Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in these texts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
Disclaimer: We understand and respect that nudity is not for everyone, and it is certainly not for every larp. There are several reasons to not feel comfortable being naked, or being around naked people, and that is perfectly alright. However, in this article we will focus mainly on our positive experiences of nudity in larps.
This article is written from the perspective of two people with fairly similar experiences and relations to nudity: we are both Swedish, and in our cultural context there are situations (sauna, public changing rooms and the occasional skinny dipping in secluded natural lakes) where naked bodies are completely ordinary, undramatic and usually not sexualised. While we both exist somewhere on the genderqueer spectrum, we are perceived by the outside world as women, and politically identify as women. Since societal beauty standards often contribute to how people feel about showing their naked bodies, it is relevant to mention that we are both able-bodied, and fairly average-looking. Karin is fat, whereas Julia is pear-shaped and of average weight. Whereas it would be interesting and helpful with more diverse perspectives, they would not fit within the scope of this article. In any case, it is our firm belief that all bodies are suited to being naked in larps, no matter how close or far they are to living up to societal beauty standards. We hope to include more diverse voices and opinions in this discussion in the future. We would like to see more people writing from different perspectives about their own experiences with nakedness in Nordic larp.
Why be naked at larps?
Nakedness in larps is usually not sexual. If we want to be sexy or sexual at larps, we will usually go for a costume that is sexy. In none of the situations where we have been naked at larps, or witnessed others’ nudity, has it been particularly sexy. Instead, nudity has made us feel other things, including, but not limited to: vulnerable, powerful, fearful, otherworldly, small, confident, helpless, innocent and natural. Provided it makes narrative and dramatic sense, we have found that being naked or witnessing nudity can make a scene much more intense and immersive, and result in a more impactful experience.
In The Forbidden History Julia played a scene involving a ritual with her character’s friend group. The beginning of the ritual was emotionally taxing. The characters tore into each other and pointed out and criticized each others’ weaknesses and insecurities. After this, the characters were each, in turn, undressed and gently bathed and washed by the others. The stark contrast between the sting of the cruel words and the tenderness of being washed gently, was made all the more palpable by having barely any clothes on. Being undressed and physically exposed, after being emotionally exposed by the cruel words, complemented and enhanced the emotional impact of the scene. This offers a clear example of how nudity can deepen immersion and imbue a feeling of vulnerability
In, off or if?
For many of us larpers, costume is an integral part of how we embody our characters. Through costuming we can modify our appearance and make ourselves look prettier, uglier, more athletic, majestic or however else we want our character to look. We may do this to distance our own identity from that of our character, or to adapt our appearance to fit a character physicality different from our own. Costuming provides cues for ourselves and other players on how our characters should be perceived and reacted to, and aids in immersion for ourselves and the players around us. Without the camouflage of costume, our nude body offers little separation between our own appearance and that of our characters, and few prompts for how our characters should be understood. One could argue that our bodies, once in costume, are ‘in-game’ and that being out of costume signifies we are ‘off-game’.
We find this argument limiting. In the same way that being out of costume could signify we are ‘off-game’, when naked, there is nothing to signify that we are anyone other than the characters we are embodying. Most characters are also in possession of a naked body beneath their clothes, and this body can be represented by our own naked bodies just as easily as their attire can be represented by our costumes. Clothing or costume is not the only way in which we embody characters. Elements such as make-up, accessories or mannerisms can be just as effective in portraying elements of our characters, and their effect is even more profound when adorning an otherwise naked body.
Karin first came to this realization when re-running The Witches of Ästad Farm (Sweden 2016). She describes the scene, in which nudity at first appeared to be just a solution to a practical problem, but ended up being an important part of the experience:
A character summoned the mythical Morrigan (a figure from Irish mythology, appearing as a crow, and often portrayed as a trio of sisters). We as crew wanted to do the scene, but did not have fitting costumes available. After some consideration I exclaimed that ‘being naked is always in-game’. We decided The Morrigan would arrive with two of their aspects as ravens who would shapeshift into human form. As ravens naturally do not wear clothes, neither would we. We used grease paint to create black wings on our backs and adopted weird, otherworldly and bird-like behavior as we ‘landed’ alongside Morrigan at a midnight ritual on that chilly autumn night. The only prop used was an apple, which we tossed between us and then to the other players.
In some situations, nakedness in larps is for practical reasons, and has no strong part in play. A typical example of this is in Swedish fantasy larps, where it is not uncommon for people to cool off by skinny-dipping in a creek or lake. In these situations, the naked bodies are viewed as neutral, undramatic, and these situations sometimes have an air of “if” (the liminal space between in-game and off-game). Important scenes rarely happen in these situations, and players usually do not feel deep immersion and emotions.
Vulnerable, yet protected
The experience of being naked, whilst those around you are clothed, can be particularly affecting and enhance the psychological and emotional state of our characters. In Libertines (Denmark 2019) Julia’s character was forced to undress by her oppressors, admit to humiliating things she was accused of, and then sit down to dinner, still naked. Being completely naked in this situation made the scene extremely immersive – the oppression felt much more threatening, and the small acts of kindness and compassion deeply moving. It was an incredible way to experience vulnerability, to let the larp come up close and personal.
However, in our experience being naked also has a sort of protective effect. When a person is wearing little or no clothing, any kind of physical contact feels more intimate or intrusive. As a result, other players tend to avoid touching you, or at least do so with more forethought and deliberation that they might otherwise do.
This effect also works in tandem with the ‘underwear rule’ that is used in many larps, especially those that have techniques for sex scenes that are realistic looking (such as theater style sex). The underwear rule says that you must be wearing at least underwear when playing out a sex scene. As a result, we have felt quite safe when being naked at larps, because we know that it will act as a clear signal that other players should not engage in sex scenes with us until we are dressed again.
Liberating and empowering
So far, we have mainly focused on the short-term effect larp has on the experience of the larp itself. However, it is also relevant to explore the effect it can have on our off-game experiences of our own bodies. Overall, our naked bodies are only relevant in our private lives either as neutral (when we are bathing or changing, etc.), and in intimate situations. We often view them with critical, evaluating eyes, gauging our fitness or attractiveness. We rarely have opportunities for our naked bodies to take up space without being judged or evaluated. In larps, it is possible to create such a space, and to reap the benefits even after the larp is over.
The larp community consists of individuals with all sorts of body types, genders and sexualities. Acceptance of differences, and recognising people as they wish to be recognised, is a behavioral norm amongst most larpers, and an intolerance to any sort of -phobic or body-shaming comments is often written into the rules and policies of larps. This openness has made larp events ideal places to experience the ‘sauna effect’ on how we view our naked bodies.
The ‘sauna effect’ is said to happen when you regularly go to spaces where people with a diversity of bodies are naked and relaxed, such as saunas or gym changing rooms. Working to become comfortable in these settings, and normalizing nudity in neutral and non-sexualised settings can have a positive effect on our self-image and mental health.
The ‘sauna effect’ makes us feel that naked bodies are quite normal, that we can relax and be ourselves, that nakedness is not something to take much note about. However, being naked at larps can also have a completely different, but equally empowering, effect on how we view our own bodies. It can offer the opportunity for our naked bodies to take up space in dramatic and impressive ways, allowing us to feel powerful or otherworldly in our nakedness – a feeling that we rarely experience in everyday life. We can tell you from experience, that despite the risk of ending up scratched and bruised, running naked through the woods, screaming and cursing can be a surprisingly raw and healing experience.
Ludography
The Forbidden History (2018): Poland. Atropos Studios
Libertines (2019, 2020): Denmark. Atropos Studios and Julia Greip
Witches of Ästad Farm/Häxorna på Ästad Gård (2016, 2017, 2018): Sweden. Karin Edman & Alfhild Thörner.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Edman, Karin, and Julia Greip. 2024. “Naked at Nordic Larp.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Leandro Godoy, one of the founders and producers of the larp group Confraria das Ideias (Eng. Brotherhood of Ideas), conducted an interview with a diverse group of larpers, players and designers from different regions in Brazil. He seeks to understand the limitations faced in Brazil, both inside and outside the games.
The people interviewed were:
André Sarturi, 45. Actor and university professor, founder of the Enigma larp group. Curitiba – PR.
Carolina Scartezini, 40. Witch of the word. Creator, actor and artistic advisor at Tudo Teatro group. Itaberaba – BA.
Effe Schmidlin, 29. Multi-artist and teacher. Member of the Sangria larp group. Belo Horizonte – MG
Henrique Marins, 44. Teacher. São Paulo – SP
Larissa Forchetto, 28. Video editor. Sao Paulo – SP
Luiz Falcão, 36 Designer, Visual Artist, Set Designer and Art Educator. Founder of the group Boi Voador and NpLarp. Sao Paulo-SP
Rafael Silva, 32. Realtor. Member of the Sangria larp group. Belo Horizonte – MG
Raissa Alonso, 32. Historian. Sao Paulo-SP
Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama, 39. Teacher. Member of the Coral Amarelo larp group. Sorocaba – SP
Thais Pistorezzi, 43. Journalist and actress. Maceió – AL
Vanessa Mayumi, 29. UX Designer. Sao Paulo-SP
Viviane Silva, 40. Art Promoter. Member of the Matilha da Garoa rpg group. Sao Paulo-SP
On factors limiting participation in larps
Luiz Falcão: For a long time, what limited us was that there were no larps to play. Organizing or running a larp is a lot of work. There was a time with a greater variety of larps (between 2010 and 2016), but today we are somehow back with scarcity once again.
