Nordic Larp

Category: Hearts

Designer and organiser reflections. Part of a collection of articles written as companion pieces to the larp conference Knutpunkt 2018.

  • Just a Little Lovin’ USA 2017

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    Just a Little Lovin’ USA 2017

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    On August 7-12, 2017 in Whitewater State Park, Minnesota, USA, 50 larpers and volunteers from five different countries took part in the sixth run of Just a Little Lovin’ (JaLL, 2011). This meant that Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo’s esteemed larp about friendship, desire, and fear of death at the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, finally found its way to the country of its diegesis: The United States. The run was the culmination of over two years of organizing and many hours of volunteer labor by a diverse team of Nordic and American larpers. It does not even count as hyperbole to say the larp exceeded all of our expectations: it absolutely did. The combination of ground crew, organizers, and excellent players allowed us to create a logistically tight yet deeply human collective experience. Below is an attempt to document one of the already most heavily discussed Nordic larps, albeit in a different fashion: from an organizer perspective, specifically that of the US team.

    A game. JaLL is a game, but seems hardly one at all. Does it even remotely belong in the same category as table tennis, Pac-Man (1980), and Dungeons & Dragons (1974)? Indeed, when talking about the larp on an LGBTQ radio show in Minneapolis, we skirted around the term “game” and used the word “experience.” In the US, HIV/AIDS is certainly not considered a topic about which one could create a game, titles such as That Dragon, Cancer (2016) notwithstanding. In addition, the epidemic itself has not really been properly processed in the American public consciousness. Larry Kramer (1983) screamed “plague” to save tens of thousands of lives in the mid-1980s, but even his early pleas to the gay community now seem distant and historical. Yet as HIV activist Andrew Schuster noted at our JaLL post-game workshop, HIV/AIDS still poses an ongoing threat to many communities, and AIDS awareness could not be more pertinent to the coming generations, despite advances in medical treatments and cures. We were larpers, but somehow we were also involved with a form of activism. Or maybe we were just having a US-based conversation that, characteristically, few of us actually have had among themselves.

    Site

    Perhaps we should start from the beginning. In July 2015, a handful of North American larpers, myself included (Torner 2015), took part in the second Danish run of JaLL. We found the larp so transformative that we vowed to bring it to the USA in the coming 1-2 years. Many locations were thrown around: Saratoga Springs in upstate New York (where the game is actually set), Austin, San Francisco, New Jersey. But the site bid that won was submitted by Jon Cole, a seasoned freeform organizer from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul representing the group Larp House. Jon had assembled a solid ground team, and had found the perfect modern group site at Whitewater, far from civilization and surrounded by natural beauty. Alexander Sandrén, a Swedish player who has been at many runs of the game, remarked that the site was, by far, the closest to what he eined the fictional Saratoga Group Center looked like. I silently noted this as a major victory. Jon’s bid for Whitewater was detailed, precise to a fault, and above all affordable; the US run had to be non-profit, and an inexpensive site with a good group of committed volunteers would alleviate financial and personnel pressures. We decided that, yes, JaLL USA 2017 would be in Minnesota. And so, the planning began in late 2015.

    Securing the site itself was, of course, already a problem. A beautiful campsite such as this one was in high demand and heavily booked. One had to call the Whitewater park office at precisely 8 am on particular mornings to book the site for exactly one year later. Several frustrated attempts at reserving our slot led to us finally landing our fifth choice of dates: the week before GenCon. August in Minnesota would mean heat and mosquitos (from which we were fortunately spared in the actual run). Yet we were relieved to at least have the site secured. We blithely posted the Save-The-Date announcement in August 2016 for the following year on social media in celebration.

    A leather harness hanging on a bench in Whitewater State Park. Photo by l.p. lade.
    A leather harness hanging on a bench in Whitewater State Park. Photo by l.p. lade.

    Controversy

    Then the Internet hit us like a ton of bricks. Or a train. Or a train made of bricks. Given the emboldening of far-right hate groups in 2016, one would think our main critics would have been anti-gay evangelical Christians and neo-Nazis. This wasn’t the case at all: it was, in fact, the progressive left that went into a social media frenzy over the game. Individuals directly affected by the AIDS crisis were ringing our phones in outrage against the ostensible insensitivity of running such a larp. We were called out as being unethical and patrolled for any language suggesting that we might make light of the topic.  We were told that the Norwegians, even gay Norwegians, had no right to this shared history, and that this was a “gay larp for straight people,” implying a kind of shameful blackface-level mimicry of a certain vulnerable community at work. The reaction came through closed circles, without even major press coverage of any kind.

    Even this private, contained negative backlash left many of us emotionally drained. We had answers for these American social media challenges, many of which had already been raised in the 2011 debate about JaLL in the Swedish newspaper Expressen (Gerge 2012). After all, the larp takes its subject matter seriously, has queer creators, and has, in fact, given queer players their own larp to cherish and in which to feel at home. Nevertheless, much of August 2016 was spent in social media damage control and creating a massive FAQ((https://jall.us/faq/ (Accessed January 2018))) explaining every facet of the larp to potential participants, as well as its detractors. We also withdrew plans to crowdfund the game and locked down major public releases of information about it, tapping JaLL allies such as Nicole Winchester and Morgan Nuncio to run interference on any discussions of the game that might come up so as to shield the organizers from further flak. Needless to say, organizing a game about which we had been proud suddenly became a curiously furtive endeavor. None of us wanted to be caught as the “leader” of the project, out of fear that we would be left holding the bag full of hate mail and death threats if a Vice or Geek and Sundry article was written about us and a social media storm erupted.

    Adaptation

    Meanwhile, the larp itself had to undergo its own transformation for the North American context. JaLL may have some of the best storytelling mechanics and complex characters seen in a larp (Waern 2012), but it was also a game that traditionally had white European players portray an almost homogeneously white American group of characters, with the exception of four Puerto Ricans. As admitted by Tor Kjetil and Hanne, this simply did not represent the racial and ethnic diversity of early 1980s New York City. Compounding this fact were developments in language around trans* individuals since the early 1980s: in the historical setting, trans* women and men would call themselves “gay” because there wasn’t yet a better term, and pronoun shifts and non-binary designations were many years to come. How would we balance avoiding the erasure of the non-white experience of the period, letting players of color to calibrate their level of comfort with respect to playing on racism, playing on and celebrating ethnic nuance, and not appropriating or unintentionally mocking any given gender expression, race, ethnicity, and culture? None of us assumed we knew the answers, so we reached out to trans*-folx and people of color to determine what larp solutions would theoretically make them feel comfortable and welcome, crediting them as consultants on the final version of the larp. Not everyone had the same response either. Kat Jones and Moyra Turkington spearheaded efforts to sort through these interviews and come up with an appropriate strategy. They chose to incorporate race and ethnicity into every character sheet, as well as to run an additional “Playing Difference at JaLL” pre-game workshop that helped calibrate player behavior with regard to class, race and ethnicity, including opt-out rules for even subtle play on racism. Such work will continue to be necessary in larps to come, we surmise, as the medium continues to grow up.

