many of the possible categories of supernatural creatures didn’t have an upper limit. Theoretically, there could have been a 100 vampires from the Toreador Clan in the larp.

    For those interested, the most popular vampire Clans in the larp were Brujah, Toreador, and Malkavian, although the Tremere and the Ventrue were only available to characters from certain primary groups such as the philosophically- minded Shadow Enlightenment.

    The third group in character creation was called the secondary group. The idea was that while the primary group represented the character’s main allegiance, the secondary group would be a secret club to which the character belonged. The idea was to make allegiances more complicated and mix up the larp’s social structures. However, based on player comments and feedback, this feature of the larp’s design largely failed to play out in practice. My understanding is that this outcome came down to the way we misjudged the pace of the larp, as well as difficulties players had locating and recognizing members of their secondary groups in a geographically scattered game.

    In terms of pacing, our chief worry was always that the revolution of the larp would lack energy. Because of this, we encouraged people to play fast and hard. This happened to such a degree that more nuanced elements such as the secondary groups were lost in the general riot.

    A Little Piece of You

    Enlightenment in Blood was a commercial project, part of the larger World of Darkness Berlin event. The larp was organized on a model where some of the work is done by organizers who get paid for their work, and some by volunteers. One of our key goals when we created the character creation system was to make the writing work less daunting and to increase the scalability of the larp.

    The method of larp organizing where each participant is provided with a written character is a lot of work, especially in big larps. It also makes the larp very hard to scale up. If you want to add ten new players, you need to write ten new characters and connect them to other characters through individually created relations.

    On the organizer side, the benefit of a Larpweaver-based system such as the one described here is to make the work of writing a larp more efficient and streamlined by exploiting the fact that many characters can share common elements. Once the basic infrastructure of character generation has been built, it also makes it possible to scale up the larp quickly. For example, Enlightenment in Blood experienced a surge of sign ups in the months leading up to the larp, ultimately almost doubling its size. It would have been impossible to write new individual characters for these players, but writing new material for Larpweaver to expand its options for new players required much less effort.

    However, we felt that the system has to offer something to the player too. While it’s useful for the organizer, that fact by itself doesn’t improve the player’s experience. This is why we focused on player choice. Using the system, the player could customize the character to suit their needs. A similar effect could be achieved by asking players to write their characters themselves from scratch, but Larpweaver has the advantage of maintaining thematic coherence in the larp because all the material is written by the organizers even though the combinations of elements are chosen by the players.

    This follows from our general idea that each Vampire: The Masquerade larp we make uses bespoke game mechanics and a design specific to that larp, instead of a larp design template that would be shared across multiple larps in the style of The Mind’s Eye Theatre. Following our general philosophy for making a Vampire larp, the organizers had minimal presence during the larp itself. Instead, we attempted to load everything into it at character creation and during workshops, and then let it run with only minimal interference.

    In Enlightenment in Blood, we felt that although all characters were assembled from pieces provided by the system, each also needed a unique element. This was the character seed: a short concept based on the primary group. So for example, after you’d chosen the Stirner Group, you could choose a veteran Anarch vampire who was a student of Max Stirner in life or the junior member of the group, a scholar of anarchist philosophy.

    As text, the seeds were usually no longer than one paragraph of text, because everything beyond the core idea was provided by other parts of the character creation system. The system was focused on providing the elements necessary for the larp to function in a coherent fashion, but other parts of the character were left with more detail for the player to ll out. The most important of these was personal history. Although the combination of a character seed and group affiliations suggests a lot of history, the player had a lot of space to create more detail in the way players in Vampire larps do in many countries.

    Unique Personalities

    The most complicated part of the Larpweaver system was related to character personality. For this part of the process, we created a questionnaire asking different questions about what kind of a character the participant wanted to play. Based on the answers, the system assigned personality elements to the character.

    An example of a question is: “What sort of themes do you wish your conflict to be built around?” Response options included “I’m interested in fate and how to change it” and “I’m interested in questions of control.”

    In the case of this particular question, our character personalities were built around the idea of conflicting traits, so that the essential dynamic of the character would be formed out of a discrepancy in the character’s personality. For example, the character could be cheerfully unhappy, someone who is comforted by the fact that everything sucks. The idea behind this is to force the player to make interpretations instead of playing a character as written. It also creates the necessary space for rewarding internal play when the player can balance different conflicting impulses to determine the way to act.

    The questionnaire also provided elements of the character’s history that were relevant to the theme of the larp. Enlightenment in Blood was about the revolution of the abandoned vampire underclass against their Camarilla masters. The Camarilla is a vampire organization in Vampire: The Masquerade, the role-playing game on which Enlightenment in Blood was based.

    To make the revolution personal, the system gave every character a specific trauma related to the Camarilla, chosen based on the player’s answers when they used Larpweaver. For example, the character might have been tortured by the Camarilla, or maybe the Camarilla arranged for the character’s friends to be executed.

    This is a good example of the way Larpweaver encourages thinking about characters in a systemic fashion. If a theme should be present in all characters, it can be built straight into the mechanism the player will use to build their character.

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    Other Choices

    Apart from these choices, we also included a couple of specific elements in the character creation system to help players access the larp. One familiar to Vampire larpers is the Disciplines or superpowers that are part of the original role-playing game. We simplified them to make them work better in a larp like this, and gave the players the choice of which ones they wanted to have.

    This is a good example of a choice that can be totally free, with no limits on how many characters have this or that power. Because in the case of this particular larp the powers characters had didn’t affect the overall design structure (although naturally it affected the play of individual players), the choice could be free of the kind of quotas we needed to use for the primary groups. Game balance was less of an issue in general because the game mechanics we used for vampire powers made them much less powerful than in most other interpretations of Vampire.

    In addition to the revolution, another of the themes of the larp was enlightenment, especially from a vampire perspective. We wanted the larp also to have space for reflection and even ideological debate. To support this, we articulated a number of different possible ideologies for the characters, which could then be chosen during character creation. For example, a character could be a materialist who didn’t really believe in the great vampire myths of Caine and the Antediluvians.

    This element in the character would then allow the player to access this particular subject matter inside the larp, in the form of conversations with other characters or just personal reflection.