Larissa Forchetto: For me, the biggest challenge is exactly this – there aren’t that many larps to go to.
Luiz Falcão: There was a time when we knew there were larps out there: there were the Graal larps, São Paulo by Night (and other vampire larp groups), and Megacorp, for example. But – this is a thing that we end up not considering – sometimes there are games, but they are not always for our player profiles. (see e.g. Falcão 2014).
Luiz Falcão: In 2013 there were a series of initiatives to change the situation, such as Luiz Prado’s larps. But it wasn’t enough.
André Sarturi: I don’t know many people in Curitiba who larp. The ones I know are much younger than I am, and I’m not really involved with the scene. If there were more larp groups, I would end up playing more larps.
Thais Pistorezzi: I moved from São Paulo to Maceió, and there are no larp groups in the region.
Luiz Falcão: Parenting, its complexity and all its invisible work. I work on the weekends (because I work with art and culture), and during the week I am at my daughter’s disposal. I don’t even have weekends for free time.
Henrique Marins: Family and professional commitments require, for example, traveling more frequently on weekends.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Calendar. And adding to this the issue of logistics and the main thing for me, the demands of day to day life. I have to put a lot of things in my daily life aside to be done during the weekend – besides, of course, spending time with my daughter. And these are everyday things, cleaning the house, cooking for the week, etc. Having more weekends participating in larps would mean having fewer full weekends to take care of these everyday demands.
Rafael Silva: Adult life consumes our time, leaving little space for pretend play.
Carolina Scartezini: I don’t play that many larps, basically for reasons of time and logistics – these are the only reasons why I’ve never been able to go to an in-person larp at the Confraria, for example.
Viviane Silva: For me, transportation and larp schedules are very relevant factors.
Vanessa Mayumi: My biggest impediment is transportation, combined with the calendar. The city (São Paulo) is huge and transport takes a long time, so when I go to a larp I have to reserve the whole day just for that. If I have more things to do during the day, I am not able to go to the larp. The sooner I find out about a larp, the more likely that I can plan.
On themes and great larps
Raissa Alonso: Currently I also prefer more reflective themes, like in the larp Último Dia em Antares (Brazil 2016, Eng. Last Day on Antares) or in the incredible larp inspired by Tommy: Cegos, Surdos e Mudos (Brazil 2017, Eng. The Blind, the Deaf and the Dumb).
Leandro Godoy: In Último Dia em Antares, a family has decided to flee to a planet orbiting the star Antares (on a one-way trip) to escape a catastrophic crisis on their own planet, but upon arrival, they discover that the star is about to explode. They wait for the end of the world, dealing with frustrations, the feeling of impotence, the fear of death, and trying to enjoy their last moments together. The larp is non-verbal: participants must interact with their bodies, by miming, and via facial expressions – without saying a single word.
Cegos, Surdos e Mudos was inspired by the rock opera Tommy (The Who, 1969) and the episode Apenas Bons Amigos (Just Good Friends) from the Brazilian tv series Comédia da Vida Privada (Private Life Comedy, Guel Arraes, Jorge Furtado and Luís Fernando Veríssimo, 1995). The story begins with a group of friends who get together at the end of high school and decide to test the legend that, by listening to the Tommy album with a lit candle, a person can glimpse their own future. From then on, the players begin to play the group’s meetings from time to time, permeated by the history of Brazil over the last sixty years. The group has to deal with their own traumas, constructed from the lyrics and characters of the songs on the album. The larp’s delicate design combines music, Brazilian history, and the characters’ personal relationships as they search for new meanings for past events and learn to value the friendships we make in life. (see Godoy 2021)
Vanessa Mayumi: The topic is very important to me. If the theme doesn’t motivate me, I end up thinking it’s not worth the effort of organizing everything to be able to go.
Luiz Falcão: I’m not interested in boffer larps, just as boffer larp audiences sometimes aren’t interested in the larps that I like. Nor in campaign larps that often try to simulate character evolution in electronic role-playing games. To me, they seem to try to reproduce a certain capitalist game where hierarchy and meritocracy are mandatory and relationships are mediated based on the accumulation of points. I also do not like larps that are based on established intellectual properties such as Vampire, Harry Potter, etc. Even though I might really like the IP itself, these games tend to have issues around canon. They generate hierarchies and conflicts… and they reduce the creative potential of the experience in favor of reproducing familiar narratives.
Lack of larp culture and resources
Luiz Falcão: One limiting factor is that larp is not seen as normal and socially accepted the same way many other activities are. We don’t even have a scene, a subculture. Soccer, cinema, theater, and video games are everywhere. There are cinemas in every shopping mall, films appear on TV, on YouTube, there is a hype. Your colleagues at work play soccer. Your father takes you to the soccer stadium. And there is no Brazilian larp community or the community is very small. Furthermore, the cost of living in Brazil is very high – and most players are not in the upper classes of the population.
Rafael Silva: The term “hunger larp” is not for nothing. There is a lack of transportation, food, and costumes to participate in larps. If you can’t afford it or don’t have a support group or network, you’re out.
Luiz Falcão: And there was the dismantling of culture from 2016 to now, with the Coup d’Etat, accompanied by a destruction of the economy for the poorest and an increasing precariousness of work (with the imposed labor reform that dismantled workers’ constitutional rights), with a drop in purchasing power, galloping inflation and a reduction in leisure time.
Leandro Godoy: You are referring to the sad incident of President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016 despite being innocent of the charges and who faced misinformation and hatred in the media. The process followed the rites of the congress but served the interests of a ruling class unhappy with social reforms and the loss of economic power.
Effe Schmidlin: And this gets in the way of finding resources to create scenography. Even accessing more private locations is difficult. Meetings in Belo Horizonte city take place mainly in parks and public squares.
Luiz Falcão: Even if you are working with art and culture, it is very difficult to work with larp – because it is not a recognized artform. It is no exaggeration to say that larp was on a rising tide until the 2016 Coup d’Etat – and after that it has been in a downward spiral. The reported problems of lack of money, time and health, all or almost all, are directly related to the precariousness that has been ongoing since 2016.
Leandro Godoy: And unfortunately, this led directly to the fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro between 2018 and 2022, which greatly compromised social relations, and had the dismantling of culture as a government plan, among other terrible policies.(see Prado & Godoy 2022).
Luiz Falcão: It is also worth highlighting the role of social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), from 2016 to now. Aggressive behavior on these networks has increased at the same time that the reach of dissemination has decreased. Participating in online communities (not just larp communities but all kinds of online communities) or publicizing activities on these networks is no longer productive. The publicity doesn’t reach the players, but the haters are always there, ready to attack.
Leandro Godoy: I think we can observe some patterns: scarcity of larps, themes, difficult urban mobility, social inequality… Any and all of these can end up limiting players in one way or another.
Do limits in larp restrict or support players?
Luiz Falcão: It depends on the game. There is no difference between support and restriction. Freedom without limits is the freedom of the oppressor. The guardrail, on the balcony, supports you and restricts you. The problem with restrictions is when they are not well applied. Beyond limits, without any limits, there is oppression. Going beyond the previous limits is alright. Beyond the current limits there is always a new limit. Every larp is a game of subjection. The question is “what do I agree to subject myself to”.
Larissa Forchetto: I think that when I’m playing, the word limit captures both things. If it’s a limit of what I know or what I can do, like acting or knowing the subject, I can push myself to overcome it. However, I feel limits are also an important support for me. They help me know how far I can go with certain things within the game itself.
Raissa Alonso: It’s a dialectical relationship. I think it boosts and supports. I feel safe when we define the limits of what we feel comfortable with in the game. I prefer it to playing blind. I think limits can be built based on consensus. When there is conversation, I feel driven to test things within larps. When there are no limits, I always prefer to be cautious, because I don’t want to be invasive with other players.
Henrique Marins: I have always found it very important, in the larps I have participated in, that the organizing team has been concerned with people’s physical and emotional safety. Knowing that there are limits increases confidence that this security is maintained. You can play freely, within the agreed limits. At the same time, knowing that the limits are there and that they can be activated at any time supports your play.
Thais Pistorezzi: I believe that an open dialogue is necessary, at least to clarify doubts. If there is a restriction in a larp, players are allowed to question it. When it is properly explained, it can be respected by the players, and it can boost ideas and even character and story building. A limit can also be a form of support. It helps us understand how far we can go, so that everybody respects each other’s boundaries. When a person knows there is a restriction, they are not supposed to ignore it and cross the boundary it defines.