    Simon of the band Urban Renaissance performs. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.
    Simon of the band Urban Renaissance performs. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    Although many US players purported to be playing in the “Nordic style” thanks to franchises such as the magic-school larp New World Magischola (2016) or runs of the sensuous vampire party larp End of the Line (2016), much player calibration remained necessary. Many of the players had never done a blackbox meta-scene or used sex/intimacy mechanics before. In addition, the US impulse to figure out how to “generate plot” or “resolve storylines” sometimes came in conflict with the overall design of the larp: characters launched unrealistically successful campaigns against HIV/AIDS and talked loudly in-character during scenes that had previously been played silently in Nordic runs. Nevertheless, such conflicts constituted part of the intercultural experience and were mostly resolved when they came up. Incorporation of the OK Check-in safety technique from End of the Line (Koljonen 2016) and the lookdown technique from New World Magischola (Brown 2016) helped players from all backgrounds adjust to the safety norms of the JaLL community.

    Even pinning down the group of JaLL USA players proved challenging. As a non-profit, the game was relatively cheap: each ticket cost $300 to merely cover the operating costs of running a 5-day event. Multiple scholarships funded by generous outside donors helped some players from diverse or impoverished backgrounds get in at a free or reduced rate. Sign-ups were done based on a casting system, with a lottery prepared in case of too many players for the limited 70 slots. And it turned out we never had too many players. It was a nail-biter for us to see if we would get enough players. The length of time-off required for this larp––6 days minimum––accompanied by the relative secrecy of the advertising, as well as the usual scheduling conflicts and illnesses all but depleted our potential player base. Over 1/3 of all committed players dropped before the game began, many of whom had even responded “No” to the question “Do you foresee any circumstances that might prevent you from attending JaLL?” Faced with the infamous JaLL player drop-off that Tor Kjetil and Hanne had warned us about, we ran the larp with the absolute minimum number of players required to play, removing numerous social groups from the larp: a BDSM triad, the youth counselors, the Hi-NRG music triad, and the polyamorous co-op house were all initially not present in the run, with some only re-introduced after the death of other characters. The Casting Committee went from a team of matchmakers to a team of larp triage nurses, swapping around character configurations even up until a week before the larp to accommodate for drops and late additions.

    Success

    Nevertheless, the players owned the resultant game. They brought electrifying energy to both the larp itself, as well as the preparation and clean-up afterward. About four out of five in this player base lay somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, and they felt seen and appreciated in the larp space. Jonaya Kemper and l.p. lade played in-character photographers who took thousands of high-quality photos for posterity. Most important to us as organizers was the glut of testimony to the power of this larp and this particular run. One of the players was part of the NYC gay scene and said how accurately the feeling of the larp captured the spirit of the times. He commented how much we, as young and middle-aged larpers, reminded him of those in the community he belonged to, which moved many of us to tears. “Thank you so much for bringing this game to the US for all of us to play.” wrote another player in their post-game survey. “It was a life-altering experience.” The positive energy among the participants poured out in their comments:

    This larp ran beautifully. The organization was impressive. Doing this for the first time and having such a good handle on both the in game and logistical elements was a real feat. I felt the game handled very sensitive issues well, and that the organizers were also sensitive to the needs of the players and of issues relating to translating it to a USA context. … I am so grateful to the players for taking on such a challenge and being so loving toward one another throughout the game.

    JaLL is amazing. Plain and simple. The organizers worked very hard, and I just want to let you know that it was noticed. I will rank JaLL as one of the best games I have ever participated in, and it is solely because of your hard work and dedication to the players. Thank you!

    Hearing such words after two years of intensive organization brought us all back to the raw emotional core of the larp. The trials had been worth it, and the community we had helped build was real and resilient. People took care of each other through the post-game bleed and larp blues. Many of the participants got on the bus from Whitewater and later wound up at a Minneapolis drag show. New relationships blossomed, players came out or announced transitioning genders, and vows were made: JaLL USA needs to happen again. Just maybe not right away. Bids for a 2019 run remain in the works, despite our country’s steady and unfortunate turn toward radical right-wing and self-immolatory politics. We nevertheless look forward to lighting up the disco ball one more time and commemorate this precious chapter of our gay history with a masterpiece 1980s larp that celebrates friendship and desire in the shadow of hardship and death.

    Thanks to everyone who made this run the success we always hoped it would be.

    References

    Brown, Maury. 2016. “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics.” https://nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safety-calibration-larp-mechanics/

    Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. 2011. Just a Little Lovin’. [Larp] Run 6: Whitewater, Minnesota, USA 2017.

    Gerge, Tova. 2012. “Larp and Aesthetic Responsibility: When Just a LittleLovin’ Became an Art Debate.” States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World. Juhana Pettersson, ed. Solmukohta, pp. 42-47.

    Koljonen, Johanna. 2016. “Toolkit: The OK Check-In.”         https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/toolkit-the-ok-check-in/

    Kramer, Larry. 1983. “1,112 and Counting.” New York Native. March 14.

    Torner, Evan. 2015. Losing Friends and the Stories We Tell Ourselves: Just a Little Lovin’ Denmark 2015. https://guyintheblackhat.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/losing-friends-and-the-stories-we-tell-ourselves-just-a-little-lovin-denmark-2015/

    Waern, Annika. 2012. “Just a Little Lovin’, and Techniques for Telling Stories in Larp.” https://annikawaern.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/just-a-little-lovin-and-techniques-for-telling-stories-in-larp/

    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: A group shot of all JaLL USA players and organizers. Photo by l.p. lade.

  • Immerton

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    Immerton

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    Immerton (Brown, Bowman, D, Jones, and Nativ 2017) is a four-day immersive larp held in Joshua Tree, California. The larp is designed to explore what it means to be a woman in a variety of contexts and intersectionalities, and to focus on woman’s ways of knowing, doing, being, and relating. Participation in the event is restricted to those who identify as a woman. A broad definition of woman is used, and organizers and participants welcomed and celebrated all expressions of womanhood. Twenty-three women took part in Immerton’s inaugural run in 2017.

    Immerton is a place and a society entirely of women, existing outside of space and time yet with portals or connections to every world and point in time. Across history, women of all races and ethnicities, social classes, cultures, and universes experience a breakthrough and find their way to Immerton. There are no men there, and women may stay as long as they like or need. Immerton is intended to be akin to Themyscira from the Wonder Woman franchise, but with a more multi-faceted approach to womanhood than a society of warriors is. The goal of Immerton was to create a sanctuary for women players without the concerns that many women experience in spaces that include all genders. A socially conditioned behavior for most women is to perform for the male gaze (Mulvey 1975); being in the presence of men changes women’s behavior, as their concerns about their own safety and relative value move to front of their minds. Immerton is an experiment in feminist and woman-centered game design.