    Early Adopters

    The way we deconstructed characters and arranged the pieces into a set of choices in Enlightenment in Blood is just one way of doing it. Every larp has its own demands, and therefore, even if the software tool or the basic principles of character deconstruction are the same, the implementation of the character creation system can be very different.

    In Enlightenment in Blood, much of the action was physical. You could dance, move from location to location, play out fight scenes (these were first resolved using our simple mechanic and then mimed out), make out with someone on a sofa, or be part of a roaring crowd of rebels. Because of this, much of the design in Larpweaver was about organizing the players into the various parts of the larp.

    The second larp where characters were created in Larpweaver was Parliament of Shadows, organized by many of the same people who worked on Enlightenment in Blood. In Parliament of Shadows, we already chose to do some things differently than in the previous larp because of the different subject matter and priorities of the larp.

    Because Parliament of Shadows was a much smaller game in which players were expected to be able to generate play out of discussions with the same few people they interacted with, we made the character seeds much more detailed and focused on giving more personality options. The themes of the larp called for the characters to have personal relationships with local Camarilla history as well as recent EU legislative fights, so we included options where you chose a particular historical event you’d been part of and a specific EU law you’d worked on. (The characters were Camarilla ghouls lobbying the EU on behalf of their undead masters).

    It is my belief that this way of approaching characters can work very well especially when making bigger larps, but I also suspect that the larp we make now with these tools will seem primitive, even simplistic once we develop our understanding of this approach further. Hamlet has been carved up, but we’re still experimenting on how to best arrange the body parts.

    Enlightenment in Blood

    Participation Fee: €90
    Players: approximately 200
    Date: May 12, 2017
    Location: Berlin, Germany
    Production: White Wolf Publishing and Participation Design Agency
    Lead designer and writer: Juhana Pettersson
    Designer: Bjarke Pedersen
    Writers: Sarah Lynne Bowman, Mika Loponen, and Jesper Kristiansen with David Pusch & Daniel Thikötter
    Producers: Bjarke Pedersen & Johanna Koljonen
    Producer (locations): Zora Hädrich
    Werewolf ritual design: René Kragh Pedersen
    Character creation design: Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson & Matthew Webb
    Character creation tool (Larpweaver): Matthew Webb, Samuel Phelps & Riley Seaman / Incognita Limited
    Social Media tool (Undernet): Kin software developed by Thomas Mertz, Per Sikker Hansen, Alena Košinárová, Richard Wetzel, and Daniel Sundström
    Workshop design: Johanna Koljonen & Bjarke Pedersen
    Runtime lead: Johanna Koljonen
    Runtime organizing and NPC coordination: David Pusch
    Runtime organizing and location coordination: Daniel Thikötter
    Runtime organizing: Monica Traxl & Bjarke Pedersen
    Creative consulting: René Kragh Pedersen, Maiju Ruusunen & Sarah Lynne Bowman
    Documentation lead: Brody Condon
    Documentation: Keren Chernizon & Tuomas Hakkarainen
    White Wolf: Karim Muammar & Martin Ericsson

    © 2016 Participation | Design | Agency AB. World of Darkness®, Vampire: The Masquerade®, Werewolf: The Apocalypse®, Mage: The Ascension®, Wraith: The Oblivion®, Changeling: The Dreaming®, Copyright© 2017 White Wolf Publishing AB All rights reserved.

    References

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. “Enlightenment in Blood: A Pervasive World of Darkness Nordic Larp.” Nordiclarp.org. Accessed December 11, 2017. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/05/29/enlightenment-blood-pervasive-world-darkness-nordic-larp/

    Fatland, Eirik. “Interaction Codes – Understanding and Establishing Patterns in Player Improvisation.” In Role, Play, Art, edited by Thorbiörn Fritzon and Tobias Wrigstad, 17-34. Stockholm: Föreningen Knutpunkt, 2006.

    Koljonen, Johanna. “‘I Could a Tale Unfold Whose Lightest Word Would Harrow up thy Soul.’ Lessons from Hamlet.” In Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, 191-202. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004.

    Pedersen, Bjarke, Johanna Koljonen, Simon Svensson, Kasper Sjøgren, and Nina Runa Essendrop (2017). Inside Hamlet. https://www.insidehamlet.com/ Run: Helsingør, Denmark, 2017.

    Pettersson, Juhana. (2017). Enlightenment in Blood. https://www.worldofdarkness.berlin/ (Accessed December 11, 2017) Run: Berlin, Germany, 2017

    Pettersson, Maria, Juhana Pettersson and Bjarke Pedersen. (2017). Parliament of Shadows. http://parliamentofshadows.com/ Run: Brussels, Belgium, 2017

    Pohjola, Mike. (2015-2016). Baltic Warriors. http://www.balticwarriors.net/ A tour of eight larps in Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; St. Petersburg, Russia; Sopot, Poland; Kiel, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden.

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.

    Cover photo: We assumed that simplistic combat rules would discourage fighting. Instead the opposite happened: Simple combat meant more combat. Photo: Tuomas Hakkarainen, in-game.

  • Lobbying for the Dead – Vampire larp at the European Parliament

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    Lobbying for the Dead – Vampire larp at the European Parliament

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    Organizing the first ever larp played partially at the European Parliament gave the opportunity to explore design concepts such as indexical larp, where the fiction of the larp corresponds to actual reality as closely as possible.

    On 24th November 2017, the actual elected real-life Members of the European Parliament Miapetra Kumpula-Natri and Julia Reda sat in a meeting room at the European Parliament in Brussels and listened to arguments from lobbying organizations such as the European Security Forum and the Eichel Group. The subject of the day was a proposed piece of EU legislation called ETIAS, The European Travel Information and Authorisation System.

    It’s a similar mechanism to the U.S. ESTA, and requires travelers to the EU to register in advance so that their information can be checked against multiple databases.

    While the MEPs and the law were real, the lobbyists were not: They were participating in a larp called Parliament of Shadows, based on the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade. The MEPs played themselves in a larp seeking to bring reality and fiction as close as possible in the world of vampire lobbying.