Luiz Falcão: It’s an ethical issue. Who guarantees compliance with a limit during the game? Who guarantees that a security code works? The best way for shit not to happen is to not do shit. It isn’t difficult to give a false feeling of security or participation. Sometimes, the rules say something, but unwritten rules produce conflicting interpretations by players, leading to unexpected things.
André Sarturi: I’m an artist and I think there are ethical limits, but at the same time art shouldn’t have limits, so in my understanding limits should be negotiated. I currently run larps for students at the university I work in, in an environment where people are linked to the arts. We have been able to explore 18+ themes in the larp O Baile do Cara de Cavalo (Brazil 2022, Eng. The Horse Face Ball), and we are studying e.g. cabaret and urban violence.
Rafael Silva: Limits are created in dialogue. They are social agreements. And as such, they enhance the larp experience. I have few limits when it comes to larping, but I understand those who need more space to enjoy the experience.
Viviane Silva: Restrictions that are there to guide the game stimulate much more than they limit. I believe they should not be or treated as a dead end.
Carolina Scartezini: When I’m playing, a limit serves both purposes: it is an inspiration (in the same vein as a creative restriction) that drives me, and it gives me a feeling of security. In general, I deal well with limits. I think they are important both to provide clarity and security and to instigate creativity. In my view, when the people participating feel that they can simply do anything, without any restrictions, they end up doing nothing as they are lost.
Tadeu Rodrigues: When I’m participating in a larp, I think the word limit means a parameter. I think it can support play. But above all, I think it gives parameters to the participants’ experience.
Effe Schmidlin: In some situations, safety rules and meta-techniques allow me to go further. In others, limits prevent me from causing problems for other people by playing. The ways in which the limits are drawn define how I will engage in the game, and how the magic circle where the game happens is built.
Limitations in the game
Leandro Godoy: What limits you during a larp? Knowledge of themes, language, resources for creating costumes, time to study characters and plot beforehand, or any personal limits?
Luiz Falcão: Text, rules, and rituals have to be available for consultation somewhere since an excess of rules and symbols can contain too much information to remember. Or too many mechanics, like in Vampire larps – consulting the rules can interrupt the larp and does not increase dramatic tension.
Leandro Godoy: I have a lot of difficulty remembering many of the rules during a larp. In fact, after I started playing more larps, I started to reduce the amount of text in the larps I organize.
Luiz Falcão: Assuming that players know or handle something that they don’t necessarily know or handle is a problem.
Tadeu Rodrigues: It limits me if the larp requires a lot of time to read and memorize the character and the plot. Brazilian larps don’t typically require much prior preparation but if a larp does, it becomes a barrier for me. So if I need to invest time before the larp, it bothers me a little, which limits me.
Leandro Godoy: Larps in Brazil don’t often require much preparation from the players. We try to make participation as practical as possible, becaus
Histórias Extraordinárias Sesc Belenzinho.
e everyday life leaves little time to read a lot of materials for a larp or to obtain complex costumes. But sometimes larps require greater preparation from players.
Henrique Marins: I think I have had the most fun when I have had more time to prepare for my character – to come up with a costume, to study the materials, and to plan some action for the larp. Of course I’ve also had really good experiences in larps where I jumped aboard almost at the last minute.
Raissa Alonso: Time needed for reading and internalizing the character depends a lot on the larp – its design and atmosphere. Sometimes it is nice to have prepared beforehand, sometimes the fun is in the improvisation.
Thais Pistorezzi: Limitation is a word that brings so much anxiety. I don’t remember feeling limited in any larp. There have been situations in which some points in the story or the characters’ costumes have caused difficulties because of a design problem. However, everything has always been resolved and worked around so that the larp could continue smoothly.
Raissa Alonso: I think it’s cool when resources are offered by the organization, so that no one feels limited. When I have to bring costumes from home, I always feel like people are comparing me to others.
Larissa Forchetto: The costumes and customizing them are the issue that limits me most at a larp. However, finding them is not something that I consider impossible. It’s a limit that I can work with.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Costumes are not really an issue in our productions, but there can be issues with ready-made costumes – I’m big! And often when there is a larp that has ready-made costumes, I know in advance that there will probably not be an outfit in my size. When there is a ready-made costume available, it often does not fit me which creates physical discomfort. Of course, this is a question of resources. We are a third world country, so investing a lot in costumes is not something that is in the spending priorities.
Effe Schmidlin: Resources for creating costumes are a problem.
Raissa Alonso: I think the strongest personal limit I have is the body issue. It needs to be negotiated, always. It can be really cool to explore it, but at the same time it is a really sensitive topic. I hate it when I feel pressured to do something, which can happen a lot when you play in a group. I think that when the game pushes you into doing something exceptional with your body, there should be a content warning. I wouldn’t play a larp blindfolded, for example, without having complete trust in the organizers and without having very clear limits on what is allowed to be done.
Luiz Falcão: Body, affection, sensitivity, sexuality, all of these need to be well discussed. Depending on how it goes, they can be issues for me too.
Henrique Marins: In some cases, the character can limit the player’s performance in a larp. For example, if the character is an introvert, you might need to avoid more intense scenes.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Interpersonal issues also limit me at larps. I don’t feel comfortable particitating if there are people whom I don’t like spending time with. If there is somebody who makes me feel rejected or refused, then I often don’t even participate. And if I do participate, I keep my distance during the larp. If I don’t like somebody outside the larp, I don’t feel comfortable playing with that person.
Carolina Scartezini: Until now, only two things have made me not to want to participate in a game: if the theme and the way it works do not interest me (generally, this happens with boffer larps or larps that seem too pedagogical to me) or if I know that something about the topic actually is a painful trigger for me (like in the larp about the military dictatorship Soldier Pereira and his school friends).
Vanessa Mayumi: My biggest limits are my health (physical and mental) and how much the activity will affect me and others. Of course, if I’m sick and contagious, I stay home. But beyond that, if I’m not mentally healthy to interpret the character and the themes, if the topic affects me personally, or if I’m not well enough to socialize with other people, I end up not going.
Viviane Silva: What limits me is my health. It is difficult for me to see in dimly lit locations. Moreover, I find it hard to stand still for a long time.
On resources, collaboration, and inter-disciplinary larp
André Sarturi: Resources limit me the most. Even though it is possible to organize larps with minimal resources, it can be interesting to do something that requires elaborate technology – for example video projection, video mapping, and electronics prototyping platforms. These are not necessary, but it is cool to be able to try another experience inside a larp design and to test the limits.The question is how to acquire and manage these resources. You also need to consider whether using technology makes sense for the game or not.
Luiz Falcão: I feel it is quite limiting to try to larp when you are filmed or when there is an audience watching but it is not properly included in the design. If you’re offering something to the audience, it is theater, not larp. In the larp Grimm Agreste (Brazil 2014), the relationship between the players and the Grimm Agreste exhibition – a beautiful installation inspired by the tales of the Grimm brothers reimagined with the aesthetics of the Brazilian wilderness and countryside – and its audience worked well because of the costumes and the design of the game. However, I have seen other experiences where this relationship did not work well, frustrating not only the participants but also the larp designer.
Leandro Godoy: In general, it is interesting to see how the practice of larp evolves with these collaborations. Ten, fifteen years ago, we weren’t discussing negotiations, costume discomforts, or how much game design and agreements can affect us during the experience. I believe we have a lot to talk about and a lot to experience. As a community, we can evolve beyond the issue of resources needed for games to happen safely and provide incredible artistic experiences.
Thank you everyone for your contribution to the conversation. I hope we meet soon, in a new larp or chat, and that these questions can lead us – participants and readers of the interview alike – to reflect more on the challenges and limits, and to have increasingly inclusive, safe and unforgettable experiences!
Bibliography
Luiz Falcão (2014): New Tastes in Brazilian Larp. In The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp, edited by Jon Back. Knutpunkt.
Leandro Godoy (2021): The use of music as a magical element for the larp experience. In Book of Magic – Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein er al. Knudepunkt.
Luiz Prado and Leandro Godoy (2022): Larp Against Fascism. In Distance of Touch, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt.
Ludography
Grimm Agreste (2014): Brazil, Sesc Interlagos. Confraria das Ideias.
Cegos, Surdos e Mudos (2017, 2022, 2023): Brazil and Sweden, Centro Cultural da Juventude, Sesc Pompéia and Konsert & Kongress. Confraria das Ideias.
Último Dia em Antares (2016): Brazil, Sesc Ipiranga and Centro Cultural da Juventude. Luiz Prado and Boi Voador.
O Baile do Cara de Cavalo (2022, 2023): Brazil, online at FLO (Brazilian Larp online festival) and UNESPAR – Faculdade de Artes do Paraná. André Sarturi, Luiz Falcão.