    We were keenly aware of the issues surrounding the US run of the Nordic larp, Mad About the Boy (Edland, Raaum, Lindahl 2010), organized by Lizzie Stark in October 2012. The larp received a great deal of criticism for excluding men, and in particular for categorizing men chromosomally and the design element that annihilated all people with the Y chromosome. Immerton was deliberately designed with several key distinctions to Mad About the Boy.

    First, the larp was not about being without men; it was instead about a complete society of women. This is important, because rather than being a larp about loss, about what is missing, it was a larp about the fullness of the society, of what was included: the multitude of women who chose to attend and whose characters were chosen to find Immerton. Second, we did not make a chromosomal distinction that defines men and women, thus being inclusive to women of any biological body and genetic typing. This separated gender from biological sex, and ensured we did not get into arguments (as had happened with Mad About the Boy) about the definition of woman and who could play. It also demonstrated a commitment to trans-inclusion and safe-space for genderqueer women. Giving people the opportunity to search themselves and determine if they fit an identity of woman was more liberating and accepting than an organizer-determined definition of woman. In addition, the all-woman design team included several feminist intersectionalities, which made it easier for women of many identities to feel included. Third, we openly declared that no man would be showing up in the game, which happens in Mad About the Boy. Men exist in characters’ pasts and futures, but during the larp they were off-stage, appearing only in memories, backstories, or narration.

    Design and Playstyle

    The concept and initial design of Immerton was created by Maury Brown, and expanded and brought to life by an all-woman team of organizers and designers. The team included Sarah Lynne Bowman, Quinn D, and Kat Jones who were writers, designers, and runtime organizers. Orli Nativ acted as Art Director for the game, creating masks and costuming, inspiration art, collages, and scenography for the event, as well as assisting with ritual design and runtime game-mastering. Tara Clapper and Caille Jensen assisted with character writing and world building, and Jess Comstock designed a set of sigils that were used for the different vocations that defined character groups.

    Immerton’s design was sandbox-style, allowing participants to make choices about actions and topics to explore. Structuring this open design were scheduled rituals that took place each evening and in the final morning, representing the forces of four goddesses. The site – a remote retreat center in the high desert of southern California – was integral to the other-worldly feel for the game, and was replete with indoor and outdoor spaces for group and private play. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his son, Lloyd, the building was made of natural desert sandstone, and players’ rooms were adjacent to one another and surrounded by a central hall, where altars to the goddesses were assembled and players gathered for meals and other activities. The site also had a labyrinth, a warm and cool swimming pool, groves of cacti, joshua trees and other native plants, and several fountainscapes and water features. The event took place during the full moon, and bonfires were lit each night.

    A design centerpiece was The Goddess Chamber, a converted bedroom suite adjacent to the large main gathering room. While not a true blackbox((Black Box. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Black_Box)) chamber as it contained furniture, The Goddess Chamber was a meta room((Meta Room. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Meta_Room)) where participants could spend time with other Immerton sisters and meet the goddesses. Players or organizers (who were also player-characters game-mastering from within the game) portrayed or “aspected”((Aspecting. https://moonlightmagick.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/a-is-for-aspecting/)) a particular goddess by donning her mask, and, at times, her robes. In the Goddess Chamber players could gegine and role-play a memory, dream, alternate choice, or future hope. They could call upon a goddess to guide, to encourage, support, chide, or convict, as needed. The design intentionally drew upon mask theory and altered consciousness as introduced by Keith Johnstone (1987) and advanced by Clayton D. Drinko (2013).

    Play focused on personal journeys, relationships, and exploration of womanhood in a polytheistic goddess pantheon. The game used no numerical rules or combat mechanics, but unfolded through role-play, rituals, art and other media, and meta-techniques. The fictional world and the player community emphasized self-care and a celebration of autonomy in a Culture of Care and Trust (Brown 2016). The intention was to make Immerton a sanctuary for women both in and out of character. The game allowed players to choose their own pace of play and level of engagement, reduce feelings of FOMO((Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). (2017).Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out)) or Fear of Missing Out, and slow the frenzied feeling that many highly plot-driven larps can create. It was very possible to play a mostly internal game and have a transformative experience. That said, the larp had a central premise: Immerton had become tethered in space and time as a result of an anomaly, and players could determine the cause and whether or how it should be resolved. Some players identified with this plot element personally, with the idea of being “stuck” or unable to move forward resonating strongly with them. Participants’ collaborative solution involved returning a cast-out Trickster goddess to the pantheon and creating rituals to heal Immerton. Those elements, of being trapped and being cast away, combined with a reclamation of play and child-like qualities that are too-often left behind in adult womanhood, led to a lot of bleed and personal processing of emotions by participants (Jones 2017).

    Characters and Bleed

    The design team encouraged participants to portray characters that shared personality traits or portions of backstory with themselves. We deliberately wanted to make the alibi of character((Alibi. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Alibi))   thin, so that participants could explore shadow or repressed aspects of their lives or selves in the safety of the community and role-play. In this way, the game was designed to deliberately chase bleed (Bowman 2015) that would be empowering and revelatory for participants. The character creation team, led by Quinn and consisting of Sarah, Kat, Tara, and Caille, asked participants to complete a casting questionnaire that sought to inspire careful reflection on one’s own past, fears, blockages, hopes, and desires. Each participant had a primary character writer who discussed the character questionnaire with the participant, and together they created the character for Immerton. For example, one player wanted to explore her anger stemming from several recent events in her life. She and her character writer created a lone survivor from a planet that had recently been annihilated, with no home to return to outside of Immerton. The character’s defining trait was rage at this personal and societal destruction, which allowed the player to explore the emotion without reliving details of her own trauma.

    Each character was connected to three others, a Pillar to provide support, a Crowbar to push for change, and another character-specific relationship. The Pillar and Crowbar design element was inspired by Simon Svensson’s Essence/Nihil relationship mechanic, which was also adapted as the Hope/Despair connections in The Quota by Simon Brind, Charlotte Ashby, Helly Dabill, Martine Svanevik, and Rob Williams (2018).

    Items depicting or representing Innara, goddess of creation. Photo by Sarah Bowman.
    Items depicting or representing Innara, goddess of creation. Photo by Sarah Bowman.

    Mythology and World-Building

    Immerton exists in its own mythos, created by Maury Brown with the goddesses expanded by Sarah Lynne Bowman. This choice was made to avoid cultural and religious appropriation and to ensure the goddesses encompassed a multitude of bodies and identities. We were also seeking to move beyond the tropes of woman as defined by their physical beauty and body, and particularly by their reproductive cycles. Not all women have children, and not all women have wombs or vaginas. We chose to move away from the maiden, mother, crone archetypes and instead were inspired by Lasara Firefox Allen’s book, Jailbreaking the Goddess. Women in Immerton may be in the Child/Daughter, Siren, Amma, or Sage stages, which are not about reproduction but about states of mind or wisdom. They are also non-linear, as one can channel or return to any stage at any time.