    The Aesthetics of Reality

    The World of Darkness is a fictional setting shared by roleplaying games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The core idea is that the World of Darkness is much like our world, except vampires, werewolves and other beings skulk in the shadows unbeknownst to us. The concept that the fictional world and the real world strongly resemble each other is built into the setting.

    For Parliament of Shadows, we chose a corner of this world rarely visited in any of the previously published World of Darkness material: High level EU politics. All player characters were professional lobbyists, and the larp started with them doing what lobbyists do: Going to the European Parliament, pitching ideas, sitting in meetings.

    One member of our core team, Maria Pettersson, works at the European Parliament as a political advisor. She designed and ran the segment of the larp that took place inside the Parliament building. This segment involved two actual MEPs, half a dozen NPC players, and assistants recruited among people who work at the Parliament. At maximum complexity, it involved six simultaneous scenes ranging from the tunnels under the Parliament building to the Plenary Hall (the space they use for full sessions of the Parliament).

    The Parliament segment also presented new challenges to larp organizing because of the highly bureaucratic environment. In some cases, issues such as whether a door could be open or closed required extensive negotiation.

    In Vampire: The Masquerade, ancient and powerful vampires seek to influence the mortal world and shape it to their purposes. The current owners of the franchise, the Swedish company White Wolf Entertainment, have favored an explicitly political understanding of these genre elements. The vision of our larp was in line with this policy, and allowed us to link actual, real policies and goals into the supernatural setting of the World of Darkness in a natural way. This way, our ancient vampires were not only seeking to control the fate of humanity in the abstract, but also on the level of concrete, actual policy.

    Indexical

    “360 degrees” is a common aesthetic idea in Nordic larp. It’s defined as larp where the visual surface matches that of the fiction. So if the larp is set in a spaceship, the venue is made to look like a spaceship. Ideally, you could turn around 360 degrees (hence the name) and not see anything that would break the illusion. From this perspective, what we did in Parliament of Shadows goes beyond 360 aesthetics and into an unusual level of larp fidelity.

    The characters are lobbyists working to influence European politics, so one of our venues is the actual European Parliament. The characters are working to influence a real law and actual MEPs participate as supporting characters, playing themselves. When the characters go for cocktails, the venue is one that hosts parties held by real lobbying companies all the time.

    The larp doesn’t only seek to imitate the fiction on the level of visual surface, but to replace it with reality whenever possible. One player commented that this was the first larp he’d ever been to that required security clearance for all participants. It was necessary to get the players into the Parliament building.

    We call this style indexical larp, where the world of the fiction and the real milieu of the larp correspond indexically, that is one to one, as much as possible.

    The two earlier World of Darkness larps organized by the same production company responsible for Parliament of Shadows, Participation Design Agency, also attempted to be as indexical as possible, although in a less dramatic way. The vampire techno party larp End of the Line always took place in the same venue in-game and off-game, whether in Helsinki, New Orleans or Berlin.

    In the Berlin urban larp Enlightenment in Blood, all venues were similarly the same in-game and off-game. The nightclub was the same nightclub, just with vampires.

    However, the indexicality of End of the Line and Enlightenment in Blood was more a question of convenience than a central aesthetic tenet. In those larps, it was easier to keep things real. In Parliament of Shadows, we used indexicality to an aggressive degree, including the use of real EU legal text and real Parliament workers to complement the physical surroundings.

    A participant who works at the Parliament and played herself in the larp. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.
    A participant who works at the Parliament and played herself in the larp. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.

    Into the Breach

    The concept of indexicality also came into play in our collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux. The Cultural Institute is an official organization tasked with facilitating Finnish culture in the Benelux countries. They agreed to support us in an unorthodox way: By lending their facilities and personnel to us for a scene.

    All the player characters were blood-addicted mortals who served distant, ancient vampires. We wanted to build a strong contrast between the daytime world of lobbying and politics and the nighttime world of blood and terror inhabited by the vampires. To this end, we created a Brussels vampire scene with supporting players. They held a perpetual, degenerate party at an extravagant hotel suite the player characters could visit.

    The idea behind Brussels vampire society was that this was the city where ancient vampires sent their progeny to learn politics. So basically, the local vampires were all ultra-privileged scions of the high and mighty. We called these wastrel vampires, powerful fools who spent their time playing cruel games with each other, and whoever happened to walk through the door.

    One of these characters had decided to continue his mortal career in the arts by making a film that would also reveal the existence of the vampires to humanity. One of the tasks of a lobbying group called the European Cultural Council was to look after the Masquerade, the rule that keeps vampires hidden. They gained information that suggested that the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux was funding a movie that would expose vampire secrets.

    Armed with this information, the characters went to the actual, real Cultural Institute to meet with the people who in real life also made this type of funding decisions and attempted to dissuade them from the project.

    In addition to creating cool scenes, these parts of the larp had an additional goal of showcasing larp to people who didn’t have experience with it. Since larp is best understood by trying, we felt that it was a good idea to create an opportunity for people who work in cultural institutions to experience it from the inside.

    Involve the People

    There’s an activist slogan that goes “Nothing about us without us”. This can also function as a larp design idea. Simply put, what happens when you involve the people larp is about in the creation of the larp?

    In the case of the Parliament of Shadows, our milieu is the world of politics and lobbying in the European Union. This world was also part of our organizing team. We had people who worked at the European Parliament and people who worked as lobbyists.

    The idea here is twofold. First, involving the people brings a higher level of fidelity and realism to the project. Second, it means that in some way, you have to face the people the larp is about. This is not the same as taking an uncritical stance. It just means that whatever you say, you’re going to say directly to those you’re talking about. It brings accountability to the process of larp design.

    In the case of Parliament of Shadows, this method of involving the people wasn’t used in a particularly dramatic manner. It came naturally from the idea of indexical larp. In the case of this larp, involving the people made our take on EU politics infinitely more nuanced than it otherwise could have been. It also directly gave us the option to organize the larp at all, since it was dependent on the access provided by Maria Pettersson.

    However, in others larps, this same method has been used in a more political way. Two of the organizers of Parliament of Shadows also worked on the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar. In Halat hisar, the larp was about the Palestinian political situation transposed onto Finnish alternative history. The team making the larp had Finnish and Palestinian members. Making that larp, we felt it was important that the Palestinian experience be represented in the process from the start of the design to the larp itself.