Soldier Pereira and His School Friends (2021, 2022): Brazil, Sesc Pompéia and online at FLO (Brazilian Larp online festival) and International larp festival by Chaos League. Leandro Godoy and Confraria das Ideias.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Godoy, Leandro. 2024. “In the Limits Below the Line – An Interview with Brazilian Larpers.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
The fact that there is a separate term for larp shows that it is quite a peculiar type of role-playing. It has its own history, culture, and audience. At their origins, the terms LRP, LARP, and larp already denoted an agglomeration of radically different games with some RPG “DNA” in them (Arjoranta 2010, 10). As the praxis of larps evolved and expanded, the term became increasingly diluted.
As a consequence, the term larp is often usedin larp circles as an all-encompassing category that includes every kind of embodied role-playing (Hyltoft 2010; Kot 2012; Bowman 2014). It is weird because, before the late 70s, the basic assumption of any role-playing activity was that it was (at least partially) embodied. The popularity of tabletop and computer role-playing games changed this assumption. A need arose for specific terms for the “live” or “live-action” versions. Originally, larp was a specific thing, but it soon became a blanket term: and, for some, a synonym for the general phenomenon of (embodied) role-playing.
This usage sometimes extends in time and space to include activities that have never considered themselves as larps. Drama in Education, process drama, sociodrama, simulation gaming, improv theater games, and some other traditions all include elements of embodied role-playing. Larpers, larp theorists, and even larp academics recurrently label these activities as larp or larping.
Each one of these activities has a longer history and older social institutions than larp, which emerged in the late ‘80s (Harviainen & al. 2018). Although larp as a term is younger than them, it is not necessarily more marginal. None of the aforementioned fields are truly mainstream right now, neither in academic research nor in daily practice. Similar to larp, their meaning and content are often obscure to outsiders.
Labeling things as larp might originate from the fact that it is easy to separate the role-playing activity from its game framing (Harviainen 2011, 185). The former is a “behavioral-psychological mode of engagement” (Deterding 2016, 104), a way of doing things that can be experienced and identified in non-larp activities. J. Tuomas Harviainen (2011, 176) attempted to capture this phenomenon with his famous criteria of “larping”:
“Role-playing in which a character, not just a social role, is played.
The activity takes place in a fictional reality shared with others. Breaking that fictional reality is seen as a breach in the play itself.
The physical presence of at least some of the players as their characters.”
In this sense, “larping” happens at most larp events, while it can also exist at non-larp events (Harviainen cites re-enactment, bibliodrama, and other activities). It is unfortunate that instead of choosing a neutral name for this universal behavior, we call it larping. This use of language subtly undermines identity: “Sure, your events are not larps. But you are still larping.”
As we identify more and more activities as larps, and create a new category for “those larps that are not aware that they are larps,” we are imposing our language and terminology on these independently established fields. History shows that this could lead to the suppression, undermining, and erasure of their origin, tradition, and identity. And this is not just an unconscious bias, it is a decade-old open agenda, calledlarpification: “Call it larp and others will follow” (Raasted 2012).
Larp as a super-umbrella term has caused confusion and mental harm. At least to me, a role-player with multiple backgrounds in the above-mentioned activities. Larpers often behave like embodied personality-playing had been an uninhabited virgin soil discovered first by them. I find it profoundly unjust that they trample over other traditions while attempting to emancipate the meaning of larp in the public discourse. This is why I always find myself on the defensive at larp theory events, if I dare to speak: which is frustrating.
While I do not suggest that changing our insider language usage is the most pressing issue in the process of furthering equity, diversity, and inclusion, I propose that cross-activity umbrella terms should be as neutral and analytic as possible to minimize linguistic and cultural oppression. Simply speaking, we should not use larp or larping to describe things outside of our domain.
It’s good that the larp scene is constantly pushing its own boundaries, but it should not try to do so by conquering or colonizing its neighbors.
Bibliography
Sebastian Deterding (2016): Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design. In Digital Make-Believe: Human-Computer Interaction edited by Phil Turner and J. Tuomas Harviainen, 101–124. Springer.
Jonne Arjoranta (2011): Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games. International Journal of Role-playing, 3–17.
J. Tuomas Harviainen (2011): The Larping that is not Larp. In Think Larp. Academic Writings from KP2011, edited by Thomas Duus Henriksen. Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle, 172–193. Rollespilsakademiet.
J. Tuomas, Harviainen, Rafael Bienia, Simon Brind, Michael Hitchens, Yaraslau I. Kot, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, David W. Simkins, Jaakko Stenros and Ian Sturrock (2018): Live-action Role-playing Games. In Role-playing Game Studies. A Transmedia Approach, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, 87–106. Routledge.
Malik Hyltoft (2010): Four Reasons Why Edu-larp Works. In LARP – Einblicke – Aufsatzsammlungzum MittelPunkt 2010, edited by Karsten Dombrowski. Zauberfeder.
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2014): Educational Live Action Role-playing Games: A Secondary Literature Review. The Wyrd Con Companion Book 3: 112–131.
Yaraslau I. Kot (2012): Educational Larp – Topics for Consideration. In The Wyrd Con Companion Book, edited by Aaron Vanek and Sarah Lynne Bowman, 118–27.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2024. “Larp: the Colonist.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
A version of this article was originally published in the Knudepunkt 2023 underground book ‘larp truths ready to be heard’.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Larp forum threads on fire off the shoulder of phpBB… I watched instamatic photos glitter in albums near the Immersionist Gate. All those… moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time… To die.
I’m old, so this might come across as old_man_yelling_at_cloud.gif, but hear me out: we suck at documenting our larps these days. There are no central larp calendars for what larps have been run and which ones are upcoming. Photos end up not in public larp galleries or forums but in personal photo albums on social media sites or closed places like invite-only events on Facebook, Discord servers etc. Discussions take place on personal social media walls or feeds, or in said closed larp events/groups or chatrooms. Amazing larps (and disastrous ones) come and go, and the only traces they leave are scattered on the social media platform breeze.
Don’t believe me? As an exercise, (without doing a shoutout on your Facebook wall) try to come up with a list of 10 larps organized in your country from a couple of years ago, let’s say 2019. Or even 2022. How do you do it? Where do you look for information? How to find out who organized those larps, at what venues were they run? What did they cost? Where are the stories from that larp, or discussions about what happened there, the interesting techniques used or the bad design choices? Try finding photos from those larps. Where are they, and how do you find them?
I’ve done this exercise over and over, trying to piece together clues and compiling the scant information into lists. It’s exhausting work that requires not only extensive research and time, but also for you to reach out (often on social media) to complete strangers – who may or may not even get notified about your message or may even miss it completely in the constant algorithm maze that is social media these days – to get a hold of even the basics: who organized the larp? Did it even happen or was it cancelled? What was the larp about?
Believe it or not, but this task is much easier for larps way back – even from back in the dark 1990s, before everyone had internet, you can still find archived forum threads, cached web pages and paper fanzine articles, that allow you to study larps that few have ever heard of. The larps of 2023? Who knows, it’s all lost in the Facebook fog of war (or even worse, buried deep in an endless stream of text on some Discord server or another). After 2012 it gets progressively harder to find information about larps, and after 2020 it’s basically a black hole. Plot the information available on a graph and you’d think larp basically died out in 2018.
So, who cares, you might ask yourself. What do I care about photos from that Finnish viking larp back around 2018, or about who organized that nordic noir slash fae power struggle larp in Copenhagen last fall? Well, we should care about our history – not only the “old” history from the 1990s or the early 2000s when “everything” happened, we should care about writing our history today for the decades to come – or it will just be a blank spot on the map, a gaping hole in the traditions and evolution of this strange hobby of ours. We should care about where we’ve been, what we’ve tried and experienced, and not only that – we should be proud and celebrate all of our larps – the good, the bad, the ones that pushed the limits or expanded the borders of our hobby, the ones that tried but failed, and the ones that perhaps didn’t leave a mark in the halls of fame but still reside in the collective memory of their participants.
We should care, and we should find a way to not only preserve that history, but to make it publicly available. How do we do this? I don’t exactly know, but since we are a smart and entrepreneurial group of weirdos, we should be able to come up with solutions. Don’t let these tears be washed away in the rain.
Existing initiatives to archive larps
https://alexandria.dk – An extensive archive of (primarily) role-playing scenarios and conventions, but also larps, fanzines etc.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Utbult, Sebastian. 2024. “Tears in the Rain.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
I started larping late in life. In the last eight years I have played with larpers of all ages, some of whom are now facing the passage of time. I hear them lament the fact that they can no longer play as they used to do. Something has changed.
I am old. As I have grown older, I hide behind layers upon layers of knowledge and experience. Like a carapace it hides me from prying eyes and hurting remarks. It will happen to all of us. Like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa we will suddenly wake up one morning as a monstrous vermin. Or at least that is what we think will happen as we grow old. But is it true? Do we have to end up as a petrified version of our younger self?
The answer is no – but if you want to change you will need to recognize that your current self is a construct born of social circumstances and the expectations of family and society. There is a certain power to this construct. You are allowed to say and do things that younger people will not get away with, but to do so you must stay inside the boundaries expected from someone of your age and gender. And your body has betrayed you – your hurting knees, sagging boobs, and wrinkled skin. You cannot be young again, but larp is make-believe. If you play a young character nobody expects you to actually be young, but to act young.