    The goddesses were created as a synthesis of many mythologies and share some traits of eastern, western, indigenous, and pagan cosmologies. The four goddesses are of four forces: creation, destruction, reclamation, and fortification, which are Innara, Ellishara, Tohtma, and Rahdira respectively. They represent four ways of experiencing the world and forces to invoke when confronted with challenges and opportunities. Each goddess is associated with a season, direction, element, gems, scents, colors, shadow and light aspects, rituals, and tarot suits. Thus, these new goddesses became connected to and evocative of goddesses from other traditions. Ellishara, for instance, has elements of Sekhmet, Kali, Durga, or Hel, but is her own entity. Every character has a primary Devotion, a particular goddess they are most drawn to, but they could also invoke or worship another goddess. One’s primary Devotion may also change throughout one’s life, and some players used a devotional change as a narrative arc for their character.

    Vocations were created in order to break up what is often “woman’s work” and combine callings in interesting ways. Players could choose Warrior, Shaman, Seer, Mender, Tender, Keeper, or Vigilant as a primary vocation. These vocations categorized similar skills or impulses. For example, menders included welders, tailors, and healers, while Keepers include librarians, teachers, historians, or builders. Each Vocation was an impulse or a calling to leave a mark in a particular way, a diverse gathering of women who are driven by similar goals and ways of interacting in the world. The design goal was to break down stereotypes and tropes that can pigeonhole women and femininity by instead exploring a multitude of expressions and intersectionalities.

    Multimedia Experiential Design

    Immerton’s design engaged participants in individual and group-based physical and artistic activities. These included art, mask-making, journaling, hiking, meditation, swimming, dancing, kata practice, and cooking. These were used both as parts of everyday life in Immerton, but also as ways to explore characters and their relationships through more than verbal role-play. The various activities were opt-in and typically framed as “offerings” that a devotee shared with other acolytes. Participants also tattooed each other with the sigil of their vocation, braided each other’s hair, and traded massages as part of group bonding and reciprocal care.

    Of course, larp has featured these activities since the beginning, but often they are ancillary or incidental activities rather than a central focus of the experience. For example, a tailor at a medieval larp might sew to heighten immersion. Such behavior isn’t typically about making clothes, but about appearing to be a tailor. The story at Immerton was told not only through words and actions, but also through artifacts created by participants. Each participant made a mask that they used in at least one ceremony, and participants collectively wrote a scroll that documented their experience. Some participants also wrote poems or journal entries, drew, painted, or created food together. Other artifacts were ephemeral, such as food, ritually made and shared together. Fire and water were used as physical transmutational elements in multiple rituals.

    One participant noted that the art and artifact elements of Immerton, “emphasized creative and nurturing elements as central to play,” while another stated that they felt these design aspects “gave places for people to engage in valuable, alternative ways with themselves, each other, and their characters.” The boundary between player and character grew thin during these immersive activities (Bowman 2017), and occasionally off-game conversations between participants creeped in. These were valuable to community building and were intense moments for some participants in their own right, but were off-putting for others who wanted stronger immersion into character (Bowman 2017; Lukka 2014). One player stated, “This game was not about simple character immersion – it was about creating spaces to reflect, be introspective, and to examine myself and my issues through the lens of my character. The multimedia aspects gave me different tools and experiences that very much enhanced the experience.”

    An acolyte contributes to the scroll, rewriting Immerton history. Photo by Sarah Bowman.
    An acolyte contributes to the scroll, rewriting Immerton history. Photo by Sarah Bowman.

    Woman-Only Space

    Being in an all-woman space was profound for participants and organizers alike. Although the game was not explicitly about gender identity, many of us live and adjust to a society that treats people whom they label as  “men” and “women” differently, with different expectations and burdens. Participants noted that the space of Immerton, since it was specifically all woman-identified, relieved participants of those expectations, or at least made them less important and influential. One participant said: “The space lightened a load I didn’t realize was so heavy; it was freeing, and it was safe. I think it is important to note that I know many wonderful people who are not women in life that I trust, that I feel free around; this isn’t about not-women being unsafe, it’s about the interplay between who is present, and the influence of society’s gender system on all of the participants. It’s about a pervasive system which has so much influence in our lives, and taking a time and a space to try to remove parts of it and see how that feels and develops. And it was powerfully different.”

    Another participant said, “I usually play with wonderful men who are good at giving space to others and are sensitive to their privilege. But, there were conversations that I think just wouldn’t have happened in other spaces. Women were openly talking about their experiences with patriarchy, relationships, menopause, childrearing, trans issues, etc. in ways that I think were afforded by the female-only space. We could discuss these issues both in- and out-of-character and it felt like a supportive and understanding atmosphere, even when women had very different views on these things.” A third participant said, “having a community of women made the space feel much safer for some of the personal exploration that I did during the game,” including “the commonalities and differences in women’s experiences, opinions, etc.”

    Participants ranged in age from 24 to 55 and showcased various expressions of womanhood and an appreciation for their beauty and diversity. They portrayed characters from across cultures and time periods, some of whom, such as Cleopatra and Emma Goldman, were women from history. One participant reflected, “There was freedom there to exist in whatever state you’re in, and a lot of support all around from fellow ‘sisters’ in a shockingly swift-developing community. It wasn’t an environment I can recall being in before, at least not for an extended duration, and I didn’t entirely recognize going in how powerful this would be.” Some participants discussed how their posture changed, how they stopped worrying as much about their personal appearance and body, how they felt they could go without a bra or other shapewear, how they felt they could sit and take up space in ways where they didn’t have to be conscious of whether they were conforming to “proper” or “ladylike” decorum.

    The woman-only community was not without its conflicts. Women disagreed with each other in- and out-of-character, and personalities clashed over sharing space, language, tone, and actions. Since players participants played close-to-home (Piironen and Thurøe 2014), the alibi between player and character was sometimes very thin, and it was difficult to know whether a character or a player was upset — or both. However, one participant noted, “while power dynamics and differentials were unavoidable, it did not have the same character as when men are involved (for instance I never worried that conflicts would result in violence). I was constantly impressed at how we were able to work through or around these conflicts in a way that helped preserve the community.” Some of this was done in-character, other times through group out-of-character calibrations, and other times through one-one in/off-game consultations with organizers.

    Immerton began as, and continues to be, an experiment. We will run a 4-hour exploratory version at several conventions in 2018, using The Goddess Chamber as the central portion of the experience and include an initiation and a closing ritual. Since conventions disallow single-gender games, these runs will be open to all gender identities, as long as players are willing to respectfully engage with the material and with the expectation that they will portray a woman. We are committed to keeping the destination experience for women only, believing that the all-woman space over the duration of the longer event creates many benefits for players. Immerton’s deliberate choice to remove men from the experience allows it to focus on being a woman in a community of women, and by creating a thin boundary between character and player, it provides a chance to explore the self. Immerton represents an uncommon or even unique opportunity for a woman-only larp space and community, one that has its heart in feminist design focusing on choice, collaboration, non-hierarchical spaces and relationships, empowerment, and communication. One of the takeaways was the power of the mask and of speaking as a divine force, speaking truth with force and authority. That central core of aspecting a Goddess will be brought into the convention larp version. Immerton will be re-run in 2018, and we will continue to tweak the design to allow for even better relationship play and exploration of the intersectionalities of woman.