    Playing with Somebody Else’s Toys

    Working with an established setting like the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is informational. The players can be assumed to know the basics of the setting already, so they don’t need to be explained in as much detail as they otherwise would. Since the amount of information players can digest is limited, this means that informational real estate is freed up for other purposes.

    Not all of our players were familiar with the World of Darkness and for some, this was their first larp. Their lack of World of Darkness experience didn’t hinder their play, but the fact that most participants had it provided the larp with a collective informational advantage.

    Disadvantages arise especially when the larp attempts to develop the setting in a new direction or create something that’s not in the style of previous works. Since the player already knows the setting, they assume that everything follows that template. If the larp seeks to do something unusual, these deviations need to be worked through with the players. In the case of Parliament of Shadows, we provided all players with information on how we’d be using the World of Darkness, so that they could adjust their vision of it accordingly.

    However, problems can arise when there’s an informational discrepancy between players. If all players encounter our take on the ghouls, for example, they accept that ghouls are now like this. However, as was the case, if the player doesn’t encounter our version of Pentex (an evil corporation) but instead only hears about, they’ll picture it in their minds according to the standard template. This is natural: The whole point of using an established setting is to have that standard template in the head of the player.

    This means that the Pentex of those characters who participated in the Pentex scenes fit with our interpretation and our larger framework of the larp. We chose to use Pentex as an element in the larp because they provided us with an agenda that would be interesting from the standpoint of political lobbying.

    The majority of the players were not present in the initial Pentex scenes. This meant that when they heard that Pentex was present in the larp, their mental imagery came from the sources they knew: Vampire’s sister roleplaying game Werewolf: the Apocalyse. This led to a confusing situation where players who met Pentex were happy with it, and players who didn’t were unhappy, because they felt Pentex was tonally inconsistent with the rest of the larp.

    This is a problem created by using a pre-existing setting in a specific way. In many larps, the larp is the only source of setting information available, so the organizers can assume that they control what’s true in the larp’s world and what isn’t. In a larp based on a shared setting this is not the case: Players have pre-existing ideas. These ideas can be used effectively, but they can also lead to problems, especially in a larp where it’s important to set a specific tone.

    Lobbyists for European intelligence agencies hiding under the table of a translator's booth to eavesdrop on a meeting. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.
    Lobbyists for European intelligence agencies hiding under the table of a translator’s booth to eavesdrop on a meeting. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.

    A Tight Agenda

    The indexical approach to larp informed the way Parliament of Shadows was structured. When a real-life lobbyist comes to Brussels, they book meetings, attend cocktail parties, go to dinners. Their schedule is packed.

    Taking the real-life template of a lobbyist’s schedule, we organized the larp around a similarly tight masterplan built around pre-arranged events the characters had on their planners. This way, we knew where the players were going to be at any given time, and could move things along quickly. Although we had a very large number of locations in Brussels, many of them existed only for an hour or two before the characters moved on to the next venue.

    This method also allowed us to splinter the larp into small groups experiencing their individual scenes at the same time in different locations. Bjarke Pedersen from our core team compared Parliament of Shadows to the Danish concept of 700% larp. In a 700% larp, one or two players experience a highly choreographed rollercoaster of an urban larp which often involved dozens of supporting players. Although our larp had 20 players, its structural concept was similar to 700% because of its predictability and reliance on pre-planned scenes.

    Another structural predecessor was the final larp of the Baltic Warriors tour organized in the summer of 2015. All the previous Baltic Warriors larps consisted of a single location, but the finale was an urban game in which politicians, lobbyists and activists worked on issues of eutrophication in the Baltic Sea.

    Here are some examples of the types of scenes characters could go through in Parliament of Shadows:

    • Hide under the table in a translator’s booth in a meeting hall at the Parliament to eavesdrop on a secret meeting.
    • Meet the vampire Prince of Brussels in a suite in the art nouveau style Hotel Metropole.
    • Embrace the Spiral worshiped by the Black Spiral Dancer tribe of werewolves in a dank Brussels forest as a prerequisite to a lobbying deal for the Pentex corporation.
    • Look over the city from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.
    • Imbibe vampire blood from a suspect ziplock bag in a dirty bar toilet.

    Indeed, the larp’s schedule was so packed that allowing the players enough time for socializing became a concern at one point of the design process.

    Claimed by Larp

    After 2017, the Plenary Hall of the European Parliament is now a place where larp has happened. One of the goals of Parliament of Shadows was very consciously to take larp into places it has never been before, both physically, conceptually and socially. For many of the politicians and Parliament workers, it was their first experience with larp as an artform. (It was also the first time my mother tried larp, in a small supporting role.)

    Our hope is that it can be used to bring new legitimacy to larp as an artform. After all, every day the Members of Parliament bring cultural events such as concerts and film screenings to the European Parliament. It was high time that one of these events was a larp.

    Parliament of Shadows

    The larp was produced by Participation Design Agency in collaboration with Oneiros and White Wolf Entertainment.

    Date: 23-25 November 2017
    Location: Multiple venues in Brussels, Belgium, including the European Parliament and Arc de Triomphe
    Number of players: 20
    Overall number of participants: 30
    Designer, writer and producer: Maria Pettersson, Juhana Pettersson & Bjarke Pedersen
    Executive Producer (Participation Design Agency): Johanna Koljonen
    Executive Producer (Oneiros): Tom Boeckx
    Producer (Brussels): Anne Marchadier & Wim Peeters
    Runtime organizer: Tonja Goldblatt
    Documentation: Tuomas Puikkonen

    References

    AbdulKarim, Fatima; Arouri, Faris; Kangas, Kaisa; Pettersson, Maria; Pettersson, Juhana; Mustafa, Riad and Rabah, Mohamad. (2013 and 2016). Halat hisar. http://www.nordicrpg.fi/halathisar/ (Accessed December 27, 2017) Run: Otava, Finland, 2016

    Bridges, Bill et al. Werewolf: The Apocalypse 2nd Edition. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf, 1994.