Image of the author. Photo by Thursarn.
When you play a character, the knowledge you have gained during a long life will help to create a deeper understanding. Often you will be surprised by what is useful for character building, no matter what age the character is. The character may be a person interested in poetry, and suddenly your old interest in romantic poets is useful, as happened to me in Forbidden History: Paradise Lost (Poland 2023). Perhaps the character is a cult member, and suddenly your tarot cards, bought when you were twenty, come into use like in Lord of Lies (Sweden, 2021). Your knowledge of how a prison panopticon constructs your mind according to the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1987, see also Foucault & Rabinow 1991) can be surprisingly useful when you create your character for a prison larp such as The Quota (United Kingdom 2018). It may all sound banal, but as you grow older your repertoire grows bigger.
When you age, you will have had more firsthand personal experiences than a young person. You may have had a child and seen them grow up with all the joys and worries that entails; lost close personal friends; had good or bad work experiences. This is part of what makes you into a real person, even though some of these experiences may be painful. Using your personal doubts, fears, and failings when you play a mother lost in a dysfunctional family – such as the one in A Nice Evening With the Family (Sweden 2018) – can be a powerful and transformative experience. It is part of what makes you human – and being human is what makes us able to play. I may no longer remember what it is to be young, years of experience has taken that from me. But I know how to create the illusion of being young because I know the consequences of my good and bad choices. It brings depth to a character, even when the person you portray is much younger than you.
Image of the author. Photo by Thursarn.
Larping is a collaborative experience where all the players must interact to create magic. In the best games all are equal. Old players may think that it is their responsibility to create possibilities for play for younger players. It is not. The most demanding thing to do as an old larper is to let go of the power that age gives you – including the power that helping others gives you. But that is what you must do if you want to play. You must be vulnerable; you must shed the layers that you have built around the person you are deep down. You must be human.
So, what does that mean? We are all human – right? Yes, and as humans, old or young, we are at the same time powerful and impotent, depending on circumstances and choices. This is even more true in a larp. Anni Tolvanen and James Lórien MacDonald (2020) talk about ensemble play and how important it is. But they are also aware of social bias in larps, and age is certainly part of it. No matter what you do you will meet players biased about your age. It cannot be avoided. Just like a lack of chemistry between players or bad weather, it is a part of life. But most of the time your co-players will be generous and kind, always remember that.
Image of the author. Photo by Thursarn.
So, when you play, remember this:
Be selfish – after all it is your own story in the larp that you are here to play.
Be kind – kindness is always important, repay the generosity of your fellow players.
Be curious – you think you know everything, have seen everything – but there is always something new to learn, new experiences to be had.
And as a much wiser old witch informed a young friend of hers:
If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.((The quote is from Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad (Discworld 12) (Unfortunately I am closer to Nanny Ogg than Granny Weatherwax).))
Image of the author. Photo by Thursarn.
Bibliography
Michel Foucault (1987): Øvervakning och straff. Lund.
Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow (ed.) (1991): The Foucault Reader. Penguin Books.
Anni Tolvanen and James Lórien MacDonald (2020): Ensemble Play. In What Do We Do When We Play, edited by Eleanor Saitta & al. Solmukohta 2020.
Terry Pratchett (1991): Witches Abroad.
Ludography
Forbidden History: Paradise Lost (2023): Poland. Atropos.
Lord of Lies (2021): Sweden. Atropos.
The Quota (2018): United Kingdom. Avalon Larp Studio.
A Nice Evening with the Family (2018): Sweden. Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman, Tobias Wrigstad, Anna-Karin Linder, Elsa Helin and Patrik Balint.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Petersen, Inge-Mette. 2024. “Words of Advice from an Old Witch to Aging Larpers.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Larp is a broad-ranging hobby, covering a plethora of subjects and every situation and scenario under the sun, with participants aged from 8 to 80. It is often stated that imagination is the limit – that anyone can play any role – but is that the reality?
We rely on the alibi of larp to allow us to play different roles, the acceptance that the reality of the characters and the setting may diverge from our perceptions. Young can play old and a school can be a spaceship, because we agree it is so.
However, while in a fantasy larp the difference from our reality applies equally to all characters and their players, for larps set in the recent past this disconnect may be less clear-cut. One player’s fictional reality may be something that other players have actually lived through. In these larps, the player’s age and/or experiences may alter their experience and thus the actions of their character.
Are age and generational experience something players and designers need to take into account, and if so, what impact do such factors have on play experience?
Emotions and knowledge
The 1980s and 1990s serve as the backdrop for a number of larps. In some, like Just a Little Lovin’ (aka JaLL, Norway 2011), which is set in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the era is an integral part of the game narrative.
For many designers and players, these years are just a retro era that provides a cool setting, something they have heard of from older members of their family, seen in TV shows like Stranger Things (USA 2016), or played in tabletop role-playing gamess like Tales from the Loop (Sweden 2017). But older players may have actually lived through these events, so their significance and the emotional associations older players have with them may greatly vary from those of younger players. Such associations may alter the play experience, leading to a bleed-in of personal experiences and emotions that in turn shape the character’s responses.
A personal example from the UK run of JaLL: a 20-something co-player said the music of the early 1980s was cool and retro, but to me it was the music of my teenage years. It brought back personal memories and emotions of the era and its events and wasn’t just a piece of atmospheric set dressing. Another example is The Sisyphus (UK 2018), set in the early 1980s during the Falklands War. Many Brits experienced the conflict first-hand – I was a teenager and recall the news coverage – but for younger co-players, or those from overseas, it was a more abstract idea. My personal experience, my familiarity with the themes and events of the conflict coloured my perceptions of some aspects of the larp.
In both JaLL and The Sisyphus I had prior knowledge of and an emotional connection to the setting that went beyond the material provided by the larp designers. In some regards that helped deepen my immersion – I didn’t need to imagine my response to these events and could draw on personal experiences to shape my character’s actions.
However, the players’ personal connections to the events – e.g. knowing how they played out in the real world – can also be a distraction to the actual game. From a player perspective, the ideal would be to play only off what the character knows. But separating what the character knows (e.g. from briefing notes or workshops) and what the player knows (from personal experience) may not be a straightforward process. It’s also worth noting that strong emotional resonance with the setting of a larp isn’t limited solely to older players, but deeply personal associations are often more difficult to prepare for.
Designing a larp set in a near-contemporary setting may require some consideration of the impact on players who actually lived through that era. Conversely, some larps may seek to exploit this personal connection. One example is the larp Reunion (UK 2023), which is set in both the late 1990s and modern day, with middle-aged players and characters. In such cases, the challenge may be to create an even experience between those players who lived through this particular period and those for whom it is a more abstract piece of history.
The social and technological changes even within the 21st century can also lead to wildly different perceptions and experiences among players. Players in their 20s and 30s have had easy access to such modern technologies as mobile communications, the internet, and digital music their whole lives, which is not necessarily the case for older players. Going back even 25 years involves a massive shift in the availability of these technologies, making some near-contemporary larp settings almost an alien world to younger players. By contrast, older players may still recall those days and the challenges and activities associated with them, such as postal orders or cheques to send money, collect phone calls, dial-up modems, and library index cards.
If these kinds of older technologies are to feature in a larp, designers may need to take steps to bridge the knowledge gap between younger and older players. Much like workshops explaining the social etiquette in a 1920s high society larp, there might need to be workshops for using the now obsolete technologies in retro-modern larps. A good example of this is Midsummer Disco (Germany 2023), set in the eighties, which had workshops explaining how to use some technologies of the era, such as how to use a cassette player – and how to rewind cassettes with a pencil!
Physicality
Player’s age has yet another impact on their play experience through their physical abilities. In school larps, such as College of Wizardry (Poland 2014), many play characters that are significantly younger than themselves. When larps have major physical elements such as sports matches, the players’ physical abilities may become a factor to consider. Can all such obstacles be cleared by imagination?
In some larps, such as Legion: Siberian Story (Czech Republic 2014), this is clearly not an option. The physicality of marching and fighting in hostile conditions is an integral part of Legion and the physical reality of the player is the physical reality of the character (a significant challenge for this 50+ year old).
But in other larps, imagination can be used to circumvent physical reality. In Avalon (Poland 2018), teenage characters raced to the top of a hill, fighting monsters, to capture a flag. Many of my younger co-players ran up the hill, but as a fifty-year-old player less physically capable of that feat, I instead slowly ambled up the hill. My 17-year-old character would have raced up that hill, and when asked about it later, no one disputed it when he said he had. Similarly, at Sahara (Tunisia 2020), some players did not participate in a long desert march but instead travelled to the next location via modern transport. It was agreed by all that these characters hadn’t vanished and miraculously reappeared, but had always been there with the others.
Conclusions
We should acknowledge that age can be a factor in play, be it because of differences in knowledge and experience or in the physical capabilities of the players. The ideal that anyone can play any role is a good aspiration, but it may not always be attainable. As a broad generalisation, it would be good to accept that older players may have more real-world experience to draw on in near-contemporary settings, whereas younger players may often be more physically capable. The ideal larp will blend the two, allowing players of all ages to combine their knowledge and experience into something greater than the individual parts.