    References

    Allen, Lasara Firefox. (2016). Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality. Llewellyn Publications

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. (March 2, 2015). Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character. Nordiclarp.org. https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. (March 8, 2017).  Immersion into Larp: Theories of Embodied Narrative Experience. First Person Scholar. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/immersion-into-larp/

    Brind, Simon; Ashby, Charlotte; Dabill, Helly; Svanevik, Martine; and Rob Williams. (2017). The Quota Design Document. https://www.quota.cymru/

    Brown, Maury (September, 2016). Creating a Culture of Trust through Larp Safety & Calibration Mechanics. https://nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safety-calibration-larp-mechanics/

    Brown, Maury; Bowman, Sarah Lynne; Jones, Kat; D, Quinn; and Orli Nativ. (2017). Immerton. Learn Larp LLC. www.immerton.com. Run: 2017, Joshua Tree, CA.

    Drinko, Clayton D. (2013). Keith Johnstone: Spontaneity, Storytelling, Status, and Masks, Trance, Altered States. Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition. Palgrave Pivot, New York. pp. 64-91.

    Edland, Tor Kjetil, Raaum, Margrete and Trine Lise Lindahl. Mad About the Boy. 2010. Run: Connecticut, 2012.

    Johnstone, Keith. (1987). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Routledge.

    Jones, Kanane. (October 28, 2017). Immerton: A Fire in the Desert. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/10/28/immerton-fire-desert/

    Koljonen, Johanna. (September, 2016). “Toolkit: the OK Check-In.” Participation Safety Blog. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/toolkit-the-ok-check-in/

    Koljonen, Johanna. (September, 2016). “Toolkit: The ‘See No Evil’ or Lookdown.” Participation Safety Blog. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/toolkit-the-see-no-evil-or-lookdown/

    Lukka, Lauri. (2014). The Psychology of Immersion: Individual Differences and Psychosocial Phenomena Relating to Immersion. The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp. Edited by Jon Back.

    Mulvey, Laura. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen.

    Piironen, Helene Willer and Kristoffer Thurøe. (2014). An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture. The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp. Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen and Jon Back.

    Stark, Lizzie. (2012). Mad About the Techniques: Stealing Nordic methods for larp design. Wyrd Con Companion Book, Aaron Vanek & Sarah Lynne Bowman, ed. http://www.sarahlynnebowman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/wyrdconcompanionbook2012.pdf

    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: Devotees meet with the goddess of destruction, Ellishara, in the Goddess Chamber. Photo by Sarah Bowman.

  • Freak Show, an Autopsy

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    Freak Show, an Autopsy

    Written by

    Coroner

    Nina Teerilahti, art director and main organizer

    Body

    Freak Show, a larp held in an abandoned amusement park in Finland. The larp told the story of the last freak show and explored otherness through a romantic gothic horror setting. The participants played a family of outcasts and freaks who struggled to survive in a hostile world. The story ended with the devil coming to take them all to perform for him forever.

    Time of Death

    2017-09-18 between 19:00 and 22:00.

    Inception

    We crawled through a small gap in the fence. Suddenly we were outside everything: law, society and all things normal. There was no one to define us, judge us or get offended by our existence. I saw the thrill and joy ignite in his eyes. It was freedom. We ran and laughed. The twilight in the run down, abandoned amusement park seeped with tragedy, magic and wonder. But the deeper we ventured between the forgotten, deteriorating buildings the sadder we felt. Laughter changed into a sense of longing and lost memories. It seemed like the place was telling us that the terrible price of true freedom is always abandonment. The moment moved me deeply. It resonated with a hidden truth, and I knew I had to share it.

    Birth

    So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein―more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    Breaking into Wasalandia with my friend started the Freak Show larp project in November 2016. I felt a manic need to create a way to share the experience, a feverish drive that reminded me of Victor Frankenstein and his quest to create life.

    After the initial spark the concept of the last freak show and a deal with the devil emerged over a few weeks. I contacted the owner of the ruins. He agreed to have an event at the site and gave me the conditions and a rough budget. In the end of the month I had nothing but an idea and nine months to make it happen. It was madness. I made rough project plans and budget sketches and decided it was worth a shot. I could not guarantee that my creation would not be a monster, a shadow to hunt me until all eternity, but if enough people wanted to take this chance with me, why not. Fearless ventures into the unknown are my specialty.

    After the publication of the idea, the Freak Show larp raised discord in social media. The project was thought to be disrespectful and insulting because of its subject. The reaction was as if we were robbing graves and bringing dead bodies back to life, and I did feel as driven to follow this path as doctor Frankenstein did. My goal with the Freak Show, as with all my art projects, was to make the world just a tiny bit better, take away some fear and add some compassion.

    Our ability to create the event without being insensitive or even hurtful was mistrusted. It was publicly demanded that our crew should have members of the minority about which we were creating a larp. As creators we were pressured to out our connection to being a freak and our experience of otherness to justify creating the story of Freak Show. Demanding organizers to lose their privacy is cruel. We did not agree.

    It was also demanded that our representations of this minority should be realistic. Larps aren’t real or realistic. Reality doesn’t have a limited duration and safety rules. Believing that larps could give you a realistic experience is insulting towards the people who experience the real thing. The intent of the larp matters far more than the level of realism achieved.

    Creating public pressure towards stories of minorities in larp will make the visibility and status of minorities worse. The fear of being offensive should not become crippling. It will end up pushing the already marginalised people even deeper into the margin.

    Seeing how much fear just the idea of a freak show larp ignited, I think the project was important. Living through stories will increase understanding and compassion, and if we want to move the limits of normal into more humane positions, we need to tell stories of people that are outside normal. We can’t let fear or public pressure stop us. If I am wrong and my passion is insane, my creations will surely hunt me down, just like they did Frankenstein.

    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Aarni Korpela.
    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Aarni Korpela.

    Brains

    Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    I gathered an international crew to create the Freak Show together with me by posting ads on larp forums on Facebook. The budget was tight, so I could only pick five people. Out of 13 applicants I chose Alessandro Giovannucci, Dominika Cembala, Martin Olsson, Morgan Kollin and Simon Brind based on what they wrote to me about their skills, motivation and experience. I included one inexperienced crew member as I always want to give someone the opportunity to learn and grow.

    Long distance work with a crew of varied backgrounds and nationalities was like sailing an unfamiliar ship in unexpected weather. At times it was hard to understand what works and what doesn’t, and why. For me, the biggest challenge to overcome was to get every crew member to communicate about their problems so that they could be solved. We had so many different working and communication cultures, that mixing them and building a new functional one was difficult, a process that continued throughout the project.

    One of the best decisions I made was to have a video call meeting every week throughout the whole project. As we had such varied ideas about how to work together or create a larp and could never meet physically, this face to face contact was essential to run the project.