    Ericsson, Martin; Pedersen, Bjarke and Pettersson, Juhana. (2016-2017). End of the Line. https://www.participation.design/end-of-the-line (Accessed December 27, 2017) Run: Helsinki, Finland, 2016

    Pettersson, Juhana. “Baltic Warriors: Helsinki – Saving the Environment with Zombies.” In The Nordic Larp Yearbook, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 8-15. Copenhagen: Rollespilsakademiet, 2014.

    Pettersson, Juhana. (2017). Enlightenment in Blood. https://www.worldofdarkness.berlin/ (Accessed December 11, 2017) Run: Berlin, Germany, 2017

    Pettersson, Maria; Pettersson, Juhana and Pedersen, Bjarke. (2017). Parliament of Shadows. http://parliamentofshadows.com/ Run: Brussels, Belgium, 2017

    Pohjola, Mike. (2015-2016). Baltic Warriors. http://www.balticwarriors.net/ A tour of eight larps in Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; St. Petersburg, Russia; Sopot, Poland; Kiel, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden.

    Rein•Hagen, Mark et al. Vampire: The Masquerade 2nd Edition. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf, 1992.

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.

    Cover photo: The last scene of the larp was played in a cultural center called Beursshouwburg, recently the location of the Feminist Curse Night event. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game. Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

  • The Last Ropecon at Dipoli

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    Ropecon is a Finnish roleplaying game convention. It’s also been something that’s been a part of my life for twenty years now.

    It was first organized in 1994, but I missed the initial years. I’m pretty sure my first Ropecon was 1996. I was sixteen and had just discovered Werewolf: the Apocalypse. I had made a character I figured was real badass, and wanted to play it in a game.

    Mike Pohjola places a viking helmet on top of a flapboard at our Baltic Warriors presentation.Dipoli is a conference center in Espoo, Finland. It has been home to Ropecon from 1998, but now was the last year. Next time, it’s going to be at Messukeskus, or Helsinki Fair Centre.

    For me, Dipoli was “the new Ropecon venue” for maybe ten years, because the first ones I attended had been at another place. The building has come to define the event with its labyrinthine interior and plentiful greenery outside. The event is usually held at the end of July, but this time it was last weekend.

    A larp prop from the game Tonnin stiflat, this is a “torpedo” of canisters that are filled with booze for smuggling during the Prohibition. It was used at the larp costume galaMy Ropecon experiences tend to be defined by the program items I go there to hold, and this year was no different. We started on Friday with Mike Pohjola by doing a presentation about Baltic Warriors, the larp campaign we’re organizing this summer. This is something I’ve done a number of years: Go to Ropecon to talk about my latest things.

    I got downright sentimental later when we went to drink outside with a few friends. We headed to the end of a pier down at the waterfront, because I wanted to stand there one more time. I’ve published or helped to publish five books at Ropecon, and after the book publishing presentations, we’ve had a little champagne to celebrate at the pier. This time we didn’t have a book, but it was still nice to go there anyway.

    On Saturday night, I held a presentation called Larpin rajoilla, the Limits of Larp, with Maria Pettersson. Our idea was simply to see what are all the places larp has gone to, geographically, socially, within the human body. It was one of the most fun presentations I’ve ever worked on, and seemed to go down well.

    Here’s the Argentinean video about Hitler and Vampire larp we used:

    On Sunday, we walked around the con area with Maria. It felt nostalgic to think about all the things that had happened there, the larps we’ve run, the books we’ve published, the presentations, the parties, the games and the conversations.

    Ropecon will go on, but I suspect that at least for the next ten years, it will feel like its at “the new venue”.

    Cover photo: The view at the entrance on Sunday. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.

  • Baltic Warriors Tallinn

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    For the venue, we had the museum ship Suur Tõll. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.I work as a larp producer in the Baltic Warriors project, and first game of our summer season was played last Saturday in Tallinn. It’s quite intimidating to go another country to do a game there. I had never even played in an Estonian larp, but it seemed to go well.

    This summer, we’re doing a series of seven Baltic Warriors games, each in a different country. In each game, the subject is eutrophication and other environmental disasters afflicting the Baltic Sea. The zombies are there to remind us that while we talk, the situation is steadily getting worse.

    One of the techniques we used was the media wall, in which characters can make news headlines. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.We had the distinct advantage of having a really cool venue, the ice breaker Suur Tõll, now a museum. It was almost too spectacular: It was easy to imagine a much bigger, much longer game taking place there.

    The larp, like all Baltic Warriors games, was divided into two parts: Politics and zombie action. During the political part, characters come together to talk about a given issue that’s being voted upon in the parliament.
    After the debate has gone for a few hours, the zombies attack. In this case, two viking zombies shambled forth from the hold of the ship, attacking the living. The museum was open to normal visitors during this time, and it was fun to see how they reacted to the screaming and gurgling that was going on.

    Not even the Bible helps against newly zombified people. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.After this, we have Baltic Warriors games in St Petersburg, Gdansk, Kiel, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. It will be fun to see how they change depending on the players, the local issues, the venue, and other matters.

    Cover photo: The Estonian producer of Baltic Warriors, Aapo Reitask, as a viking zombie. Ingame-photo by Juhana Pettersson.

  • Murder in Helsinki

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    Murder in Helsinki

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    Tonnin stiflat is a Finnish larp campaign played in Helsinki in 2014. Consisting of three games, it was organized by the veteran city game designers Niina Niskanen and Simo Järvelä.

    Photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen.The setting is Helsinki in the year 1927, and the subject matter crime, prohibition, working class life and the violent legacy of the civil war. The characters were bootleggers and policemen, struggling artists and their sybaritic patrons.

    Niskanen and Järvelä have edited and published a documentation book about the larps in English. It’s downloadable here, for free, and definitely worth a look.

    The book is especially welcome as Finnish larp has traditionally been something of a poor cousin in the milieu of Nordic larp. There have been interesting games aplenty, but documentation has been scarce and Nordic attention usually limited to the games that Finnish writers have pushed the hardest, like Ground Zero.

    City games played in an open urban environment have traditionally been a Finnish strong suit, and Niskanen and Järvelä are masters of this form. It’s especially nice to see this type of game documented in book form and in English, as the games that tend to receive this treatment are usually one-weekend affair played in a closed environment, such as Kapo and Mad About the Boy.

    Photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen.Tonnin stiflat (the title is an expression for very expensive shoes in the traditional Helsinki slang) benefits greatly from the fact that it’s been documented by the Finnish larp photographer Tuomas Puikkonen. His photos are all over the book, and you can see the full set here.

    There are many good larp photographers in the Nordic countries, but Puikkonen distinguishes himself by his ability to be in the moment and capture the subjective feeling of the player.

    The only real complaint that I have for this book is that it’s so short. I could’ve read more about this stuff.

    Cover photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen. Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

  • Looking at You – Larp, Documentation and Being Watched

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    Looking at You – Larp, Documentation and Being Watched

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    So far, Nordic larp has produced two games that have become international news stories that all kinds of sites cannibalize and copy from each other: the Danish 2013 rerun of Panopticorp, and the Polish-Danish Harry Potter game College of Wizardry. In both cases, the attention was fueled by solid documentation and good video from the game.

    In both cases, your private larp experience of co-creating and having fun with your friends suddenly had an audience literally in the millions. Even if only as a glimpse in a video on the website of the Daily Mail. If you don’t document games, they become forgotten ephemera that will live on only in the memories of the participants. If you do document and publish, private experiences can become public in increasingly impressive ways.

    The documentary filmmakers Cosmic Joke were present at College of Wizardry. Participants reported after the game that the game was changed and people played differently because of the cameras. Video footage and good photos are essential for fueling mass media coverage, but they also influence the game as it is being played.

    Secret Larp

    Identlos was a Finnish larp held in Helsinki on the 26th of October, 2014. It was organized by Jamie MacDonald and Petri Leinonen. The larp was about identity in the modern surveillance society. One of my most interesting experiences as a player was leaving my cell phone home.

    The last time I was without my cell phone was in the spring of 2013. It fell on the sidewalk and the screen cracked. The superfast, express repair took an hour. An hour I had to spend phone-less. The time before that was in 2009.

    I was in North Korea for a week, and left my phone and other electronics in a strongbox at a hotel in Beijing.
    I never forget my phone. I get jittery if I have to be without something to do for longer than three minutes. When I have my phone with me, I’m completely trackable to any surveillance entities or curious phone company employees who might be interested. The phone can be used to listen to me remotely. Its list of contacts is a straightforward run through of everyone I associate with.

    Because of all this, going to Identlos was a no-brainer for me. It was a game about some of the most pressing issues of our time. It was also an interesting contribution to the discussion going on in the Nordic larp scene concerning documentation. Identlos wasn’t a secret game in the sense that it was hard to find out about it. It was advertised for potential players. Rather, all documentation during the event was forbidden. No photos, no video. Because of this, it’s secret in the sense that it’s hard for a person who wasn’t there to find out how it was. This is part of the design of the game.

    Meta

    In Identlos, most of the characters had escaped the surveillance networks of modern society, or wanted to do so. To do this, they had to leave behind most of the electronic niceties of the world we live in: social media, cell phones, massive media access.

    During the larp, the characters in the organization called Identlos did not have their phones with them, or credit cards or similar items connected to a network. Because of this, the players had to do without as well. We had to pay cash if we wanted to go to the bar.

    Despite the ban on documentation, apparently even radical anti-surveillance games are subject to the demands of the outside world. The game was held as part of the arts festival Mad House Helsinki. A photographer unconnected to the larp set up shop directly outside the main game area, separated from the action only by a curtain. We ran past him all the time, and many chose to participate in his portrait project, including myself. Considering the theme and the rules of Identlos, his presence seemed supremely ironic.

    Technically, his presence wasn’t against the rules, since he wasn’t in the game area. To the best of my knowledge, the ban on photo documentation of in-game action held.

    As a player, I couldn’t but help noticing that this also changes the power dynamics of how we talk about the game afterwards. Centrally-controlled photo policy and documentation is a useful tool for organizers who wish to influence the life their game has after it’s over. In the case of Identlos, no such tool exists. The only records are the words of the players and the impressions of the organizers.

    On Display

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was probably the opposite of Identlos when it comes to documentation and how exposed the players were to outside view. It was the first in a projected series of larps under the wider Baltic Warriors transmedia project. The principal design of the game was by Mike Pohjola. I did additional design and practical production.

    The game was played in the center of Helsinki in an outdoor cafe area on the 30th of August, 2014 in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

    The characters were politicians, lobbyists and activists talking about ecological issues related to the Baltic Sea, unaware of a zombie threat that would soon emerge.

    The public could just walk into the game area. The game was documented in the photos of random passerby, by journalists we had invited, and by our own documentation team. In short, it was total documentation anarchy. A picture from our game could be anywhere, and we had little control over it.

    In Baltic Warriors, this maximalist attitude towards documentation was mandated by the political nature of the project and the demands of making a game in this particular location with these particular partners. In future games, we will probably experiment with different kinds of photo and privacy policies, depending on the individual demands of each game.

    Our lax attitude towards being in public was criticized by some players after the game, especially regarding the political speeches that characters made on stage. Since the setting was contemporary and the issues real, larp could easily be mistaken for reality. At least until the zombies attacked. Baltic Warriors: Helsinki demonstrated that privacy and control over documentation are deal-breakers for many players. I have heard from many people who were fascinated by the project, but decided not to participate in what was essentially a public performance.

    You Have to Write

    Nowadays it’s not enough to play in a larp. You also have to write a 30.000 character essay about it, with original thoughts and profound reflection.

    Halat hisar was a political game. As organizers, we wanted to use it to get media attention for issues in Palestine, in addition to creating a meaningful game experience. The political side of the project made documentation a no-brainer. While the game itself would be played in a secluded location away from the public, it would be photographed. There would be video. After the game, we published a documentation book and a short documentary film.

    Our photographers Tuomas Puikkonen and Katri Lassila did excellent work documenting the game, but individual player experiences are essential for any true effort to understand what happened. That requires some effort on part of the players.

    I spent a lot of time after Halat hisar hounding our players into writing about the game and appearing on camera talking about it. Because of its political content, Halat hisar might be an extreme case, but ordinary ambitious Nordic games have these demands too. As a participant, you have the artwork lodged inside your brain after the game is over. For history to know what happened, that experience has to be drilled out.