Ludography
Avalon Larp Studio. Avalon. Poland, 2018.
Carcossa Dreams. The Sisyphus. UK, 2018.
Chaos League. Sahara. Tunisia, 2020.
Dziobak Larp Studios. College of Wizardry. Poland, 2014.
Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. Just A Little Lovin’. Norway, 2011.
Hintze, Nils. Based on the art of Simon Stålenhag. Tales from the Loop. Sweden: Free League Publishing, 2017.
Duffer Brothers, Netflix. Stranger Things. USA, 2016.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Hartford, Chris. 2024. “Experience vs Imagination – Effects of Player Age.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
There is no such thing as an objective narrative of history. The context of the present-day, the lens of hindsight, and the impossibility of knowing or understanding the true thoughts, feelings, and motivations of people in the past, all conspire against it. Furthermore, any presentation of history is necessarily selective, and necessarily imposes a frame around those historical facts that are included – a frame dictated by the writer’s perspective and agenda. However, it can still be the case that some narrative approaches are trying harder to be objective than others; and that some are more successful at it than others.
By default, unless you are trained as a historian, you will be receiving what we would like to call ‘the popularized narrative of history’. This is a mashup of what you typically learn at school, what you encounter in popular culture, and what you are told by those around you – both from their own experiences of recent history, and from the popularized learning process that they went through themselves. It may be that you were fortunate enough to have had an enlightened education, or to have grown up among people who had an informed view of history, or to have been trained to think critically about popular culture. But for most of us, this will not be the case. We will emerge into adulthood having imbibed a historical narrative that includes a range of stories about the history of our own community; about other peoples with which it has interacted; about the ancient world; and so on.
This popularized narrative, as well as not being accurate, is not neutral: it serves a social purpose. The object is to bind citizens together in a communal national story. It may favour incidents in history when ‘we were the good guys’ – it may avoid situations where the behaviour of our forebears was more difficult for our modern selves to accept. It may stereotype, and it may harmfully ‘other’ – treating groups of people as different from ‘us’, and so not deserving of the same consideration. For example, in the popularized narrative in colonial nations, colonized people are said to be primitive, barbaric, and inferior – justifying the historical colonization process as one of bringing civilization and enlightenment to them. In general, we can characterize the popularized narrative as a top-down oligarchic narrative, dictated in the interests of those in power – so that they might rule us more effectively by controlling our view of ‘us’, of our historical role, and of our present place on the world stage.
Through popular culture, a country’s popularized historical narrative may spread far outside its own borders. People from outside France understand the reign of Louis XIII through the lens of The Three Musketeers; people from outside the UK understand the Regency period through the lens of Jane Austen – or, more usually, from the host of films and TV shows based on or inspired by her work. And then, they (we) design larps about it.
Politics of larp
There is a traditional view that larping is just harmless fun – a form of entertainment, apolitical in nature, without responsibility towards its subjects. We believe that this is at best naive, at worst disingenuous: it works to undermine the unavoidably political nature of choices made within an ideologically-contested cultural sphere.
What we choose to larp about, and how we choose to present it, are inherently political. Each option taken serves to exclude other possibilities. Each decision represents a commitment to one set of values, and a denial of another.
If we design a larp set in the Regency period, what are we saying about gender roles? – about social class distinctions? – about racism? – about sexuality? – about slavery? The popularized narrative contains heavily-loaded answers to all of these questions. For example, it teaches that the UK’s relationship to slavery was a noble role of leading the world in abolishing the practice and in fighting to bring it to an end – ignoring the fact that during the Regency period, a large part of the country’s wealth, and that of the characters in Jane Austen’s novels, was derived from the ongoing exploitation and subjugation of enslaved people (see for example Ferguson 2003). We must not just accept these answers blindly.
Mindful historical larping
The narrative of the Regency era through Jane Austen and the TV show Bridgerton has spawned larps such as The Social Season (Germany, 2023)and Pride without Prejudice (UK, 2018). Both these larps represent a popularized version of the history of the Regency period for upper-class people. These versions of history ignore the reality of life for anyone who isn’t upper-class. In the world of the Bridgerton-style Regency era, money and success are symbols of status, not survival.
The fact that the wealth of many families was gained through enslaving people is a topic that also has no place in either of these larps, despite being a real-world historical factor. The two larps mentioned take a different approach to handling this. Pride without Prejudice is set in an alternative reality where people were not enslaved and where queerphobia didn’t exist. The Social Season design document (Dombrowski Event UG 2023) states that play on racism is not allowed and that “conversations about slave plantations in the New World or the lucrative human trafficking that you or your imaginary friends engage in are also undesirable.”
Fairweather Manor (Poland, 2015) is a larp inspired by the TV shows Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. It focuses on key themes of gender and class, in a similar way to the ways they have been depicted in these shows, and aims to “balance the atmosphere of a historical setting with a highly immersive and playable experience” (Fairweather Manor website 2023). The larp ignored the reality of the class division meaning that it would be unlikely that the servants and the upper class families they serve would be friends and confidants, as well as ignoring the impact of the British empire and the way it was celebrated during this time period.
This is not intended as a criticism of these larps: all of them state that they are representing a fictionalized account of history which is necessary for playability, and acknowledge the choices made about what to include and what to exclude.
So none of this is to say that creators of larps are acting immorally by using a popularized, or otherwise limited, view of history to create larps. We are always making choices when we decide what the main focus of a larp is, and with limited time and a limited number of participants we can’t hope to explore all aspects of a historical period. And even if attempted, it is likely that our own biases and lack of information would lead to some aspects being missed anyway.
Instead we need to make mindful choices about what to include, and about the statements we’re making with what we exclude.
This is not an argument that all historical larps should be exercises in exploring historical oppression. It is totally fine to create an alternative history where racism, or queerphobia, doesn’t exist, in order to focus on another aspect of the experience (see also Holkar 2016). In fact, choices to include things (e.g. a strict gender binary, sexual violence) because they are deemed to be historically accurate should also be made meaningfully.
An important question to ask ourselves as designers is, if we are exploring a historical period that is portrayed in a specific way in the media and in general public understanding, are we leaning into that portrayal? If so, what has been omitted from that portrayal and should that be communicated to participants?
For example Unnatural Allures is “a fictionalized and heightened version of the late Victorian and Edwardian era” (Design Document, Kraut.tales 2023)and plays with eroticism and horror. The writers acknowledge the nationalism, colonialism, and orientalism of the period, and suggest that there will be some play around it, although it will be framed in a negative light; while stating that racism is not a theme of play. They also include suggested readings in the appendix of the design document for potential players who want to contextualize the period.
Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011), set in the 1980s, engages heavily with the time period. The themes of the larp are desire, in part represented through queer spaces and cultural movements of the time; and death, represented by the AIDS crisis and the social response to it. However, in the majority of runs of the larp, themes of racism – which was prevalent within and outside the queer community at the time the larp is set – were largely ignored, generally as a conscious design choice not to shift focus or add another axis of oppression. But in a run in the USA (2017), play on racism was included, as the designers then felt that it was essential not to erase the experiences of people of colour.
Conclusion
To state that all larps are political is not to state that all larps have to engage in difficult topics, to evoke negative emotions, or to be an exploration of the deeper injustices of society. However, we believe that there is a responsibility for designers to consider what they are including in, and omitting from, their larps; and what statements are being made by those decisions.
The popularized narrative of history will always be tempting to draw upon, because it is what is most accessible and familiar: it requires the least work on the part of the designer. But it brings a load of cultural baggage and assumptions that may be unwanted – and that, we feel, should be investigated and challenged.
Mo Holkar (2016): Larp and Prejudice: Expressing, Erasing, Exploring, and the Fun Tax. In Larp Realia – Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen, and Kaisa Kangas. Solmukohta.
Fairweather Manor (2015): Poland. Agata Swistak, Agnieszka Linka Hawryluk-Boruta, Akinomaja Borysiewicz, Alexander Tukaj, Beata Ploch, Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski, Ida Pawłowicz, Janina Wicher, Krzysztof “Ciastek” Szczęch, Krzysztof “Iryt” Kraus, Maciek Nitka, Mikołaj Wicher, Nadina Wiórkiewicz, Szymon Boruta. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Norway. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2017): USA. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo. Pink Dollars LLC.
Pride without Prejudice (2018): UK. Amy Mason and David Proctor.
The Social Season (2023): Germany. Dombrowski Event UG.
Unnatural Allures (2024): Germany. Alexandra Vogel, Florian Hofmann, Marina Machaeuer, Christian Schneider, Germany. kraut.tales
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Wood, Laura, and Mo Holkar. 2024. “Challenging the Popularized Narrative of History.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
The first time I larped, sometime around 2001, I played a governess in a Jane Austen inspired regency romance. A lot of that game – such as the name of the game or my character – have been lost to me, but I do remember the feeling of being lost and bored. My character’s status required her to be present at the party of the gentry, but was too low for any hope of a romance plot. She couldn’t sneak into the kitchen either – and she was sternly turned away when she tried – because her status was too high for the servants to risk her finding out about the drama going on downstairs.