    During the nine months of production there were miscommunications, surprising life events and lack of motivation. On the other hand, there was pure creative joy, enthusiasm and strength in combining varied skills and backgrounds. Whenever we had a crisis or a problem to solve, our diversity was a clear asset. Whenever we needed cumbersome things actually done in time, our lack of face to face contact was a problem. A multinational long distance crew is great for designing and not so great for actually getting the work done.

    I set three design guidelines for the project:

    • Does it create play or enhance immersion? If not, don’t do it.
    • Does it give players tools to explore the themes? If not, don’t do it.
    • Treat characters and the subject of being a freak with respect and dignity.

    These guidelines helped us focus on the right things. In the end we were happy to notice that almost everything we created for the event actually came into play. What we did affected the player’s experience directly, there was no work done in vain.

    Skin

    His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and owing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, … his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    The practicalities of the event were almost completely decided for us by the owner of the site. We had strict limitations and high costs. In many cases this meant that we had to do something badly or not do the event at all. For example we had to buy food from the owner and it had to be served at his hotel at certain times, not at the site, which was far from ideal.

    The site itself was an actual ruin and under the bombardment of vandals, the current and the new owners and multinational companies connected to the deal that was negotiated in the meantime. Over half a year, large structures, furniture, windows, doors and even staircases disappeared, electricity and water became unavailable where they should’ve been and some areas got into far more rapid decay than anticipated. The site was out of control. We had to accept that, even though much of the extreme situations came as a surprise, such as one of the largest usable inside spaces being totally covered in a thick layer of soap, courtesy of vandals.

    The ruin of Wasalandia would never be a safe game site by any standards, but this project was for sensible adults who could take responsibility for themselves. There were dangerous materials and places. In exchange, we had the freedom to rearrange and actually build things. The site was vast and filled with buildings and random items. It was overwhelming. In this larp real, actual exploration and building was a major part of the game and the players enjoyed it immensely.

    From a player perspective the abandoned Wasalandia and the actual circus tent with its sound and lighting equipment were half the game. The players did actually build different usable spaces during the game and practised and performed in a real circus tent. The atmosphere of the site and tent was intense and the struggles to create a new home for the Freak Show and the joy of finding usable items and furniture were real.

    The magical wonderland the players managed to create in the ruins during the game blew us all away. For example, the players got the wheel of fortune and lights working in a building that was supposed to not be usable, built a space with red lights and roses for intimate burlesque shows, found a full clown costume and built a cathedral in an old restaurant. Using the site in any way we could imagine was truly a unique opportunity and experience.

    Muscles

    “I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” ― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    Our greatest success in the Freak Show was getting the players we had. They were very motivated, amazingly talented and created a beautiful story and experience. Getting great players was not pure coincidence.

    We designed the application process to search for motivation and capability to create with us. We were not interested in any other qualities like age, gender, experience or country of origin. We knew that in the timeframe and resources we had, we could not create everything but were heavily dependant on players creating their own game for themselves. This game would be a sandbox, a chance to play what you create towards a fixed ending.

    We designed a blind casting, where you applied to a certain character. The characters were described with a few inspirational sentences and the player was to develop the character further and send us a short text about it.

    After the signup closed all crew members voted for each application and the highest scores got in. It was easy to pick the most creative and motivated sounding applications. Many of them moved us or made us inspired and excited. The applications were also a great starting point to develop the characters further with the players.

    Heart

    I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    In creating anything I find motivation the key factor. Everything else follows with more or less work, but without motivation nothing happens. In the Freak Show we focused on creating the players motivation to create an experience that would inspire and move them. This is why we chose to create characters together with players in a discussion.

    The character creation video calls with players were one of the most amazing experiences in the project. At it’s best they were enthusiastic brainstorming, player and writer driving each other on and creating an amazing story and person together. With this discussion and letting the player affect everything each character became an amazing piece of art and far better than any writer could have created on their own. The player’s motivation to play the characters that had been handcrafted to fulfil their wishes was high, which of course affected the larp immensely. Motivated and enthusiastic players create magic.

    Lungs

    Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    The themes of Freak Show were otherness and being an outcast. They were born from that first moment of inspiration. As outcasts the freaks had magic and freedom, but the price was terrible and they were slowly perishing, just like the ruins of Wasalandia.

    Every character was a freak or an outcast, some visibly, others in other ways. There was deformity, mental illness, physical and mental disability, unaccepted love and sexuality, passion or power and unforgivable crimes. Otherness was woven into all characters, all had a strong reason to choose the hard life of an outcast and all characters had different emotional responses and coping mechanisms. These together created a network of viewpoints to explore the themes inside the game.

    The players who played on a very physical otherness, like the conjoined twins, and thus felt the otherness in a very concrete way, may have gotten the most intense experience. Some of the others had a harder time connecting to the themes, as the family of freaks was very accepting and this made them feel quite normal. Having more interaction with normal people who treated them as freaks and outcasts would have benefited the game.

    Eyes

    I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    I feel that photos never truly capture a larp, they are pale shadows compared to the experience. Larps are mandalas, made as perfect as they can be with extreme effort and then suddenly gone forever. All larp reproductions are flawed and lack the original essence, the true beauty that made the experience remarkable.

    At its best, larp photography gives us tools to remember. At its worst larp photography gives us tools to gather validation in social media on the expense of the actual experience. I did not want photos of the Freak Show for two reasons: because I wanted to protect our players from the social media outrage caused by the subject of the game and because I did not want the need for good photos to take away from the focus of playing.

    We used a group of artists to document the Freak Show larp by drawing. The artists were woven into the world by making them a meta-technique to represent the feeling of the end of times. In the game world the artists were watcher spirits that came to document the events when all is ending. They had black shroud costumes that hid their features. Whenever a watcher spirit stopped to draw a player, the player felt the gaze of God or the Devil on them. The watcher spirits were present for the last eight hours of the larp.

    The watcher spirits worked pretty well. The situation was very challenging for the artists and at times overwhelming for the players, but all in all it was a good experience for both. In my opinion the drawings captured the mood of the game in a beautiful way. Fleeting impressions with heavy interpretation fit the Freak Show better than photographs. The unusual documentation method also gave the players a feeling that the event was something very special and unique, which added to the magic of the experience.

    Cause of Death

    ‘But soon’, he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing ames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    We rented a circus tent from a real small Finnish circus for the Freak Show. The day before the game I was watching them erect it. An old carnie, the tent master, was having a smoke and chatting with me as the Moroccan brothers were setting up the support beams. “It feels funny to have real circus people around as we are just going to pretend to be a circus for a while.” I said. The tent master inhaled smoke and looked at me in the eyes suddenly very serious, almost moved. Something shined behind the old man’s grey eyes. “I don’t think it’s funny at all. You are not just playing.” I was confused, but moved. He struck a chord. The tent master looked at the slowly rising tent that he had travelled with for decades. “That the idea of circus has inspired you to do this, that is truly beautiful.” I held back tears. The old carnie smiled and took another drag.

    I agree. What we did that weekend was truly beautiful. As all tragic, life-changing beauty, it also had to die to preserve its magic. The beauty of a larp dies as soon as it is born, leaving only echoes, vibrant after images that soon start to fade. It can’t exist in any other way.