    Of course, when the documentation effort is led by an organizer, like with Halat hisar, its content is also controlled by the organizers. As the person mainly responsible for the documentation, I tried to be honest, but all documentation entails choices of what to include and what to leave out.

    Documentation always has an angle and a perspective: What to shoot during the game? Whom to ask to get something written material about it? What to include in edited versions of the material, such as books and films?

    The Danish larp KAPO is an example of a game where the documentation was a player-led process. The documentation book published for the game was curated by a player, and though the organizers supplied photos and some words for it, they had no control over it.

    This is a great thing to happen to a game, but personal experience suggests that normally, a documentation effort has to be led pretty aggressively for it to happen. The motivation to do this tends to default to the organizers.

    So here’s the question: Is writing about your experience, appearing in photos and on video, part of the responsibility of playing in a game? Do you as the player have to accept the task of framing and expressing your inner processes for the consumption of a wider, non-playing audience?

    Reach

    In Identlos, I played a successful indie game designer apparently modeled after someone like Minecraft’s Markus Persson. I had escaped normal society because of the amount of hate among videogame fans. I lived in the secluded and small Identlos settlement, still making games but with a much smaller audience and less resources than before. I was happy with this.

    In some ways, the difference between what my character had left behind and what he had now was similar to experiences from my own life. I have personally felt the difference by making television for mass audiences and making larp for a small scene.

    Getting into character, I thought about how it would feel like to go from an audience of millions to an audience of hundreds. In some ways, the change would be small: You would still get your best feedback and comments from your friends. At the same time, it was hard to see how it wouldn’t be disappointing. Having a mass audience means you get to be part of the conversation on a wider level. You matter. Of course, making games for a limited audience means you still matter to those people. But scale is seductive.

    Scale is a classic problem of larp design. Given the extremely personal nature of larp, how to scale it up? How to reach a mass audience? These questions are further complicated by issues of safety and privacy. In Identlos, my character had chosen safety over reaching a mass audience. He had limited his horizons because he didn’t want to live in a world with no privacy. It was an interesting dichotomy, because usually in modern political discourse safety is presented as the result of obliterating privacy. The larp argued the opposite, or at least complicated the issue.

    Memory

    Due to the lack of photos, Identlos only exists in the memory of its participants. Since there has not been any text-based documentation either, the story of what the game was is left to the underground of folklore in the player community.

    When I started larping in the mid- Nineties, this was normal for all larps. There was very little documentation, even photos. Nowadays, it seems to me there’s photos from most larps, at least to some extent. What would have been normal in 1995 is experimental now that it was done by Identlos in 2014.

    That’s a facile statement, of course, since Identlos’ choices were informed by a larger political and theoretical apparatus about issues of privacy. Still, the result can be the same: Identlos can join the legions of games that will not be remembered. Does it matter if it’s by design or not, if the end result is the same?

    In terms of penetration into larp culture, my most influential game was probably Luminescence, which I organized with Mike Pohjola. I still see jokes about flour games in the most surprising places. It seems to me that the idea of the game, the “flour larp”, has become a meme of sorts, divorced from the original context. I suspect something similar happens when games like Panopticorp and College of Wizardry go through the distorting lens of global mass media.

    With political games like Baltic Warriors and Halat hisar, the goal is to change the world. Documentation and publicity are necessary parts of the project. But Identlos is a political game too. It’s just that it prioritizes its art over its politics, and makes us ask the question:

    Who are we larping for?

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Player documenting at Halat hisar by Johannes Axner is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

  • Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

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    Saving the Environment with Zombies

    Characters listening during the debate. (Play, Sarita Sharma)Tourists are standing in the queue for the Ferris wheel. Some are eating ice cream. Suddenly two viking zombies, covered in seaweed, shamble from behind the ticket booth. They stumble and crawl to reach the higher platform of the popup cafe. The zombies ignore the tourists and other bystanders, because they’re not players.

    There’s a public discussion of the state of the Baltic Sea going on in the cafe. There are politicians, activists and lobbyists arguing what should be done to save the Baltic Sea from an imminent ecological catastrophe, and who should do it. This is the larp.

    At first, the characters look at the zombies in confusion, but after the first couple are infected, panic ensues. As one of the organizers, I scramble around picking up purses, shoes and other items the players drop during their impressive zombification scenes. The zombie victims are rushed into makeup so they too can join the undead horde, and I take personal items to the back room of the cafe for safekeeping.

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was the first in a hopefully longer series of political larps about environmental issues related to the Baltic Sea, and especially to the way oxygen depletion in the water can lead to “dead zones” in which nothing lives. These are caused by many different things, but one culprit is industrial agriculture.

    This and future larps are part of the wider Baltic Warriors transmedia project. The creative outline of the project is by Mike Pohjola. He was also the principal designer for this larp, with some help from me. The Baltic Warriors project is a complicated international co-production, steered by the German film company Kinomaton.

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was played at the Allas popup cafe on the Helsinki waterfront on the 30th of August, 2014.

    Zombies

    Viking zombie design by Julius Sepponen (left) of Make Up For Ever Academy Finland. (Play, Juhana Pettersson)In 2011, I published an article called The Necessary Zombie in one of that year’s Knudepunkt books, Talk Larp. I argued that even an experimental larp must have some elements that are familiar to the participants, and that they are comfortable with. It’s hard to be creative if all the elements of the game feel foreign and opaque. I called this familiar element the Necessary Zombie because zombies are one example of an element familiar to most. We all know what to do in a zombie game.

    I never really expected to end up actually making a game with zombies, necessary or otherwise, but in the spring of 2014, I was asked to join the organizing team of Baltic Warriors. My job was to act as a larp producer in the context of the wider transmedia work.

    The Necessary Zombie has more to do with Baltic Warriors than just the zombies. Baltic Warriors is a political creative project, and that means it’s supposed to reach people. As transmedia projects tend to do, it consists of many different kinds of media operating on different levels. Some are national or international, and others, such as larp, are local.

    In Pohjola’s larp design, the zombie is meant to liven up an otherwise dry subject, and to make the game easier to approach for the participants. It also acts as a blunt metaphor. In our fiction, the Dead Zones forming and growing in the Baltic Sea would make long-dead viking warriors rise from their watery graves as terrifying undead monsters seeking to attack the living. In the game, the political debate was cut short by the attack of the viking zombies.

    This went into the heart of the political analysis underlying our game: Everyone agrees that something should be done to help the Baltic Sea.

    Yet very little is happening. If this continues, soon it will be too late. Too much talk, too little action, and the viking zombies will get you. Or the damage to the sea will be so severe, it can’t be fixed.

    Risks

    The Finnish Minister of the Environment in the post-game panel discussion. (Post-game, Miia Laine)In its first game, the Baltic Warriors project was following ideas about rapid prototyping and iterative game design championed by Eirik Fatland and Bjarke Pedersen, as well as following my own experiences in the use of a test game to help with the design of the larp Halat hisar. The basic idea is pretty simple: Since larp is relatively cheap and easy to produce, why not try out ideas in smaller games before committing resources and time?

    This attitude also encourages taking creative risks. Will it work? We’ll see! It’s a test game. We also had a reason to run a test game that went beyond the demands of the game itself. The transmedia nature of the wider Baltic Warriors project demands that we document the larps thoroughly. In the test game, our documentary crew would get valuable experience with how to shoot larp.

    The location was provided by one of the partners, the Korjaamo cultural center. As a larp space, the open-air cafe was pretty much the opposite of private: In addition to our documentation team and reporters and photographers from various media, there were tourists and random passersby. Indeed, this was part of the design. You could jump into the game after a brief talk with an organizer.

    It was supposed to work so that you’d get a short instant-character, a couple of pointers about what you could do, and you’d be ready to start playing. You were a citizen, a version of yourself, who had come to the meeting to air some of your own concerns about the state of the Baltic Sea.

    Unfortunately, this was one of the parts of the game that didn’t really work. We only had two people who did this. One of them managed to become part of the game, the other didn’t until the zombie attack, which had a democratizing effect.

    Baltic Warriors is the second political larp project I’ve been involved in, after Halat hisar. In both cases, using the game to get media attention for the issues has been a part of the overall strategy of the project. Getting media interest for a game is really about how good a story it makes. Halat hisar was easy to publicize: Palestinian larp in Finland is a good story. Baltic Warriors was not especially difficult, but definitely harder than Halat hisar had been. It didn’t have an exceptional hook, which meant it had to compete with all other newsworthy events and cultural happenings going on at the same time.

    We got a few mentions on radio and local news, and one really nice article and video in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Helsinki. I only later found out how this had come to be: through relentless badgering of the paper, by many different people in our organizing group.

    Organizer Mike Pohjola being interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat during the larp. (Play, Juhana Pettersson)

    The Participants

    During the production we joked that we had more partner organizations than we had players. The punchline was that this was literally true. Of course, this was because our small game was the pilot for a big project. It had the support structure of a much more ambitious production.

    Our system for who played in the game was somewhat chaotic. We had a public sign up, we invited players, we had people just show up, and at the very last minute, many of the people from the organizations we worked with decided to play. This proved to be a very good thing: Larp is hard to grasp if you don’t try, but when you do try, its power becomes manifest. In complicated transmedia projects, it’s good that the people who are involved understand and appreciate the form.

    As a result, we had a strange player base: Some were larpers who knew how to make game but didn’t have a lot of personal experience with environmental politics. Others were professional activists who were new to larp but knew the subject of the game very well.

    At least in my estimation, this combination worked well, with larpers helping to make the game work and the newcomers giving it some authenticity.

    In practice, we tried to cast characters so that there would be mixed groups. For example, a larper could play a politician and an activist could play her assistant. We planned the characters so that the politician in this scenario would be more of a “face” character, and the assistant more of an “action” character.

    Some of the participants were given characters who were the opposite of who they were in real life. For example, one activist player had a business lobbyist character. A participant who was a real business lobbyist got a character who was an environmental activist.

    I believe that most people can larp pretty well on their first try, especially in a game with experienced players. That’s how it went this time too. It was fun especially because some of the players from the partner organizations were of an older generation. It gave the game verisimilitude. After the game, we held a public discussion about the issues raised in the game. The idea was that it would be good to show how things were in the real world: What was fiction, and what was true. In the panel discussion, one of the participants was the Finnish Minister of the Environment at that time, Ville Niinistö.

    Unfortunately, we couldn’t get him to play in the larp itself.

    The Attack

    Organizer Juhana Pettersson (left) and a participant during the debrief. (Post-game, Miia Laine)The political debates of the game ended in a pre-designed non sequitur: The zombie attack. We had briefed players about this beforehand. Practicing the rules had doubled as a warm-up exercise before the game started. What had until that point been a very social, discussion-oriented game suddenly turned into everyone running around the place trying to complete the ritual to banish the zombies.

    If the players managed to carry enough clean water in their hands to the ritual location, they would win. If not, the zombies would win.

    Trying to care for clean water was a game mechanic, and according to player feedback, it worked on a conceptual level.

    The zombies were a structural choice I had been a little worried about, because on a story level, it was kind of random. It proved to work in practice, though, probably because it gave the game an action- oriented, fun ending. The characters could only survive by working together to achieve a common goal. That was a good thing to finish with.

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

    Credits: Mike Pohjola (Design), Juhana Pettersson (Additional design and production), Sarita Sharma (Production), Harmke Heezen & Miia Laine (Production Assistance), Julius Sepponen & Make Up For Ever Academy Finland (Zombie Effects), (Film documentation), Kinomaton Berlin & Made Partners: Goethe Institute, Baltic Sea Action Group, Korjaamo, Helsingin kaupunki, Finnland-istitut in Deutschland, AVEK, Medienboard, Berlin-Brandenburg, Media, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig- Holstein, Nipkow Programm, EsoDoc (Production)
    Date: August 30, 2014
    Location: Helsinki, Finland
    Length: 3 hours
    Players: 20
    Budget: €1,000
    Participation Fee: none
    Game Mechanics: First minimal, then light zombie mechanics
    Website: http://balticwarriors.net

    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Participants discuss the game while a member of our film crew records sound (Pre-game, Juhana Pettersson). Other photos by Miia Laiene and Juhana Pettersson.