    Re-animation

    The Freak Show gave birth to lasting friendships, deep realizations, life-changing experiences, amazing artwork and beauty. Four people took tattoos after the event to always remember it. Can I take credit for these achievements? No. I did not make them. Would all of this have happened without me? No.

    As a larp creator I see myself as a person who makes things possible. With the Freak Show, I think I made important experiences possible for several people. To me that is worth all the work, stress, trouble, critique and even hate I received for doing this project. I am satisfied that I took the chance and leapt into the unknown.

    Will the Freak Show be re-animated? Perhaps, in another time and country, in a different abandoned place seeping with tragedy. If you know just the place, have the needed tools to bring a beautiful monster to life and want to take this journey with me, I’m open to suggestions. My passion to create false lives is still burning.

    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Kaspar Tamsalu.
    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Kaspar Tamsalu.

    Links

    Freak Show larp website: http://martinolsson.github.io/freakshowlarp

    Freak Show documentation drawings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6zJauE8ICngUk1pRHhFNWQ4aVE?usp=sharing

    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 image: Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Andrei Kedrin.

  • Keeping the Candles Lit, When the Light Has Gone Out

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    Keeping the Candles Lit, When the Light Has Gone Out

    Written by

    Eclipses are funny things. They stop the world, and we all look up together, watching that constant sun slowly disappear before our very eyes. And together, we wonder, for just a moment, if the light will ever come back.

    This year the world marvelled at an unbelievable eclipse. Across the United States, people bought protective glasses to witness the astronomical phenomenon together. That Monday, I stood outside my hotel in Indianapolis, packing up my truck to head home from GenCon, the largest gaming convention in the United States. My team and I had run a very successful Dresden Files larp only two days before. In my bag, I had the IGDN Award won by War Birds, an anthology put together by Unruly Designs. The book brought together the stories of women who contributed to war: forgotten stories pushed aside by the incorrect narrative that women remained passive during conflicts and didn’t contribute actively. I contributed with a game called Keeping the Candles Lit, about the experiences of Jewish women fighting as partisans during World War II.

    As the only member of the War Birds team present at the IGDN Awards, I stood up to collect the award, stumbling over my words. During my impromptu speech, I thanked the team and everyone who supported the book. But most importantly I thanked the women who inspired the game I wrote: my grandmother, Nora Stern, and my mother, Esther Kessock. After accepting the award, I texted my mother as my friends and I celebrated back in our room. “War Birds just won an award, and my part of this is because of you.”

    As I looked up at the eclipse only a few days later, my phone rang. It was my father back in New York.

    “Come home as fast as you can,” he said. “The doctors say she’s very bad.”

    My friends and I packed up the car and drove sixteen hours straight to get back. By the next morning at ten a.m., only half an hour before I reached the hospital, my mother was dead. I will never know if she saw the text I sent. I like to think she did.

    Inspiration for Keeping The Candles Lit, Esther Kessock.
    Inspiration for Keeping The Candles Lit, Esther Kessock.

    I wrote Keeping the Candles Lit as a tribute game more than a freelance project. When Moyra Turkington approached me to contribute to the anthology, I was interested. While I’ve written a number of fan-tribute games for intellectual properties like Battlestar Galactica, My Little Pony, or Dragon Age, my smaller larps are motivated by my interest in creating deeply personal, emotional, intimate experiences. The chance to create a game based on true historical stories to small groups of people at a time seemed right up my alley. The question really came down to what story to choose. The answer almost chose itself.

    In my experience, there is an absence of Jewish stories in the media, and this is even more true in the larp world. When Jews do appear in media, their stories are usually framed by unfortunate stereotypes or fixated on specific historical narratives. The most familiar of these are the Christian stories about Jews in the time of Jesus, Hanukkah and Rosh Hashanah, the Americanized and secularized Jewish experience of Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, or the ‘mysterious’ and often maligned ultra-orthodox narratives. And of course, the Holocaust, an ever-looming specter over any war story involving Jews. From Schindler’s List to Inglourious Basterds, it seems no one can have a conversation about World War II and Jews without immediately framing the narrative around concentration camps, gas chambers, and pictures of atrocities beyond measure. It’s easy to fall into these tropes when creating a game about Jews during World War II. But easy wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to make a game that was difficult, that challenged the narrative of the passive Jews, victims of the barbarity of the Nazi genocide machine. In the stories about the partisans of Europe, I found my inspiration.

    The tagline of War Birds is “we have always fought,” the ‘we’ meaning women. But the truth is, Jews also had narratives of oppression brought down on them by political powers going back into antiquity. In my research, I discovered the stories of so many Jews who escaped the Nazis to join resistance cells across Europe, hiding in forests to survive and strike against German forces as partisans. In my eyes, these stories gave us the backdrop for a larp with agency and drive, beyond the tight confines of prison camp walls and the Nazi stranglehold. It provided a new lens for the Jewish experience. Within that framework however, there was an added layer worth exploring: the story of the woman’s experience during a time of crisis.

    For most non-Jews, the interior lives of religious Jews and especially Jewish women is largely a mystery. Cultural and religious practices are hardly explored publicly or in media, and as a minority group often seen as impenetrable, the importance of these practices to Jewish identity might be difficult to understand. Yet to someone like me, who grew up Orthodox Jewish, I was raised with an innate understanding of the depth and meaning of religious practice in Jewish life. Tradition isn’t just a song from Fiddler On The Roof, but the cornerstone connecting generations of Jews in the global diaspora. Travel the world and you will meet another Jew whose practices are much like your own, no matter the language they speak or the place they call home. Jewish practice binds us, and never so much as the traditions connecting women. Passed down from mother to daughter, Jewish women are taught they are not only the keepers of the home, but the ones to teach their children the importance of their heritage. They are not just homemakers, of course, but aishet chayil – women of valor – who serve as the bedrock of cultural transmission. This is how it was passed down to me, from my own mother and grandmother, and from my female relatives. While the men might be more visible in their religious garb, their prayers, and their practices, we women almost had our own language, passed around between one another, connecting mothers and daughters back in a chain through centuries.

    This was the story I wanted to tell when I sat down to write Keeping The Candles Lit. Not the story of war and the devastating effects on Jews across Europe. Instead, I wanted to focus on a story close to my heart, peeling back the layers of mystery about Jewish belief and practice and letting non-Jews, if even for one moment, see what this living, breathing tradition looks like from the inside. But more than anything, I wanted them to see what happened when war tried to tear those important bonds to pieces.

    [space]

    My grandmother, Nora Stern, came to the United States as a refugee. She was born in a tiny town in Hungary which no longer exists on the maps; it was razed to the ground by Nazis after they took her and her entire family away. Of her massive, twenty-five-member family, only my grandmother survived. She languished in a recovery camp in Sweden for months, gaining back her health after being liberated from Auschwitz. There, she met my grandfather Zev, who had lost his wife and daughter, and the two married. In the United States, they opened up a sandwich shop and struggled every day to make ends meet. They had my mother, Esther, in 1949, and my uncle Mitch not long after. My grandfather developed cancer, leaving my grandmother to tend to his health and raise my mom and uncle alone. By the time my mother turned sixteen my grandfather was gone, and together the women of my family kept food on the table and a roof over their heads. So when I was born, both were already aishet chayil, those women of valor, who spent their time steadfast in their beliefs, bonded by equal struggle and religious ties passed down from mother to daughter. And soon, passed down to me.

    My grandmother never talked about the war to me. I spent most of my childhood at her house after school, since my parents both had to work, and she never spoke more than two sentences at a time about her experiences. Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, she visited my house in the evenings. She would sit at the kitchen table and my mother would type out long stories on an old typewriter. When I offered to do the job on a computer, the two threw me out of the room. I later found out my grandmother was telling her story – all of it – for the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. I was never allowed to read the accounts, but I know they haunted my mother years after. When my grandmother’s health began to decline, I’d hear her crying out at night when I stayed over to look after her. She’d cry for her friend Chaya, who she claimed was hiding “under the bed.” When I asked my mother about it, she only shook her head. Chaya died in the war, and that’s all they’d ever tell me. These were the stories I heard, the half-kept secrets, the looming knowledge of half a family gone, of roots being replanted in salted earth.

    Working on Keeping the Candles Lit, I knew these were stories I could tell. I could frame the story of mothers and daughters coming together to rebuild life in the ashes of destruction. But that narrative was well-trodden, and didn’t reflect the women of iron I knew existed during the war. Instead, I considered the bond between my mother and grandmother, the religious practices they shared and passed on to me, and wondered what it would look like to try and pass down those beliefs, to keep those religious practices, while being hunted. Jewish culture in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century reflected generations of insular cultural development and deeply structured life. What would happen to those understood places in society, that structured life, for those people on the run for their lives? More than anything, what would happen to the bonds between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, in the light of a new world? The small-town life of Eastern Europe was upturned, burnt down, destroyed forever. Before these women was a future of new countries, new families, and maybe even the death of everything they loved. To many, it might mean the death of belief in a God that could let the Nazis destroy their very world.

    This cultural disruption was the heart of the story I wanted to tell. And it all came from my own personal, inexplicable guilt.

    Shoshana and Esther Kessock, CUNY Brooklyn College graduation 2010.
    Shoshana and Esther Kessock, CUNY Brooklyn College graduation 2010.

    Structurally, I had the tentpoles of Keeping the Candles Lit before I even realized why I truly wanted to tell the story. I knew I wanted to show the partisans fighting, the difficulties of women keeping their religious practices, and the connections between three generations of women as they struggled to survive. It wasn’t until much later that I realized why I personally wanted to capture the importance of these traditions for the rest of the world to see. I discovered it when I finally sat down to write the damn game after weeks of complete and total writer’s block, as I tried to find a way to encompass an entire culture’s meaning in a few pages. I procrastinated. I worried I would do a bad job and misrepresent Judaism, or worse, not get my point across. I wondered how you could crystalize generations of significance and beauty into a few thousand words. I couldn’t imagine how I could pass that weight on to players who might not even know a single Jew in their lives, or only knew the bagels and cream cheese and ‘oy vey’ Jewish experience of secular media.

    It took peeling back the layers of my own childhood, of the years spent in Jewish school and at my grandmother’s kitchen table, in synagogue with my father, or being held high on my uncle’s shoulders at a Jewish wedding as a child, for me to understand the moments, the tiny precious breaths between rhetoric, dogma, and rote. In designing the game, I had to find the places where agency for play existed in concert with a litany of beliefs the players might not completely understand, but could tie in with their own backgrounds and cultures. While someone might not understand the rituals of the Sabbath completely, they could potentially connect to the experience of sharing a peaceful moment in front of holiday candles with their relatives. They could understand the importance of eating food rich with the memories of their ancestors, made for special holidays, shared together as religious or familial practice. They could understand the tensions of a family trying to transmit their culture down to the next generation in a rapidly changing world. These were the hooks I needed to connect, to distill the feeling of personal connection, rather than religious significance.

    In the end, I found myself emotionally unprepared for the project. I forced myself to delve into meaning behind religious ritual I’d had a tempestuous relationship with all my life, to rediscover the beauty and importance in the Sabbath rituals, the modesty of dress and living so wholly important to Jewish life, practices I’d often questioned from a “progress” feminist position. Yet Keeping the Candles Lit forced me to face my feelings and rediscover much of what I’d left behind. When I finished writing the game, I didn’t want to look at it or play-test it. Instead, I handed it off to my roommate to run. I didn’t want to look at the damn thing ever again. It took months for me to understand that writing the game had ripped off a bandage about my culture, about our history, and about the transmission of tradition in my own family. Keeping The Candles Lit tore open old wounds about my relationships with my mother and grandmother, about my guilt at no longer being religious, and about my feelings of failing them both. It reminded me of years of fights, of disagreements and arguments about the importance of history, culture, of our practices and their importance. And it made me realize I’d written Keeping the Candles Lit as much as a tribute to the things I’d left behind, as for the rest of the world to see the Jewish world I deep down cherish so much.

    My grandmother died when I was sixteen. She never got a chance to see the woman I am today. I often think she might have liked me now, though she would probably have (metaphorically) kicked me in the head over the years for things I’d done. Looking back, some of the greatest moments of my life were spent in the hours before the Sabbath, cooking her special chocolate roll cakes and listening to Yiddish songs on the radio. I will never forget lighting Sabbath candles with my mother, listening to her say the blessing, and waiting for my father to come back from synagogue while we talked the way only mothers and daughters only can, in the comfort of our own kitchen at home. This shared language of mothers and daughters came from our connection, which I’d left so far behind, severed just as much as it might have been in the heart of war.

    The role of the daughter in Keeping the Candles Lit will always be me, the seeker for a new future in the face of change. And that’s why I’ll never run or play my own game. I don’t need to, and I don’t think I ever could.

    In the end, I don’t know if my mother ever saw the text message about winning the IGDN Award for War Birds. The award plaque rests on my shelf, and I have a hard time looking at it. I have a hard time even looking at the War Birds anthology, even though I’m proud of my contribution. There’s just too much of my family, and too much of me in the game.

    But before leaving for the convention, I hugged and kissed my mother, and she wished me well. I told her if she wanted me to stay home, she just needed to ask. She gave that universal Jewish mother shrug and said, “What would it matter what I said? You’ll only do what you want anyway. You always do.” And she was right. But even though the words sounded so harsh, I knew she meant them with a certain sense of pride. Her last words to me were, “I’ll talk to you when you get back,” although maybe the last words we shared with one another were in a text about how much she inspired a game shared throughout the larp world. I know my mother backed the Kickstarter for the book, even though she’d never larped in her life, and she read the game. And that’s got to be enough, for me.

    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: Sabbath Candles, a cornerstone of Jewish practice.

  • 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.