To be clear, this game was a genre romance based on fiction, not meant to be a look into the social history and real lives of the people in regency Britain, and I as a player did not consider the real lives and social status of actual governesses of the era. When we roleplay, we often see history as our playground, and the stories of people of bygone eras as inspiration for our characters. In many cases, we find the stories that most pique our interest on the edges and in the margins: it’s often much more fun to play drama and hardship than ordinary day-to-day life.
This paper explores questions of ethics when playing with the lives of real, sometimes marginalized, historical people. How can we treat the lives of people who lived and died centuries ago with respect? How much context should we expect the players to study in order to respectfully portray lives of people in the past? In what detail should we communicate the changes we make for artistic or playability purposes?
A personal interest
The question of how we treat people of bygone times recently became relevant to me, as I joined the research project Tieteen ja taikuuden rajamailla (abbreviated TiTaRa, the name translates to Between Science and Magic), funded by the Kone Foundation from 2023 to 2025. In the project, the three people working as researchers have a background in English historical linguistics. My own merits as a researcher come from looking further back in history: I majored in New Testament Exegetics, and have studied people in vulnerable and marginalized positions in the Biblical World – prostitutes and slaves (Nyberg 2000). More recently, I worked in the field of local cultural heritage for nearly a decade.
My role in the project is one of a designer. I will be writing a roleplaying game – a tabletop game tentatively titled Tähtiin kirjoitettu (forthcoming 2025, Eng. Written in the Stars) – based on the research that my peers in the project publish. This means that the sources for my game will be examples of real people and their lives in medieval and early modern England. The research project concentrates on the vocabulary used of witches, astrologers and alchemists – and by them, of themselves – in that time period. These people were all set apart from regular society in some way, and at least in the case of witches also feared and sometimes persecuted.
As the game I am designing will be published as part of a research project, and as the aim is to make the information accessible to a wider audience, I am concerned by both historical accuracy and playability. This paper was prompted by considerations of portraying the lives of the medieval subjects in a way that does not diminish their experiences, but that allows for enough common ground for the modern players to be able to identify with their characters.
A history of stereotypes
In role-playing games studies, there has been some discussion about misery tourism during the past few years. Many games draw inspiration from current or recent historical experiences, often those of marginalized people. Some of these games have been designed in co-operation with groups affected by the real-world issues they depict, such as Halat hisar (Finland 2013, Eng. State of Siege). Others, such as the Polish 4th of July (Poland 2022) larp about trashy trailer park living in Ohio have been mostly inspired by media and there has not been contact with any actual poor trailer park residents in the design process.
In recent years, the roleplaying community has also started to acknowledge large problems pertaining to depictions of race especially in the D&D derived tabletop tradition (Loponen 2019) but also in larp . Roleplaying games have a long history of orientalism, in portraying Asian or Middle Eastern inspired roleplaying cultures as other, exotic, naïve and mystical (Trammell 2016). Roleplayers of color have made it clear that appearing in blackface or in exoticized dress or gear to portray someone who is Black, or of Arab, indigenous, or Asian descent is not a homage, but a continuation of a long legacy of racism. (Kemper 2018, Eddy 2020)
The discussions concerning misery tourism, or different racist stereotypes in roleplaying games, are far from finished, as these themes are important in making the roleplaying hobby in all its forms more welcoming and accessible for people of different backgrounds. What seems to be missing, though, is a discussion on games using history that goes beyond the 20th century. There has been discussion about historical and historically inspired games, but these discussions usually revolve more around how accurately history and historical events are represented, and what alterations have been made to make for better playability (Salomonsen 2003).
Quite a few roleplaying games, starting from the earliest D&D, are set in pseudo-medieval worlds. This makes the concept of medievalism relevant. For the purposes of this paper, medievalism refers to idealized or stereotypical views of the medieval world. In the roleplaying game context, it’s usually more important to build a setting for adventures, not portray the world in a historically accurate way. In the process, these games more often than not end up quite Eurocentric, even when creating fantasy worlds, and colored by a romanticized view of medieval times (Konzack and Dall 2008). This idealized, romanticized medievalism is also something that can attract the interest of conservative nationalist groups – with ideals directly opposed to the ideals of openness and accessibility mentioned above (Mochocki 2022).
Outside the roleplaying community
The discussions on racist and colonialist stereotypes, as well as treating the heritage of people with respect, have not arisen a vacuum in roleplaying game studies. The same discussions are ongoing in both other fields of study and in broader public discussions. For the purposes of this paper, I will only cite a couple of cases that are pertinent for the issues of history, heritage and respect.
In July 2023, as I was working on this paper, the Dutch king Willem Alexander gave a speech in apology for the part that the Netherlands played in the history of slavery (Willem Alexander 2023). At the same time, artefacts that were taken from Sri Lanka and Indonesia during the Dutch colonization are now being returned home (Bubalo 2023).
Museums that work with cultural heritage and store historical artefacts also participate in the discussion. In Finland, the National Museum repatriated Sámi artefacts from their collections to the Sámi community and the Sámi Museum Siida in 2021. I myself visited the powerful exhibit Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan – The Homecoming, which according to the National Museum “showcases the significance of cultural heritage to people and identity and encourages us to think about the control and ownership of cultural heritage”. In the exhibition Egypt of Glory – The Last Great Dynasties in 2020 to 2021, in the museum Amos Rex, located in central Helsinki, questions of respect and of displaying the bodies of the dead, who had been mummified and buried according to their religious customs, were included in the exhibition texts for the public to read. The part of the exhibition where the human mummies were displayed was somber. The acoustics were created to shield the area from crowd noises, and the visitors were asked to be respectfully quiet. Both exhibitions mentioned above made the exhibition materials available in the relevant languages, in the case of the first in Sámi languages, and in the second in Arabic.
These cases are but a few examples of the discussion about history, heritage, and respect, in the context of which we operate both as scholars and as creators of roleplaying games and larps.
Voices of larp writers
For a closer look into the subject at hand, I talked with the writers of two Finnish historical larps from the 2010s: Completorium from 2012 and Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (Eng. So That the Strong Should Not Harm the Weak) from 2018. I had a personal discussion with Minna Heimola, one of the authors of Completorium, and interviewed Aino Haavisto and Ada-Maria Hyvärinen about Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa by email. In these talks, I asked these larp writers the same questions that I posed in the Introduction of this paper: How can we treat the lives of people who lived and died centuries ago with respect? How much context should we expect the players to study in order to respectfully portray lives of people in the past? In what detail should we communicate the changes we make for artistic or playability purposes?
Both these games hail from the Finnish historical larp tradition, which has been greatly influenced by the reenactment and larp association Harmaasudet (The Greywolves). This game style is characterized by an ambition for authenticity, and a lot of discussion and research into historical sources goes into the writing of these games. There is also an educational undertone, and players are expected to read background material put together by the organizers (Sahramaa 2010). Before historical games, there are often possibilities to join in crafting sessions for sewing costumes or making other gear. For my first larp, the game mentioned in the Introduction, a game in either the Harmaasudet or Alter Ego tradition, I participated in several dance rehearsals to learn recreations of historical dances of the era – and I also learned to play whist, a card game that was popular in the regency era.
In addition to Harmaasudet, several prolific Finnish writers of historical larp are alumni of Alter Ego, the University of Helsinki roleplaying association. This means many have degrees in subjects such as cultural heritage studies or folkloristics, and have gone on to careers in, for example, some of the most well-known museums in Finland. Some have also completed doctorates – an achievement that translates into ever-more professional background research.
Completorium (Finland 2012) was a game set in a medieval Cistercian monastery. The authors have already published texts about the game, from the point of view of considering gender in historical larps (Heimola and Heimola 2016) and also from the point of view of reenacting history (Heimola 2012). In the case of this particular game, the main organizers had recently completed or were just about to complete their doctoral studies in theology and in comparative religion – and during my discussion with Minna Heimola I was shown a respectable pile of books that represented just some of the background research done for Completorium.
In our discussion, Heimola reiterated that the organizers wanted to respond to a dual issue: one of the most common complaints about Finnish historical larp in the 2000s was that female characters often ended up as being boring and feeling like side characters, but at the same time – and this is something that still persists in Finnish larp – most of the people signing up for the games were non-male, and wished to play non-male characters. Hence, the main consideration of the organizers was not a respectful treatment of any historical subjects. Rather, they wanted to portray a historical setting that fit their mostly-female player demographic, in a way that allowed for meaningful play and character agency within that setting.
Heimola mentioned that they also dived into historical sources for what the characters were supposed to do during the game: the day-to-day cycle of monastic life with both services and daily labor, scenes of religious visions, as well as more action-oriented plots such as attempts to steal relics for another church.
Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (Finland 2018) was a larp set in ancient Mesopotamia, in the context of a judge’s visit to a fictional small town. Also in this case, the authors have written about the game and their thinking around the themes and of making history playable (Haavisto and Hyvärinen 2020). Again, the historical background of the game was well-researched: Haavisto has a degree in languages and Asian studies, with a minor in Assyriology.
In my interview, the authors told me that they had a clear division of labor, with Haavisto being in charge of the actual historical background, and Hyvärinen taking more responsibility of changing things around to create a better and more playable story. From the start they agreed that playability comes before historical accuracy. Initially, the plan had been that every character would have had some connection to actual historical materials: tablets on court cases of the era, letters and the like. This did not quite come to pass, and the final result was that around a third of the characters had these direct connections to the ancient material. As an example, the authors described using actual ancient court cases that pertained to one or two people and then filled in details such as family members – so those family member characters did not have a direct link to historical materials. No characters were directly and fully based on actual historical persons, though one character did impersonate Ea-Nāṣir, the copper merchant of the clay tablet UET V, 81 (Figulla and Martin 1953).
The authors said that in their experience the Finnish larpculture surrounding historical larp expects the players to read all materials in order to understand the genre and the vision of the game at hand, and to act accordingly when playing. As such, they were not concerned about their players being disrespectful of the material presented – and also, as they point out, the events of the game were set so far back in history that any information we have is based on archeology rather than any living cultural heritage. With a 3000+ year gap in time between the time represented in the game and the people of today, we cannot really call the ancient Mesopotamians close cultural ancestors of anyone alive now.
This does not mean that history was taken lightly. In the background information section of the game homepage, details for which there were no sources in research, or which were changed for better playability, were clearly marked in cursive. The authors told me they felt it was important that the players, when preparing for the game, would be able to see right away what was based on historical research, and what was not. It was also communicated to the players from the start that they were engaging in a decidedly feminist take on history. On the point of contextualization, the authors also said that many of the plotlines for the characters were age-old, and deeply rooted in being human and not representing a particular era: fairly sharing inheritance, being involved in a love triangle, or the balance between fulfilling parental wishes versus taking your own liberties.
In all, the organizers of both Completorium and Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa agreed on that players needed enough onboarding and contextualization to grasp the setting and game vision. The Finnish style of historical larp expects players to be prepared to put in some work into understanding the era the given game is set in, and to dress and act the part. In both cases, if historical accuracy and playability were in conflict, playability was prioritized.
Of course, even though styles of play have evolved during the years, Finnish larp has a long history of prioritizing immersion into character, and acting as you believe your character would do in any given situation or social setting. Even though it’s been over two decades since the debated Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2003), the ideals of strong character immersion being central to the larp experience still linger.
The authors I interviewed felt that taking into account the style of play in historical games that has evolved in the Finnish tradition, they had every reason to believe that their players would treat their characters respectfully, and would do their best to represent the lives of the characters in an as authentic fashion as they could, based on the background material they were given.
As I myself have experienced this tradition and style of play firsthand, I understand the position of these authors. The question is: How much do the players actually know about history, and how much do they think they know? There are pitfalls in trusting the historical knowledge of your players.
History, heritage, and roleplaying
The authors of Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa mentioned heritage, and the fact that the very ancient history their game was set in isn’t directly lived and experienced heritage for anyone today. When considering this, I ended up looking into questions of heritage. I found the vocabulary of heritage studies very helpful when considering the issues of using the lives, experiences and accounts of real people as material for games.
According to Rodney Harrison (2013), history is about the past, whereas heritage is concerned with the present and future. This means that we make sense of past events concerning our social or ethnic group, about our nation or about a minority we belong to by giving meaning to things that our predecessors have done or experienced. It’s a process of social meaning-making.
In his book Role-play as a Heritage Practice Michał Mochocki (2021) combines heritage studies with historical game studies and roleplaying game studies, and discusses authenticity and historical accuracy in the context of games, as well as immersion and experiencing. He notes that the discussion in the field of historical game studies often distinguishes between accuracy-based authenticity, and behavioral and psychological authenticity, which leads to a dualism of accuracy-of-facts versus authenticity-of-feeling.
As someone who has played both tabletop RPGs and larped in historical settings, I recognize the thought of authenticity-of-feeling from my own experience. I would not expect historical accuracy, or accuracy-of-facts, in every detail of a game. Instead, when going to a historical larp, I want to experience something of the era the game is about. If the game had an educational goal – such as highlighting the experiences of marginalized groups in the era and setting – I would expect proper contextualization through workshops, talks, or written information provided.
Above, in A history of stereotypes, I noted that we tend to shift from questions of ethics and respect to more general questions of accuracy and authenticity when we go further back in history. The viewpoint of heritage studies sheds some light on why that is. When there is a direct link of living heritage between the era or events we portray, and people alive today, we need to take this into account. This is where the questions of respectful treatment of the past and the people and events we portray are important. When we go into history, the link is often broader – such as the Dzikie Pola (Poland 1997) portrayal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which describes the history of whole nations rather than any marginalized groups (Mochocki 2022).
The pitfall of history is that we often think we know what it was all about, but what we are taught at school is in the end quite superficial. If we play striving to be “authentic”, it is easy to erase marginalized identities, or repeat our prejudices time and again. Having studied historical times and people myself (Nyberg 2000, 2006), I know from experience that we very often just cannot know for certain how people – especially people who were not in politically significant positions – really lived, as the further back we go, the more we rely on what kind of materials have been preserved. If we have a collection of Roman laws, for example, we do not know for sure how strongly they were enforced, unless the information is extensively backed by other sources such as court rulings and contemporary written accounts. Defending discriminatory design choices by saying “this is historically accurate” is very often not a sustainable argument.
When we move from themes of heritage to themes of history, it is well justified to use the principle “the players are more important than the game”. We are not disrespecting the people of bygone eras by considering the safety and well-being of our players today. If we design for what we imagine was historically accurate rather than for playability, we will very likely be placing roadblocks for people from marginalized backgrounds joining the game (Jones, Holkar and Kemper 2019).
Conclusion
The questions of respectful treatment of historical subjects have not been raised very much in roleplaying game studies. We visit the past and play with people’s lives not only to experience their struggles or marginalization, but to find the human connection between them and us. Even separated by nearly four millennia, we can sympathize with the client who complained about the quality of copper provided by one Ea-Nāṣir – or, as we do not know if the complaint had merit, the poor salesman. What we need to remember is that when we create a game set in history, we always create our own interpretation of it. It is not necessary to repeat every oppression and injustice – and not considering these in the design but just including them by default damages playability.
The farther back in history we go, the less information we have on what the everyday lives of people were really like, or what the thoughts and feelings of the average person were. What we do have, however, is an ongoing discussion about the respectful treatment of people’s heritage. Living heritage makes sense of events of the past and how they pertain to the events of the present and the future.
The current discussion on the history of racism, the legacy of colonialism, and the respectful treatment of cultural heritage is ongoing not only in the context of roleplaying games, but in society at large. This article is only a quick dip into these issues as they are relevant for roleplaying in historical settings, and I hope to be able to expand on this and go deeper into the questions of history, accuracy and authenticity, and respect, at a later date.
EunJung Chang (2006): Interactive Experiences and Contextual Learning in Museums. In Studies in Art Education, Vol 47, No. 2 (Winter, 2006), 170-186.
H.H. Figulla and W.J. Martin (eds.) (1953): Letters and Business Documents of the Old Babylonian Period. In Ur Excavations Texts V: Letters of and Documents of the Old-Babylonian Period. British Museum Publications.
Jenni Sahramaa (2010): Antikristuksen yö. Steel and Holy Spirit in Medieval Bohemia. In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Fëa Livia.
Jonaya Kemper (2018): A Seat at the Feasting Table – A Call for Inclusivity in International Larp. In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. ETC Press.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Kristel Nyberg (2000): Prostituutio Uuden testamentin maailmassa. University of Helsinki, unpublished master’s thesis.
Kristel Nyberg (2006): Prostituutio ja naisihanne Uuden testamentin maailmassa. In Taivaallista seksiä: Kristinusko ja seksuaalisuus, edited by Minna Ahola, Marjo-Riitta Antikainen and Päivi Salmesvuori. Tammi.
Lars Konzack and Ian Dall (2008): Fantasy and Medievalism in Role-Playing Games. In Playground Worlds. Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Ropecon ry.
Michał Mochocki (2021): Role-play as a Heritage Practice. Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment. Routledge.
Michał Mochocki (2022): Heritage of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Polish Role-playing and Reenactment. Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022. Youtube, October 20, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKgsPb25L4, ref. July 13, 2023.
Mika Loponen (2019): The Semiospheres of Prejudice in Fantastic Arts: The Inherited Racism of Irrealia and Their Translation. Doctoral dissertation. University of Helsinki.
Mike Pohjola (2003): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp, edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup, and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03.
Mikko Heimola (2012): Completorium – keskiaikaisen luostariyhteisön elävöittämistä näytelmäroolipelin keinoin. In Glossæ III/2012.
Minna Heimola and Mikko Heimola (2016): Gender and Historical Larps: Two Case Studies of Women’s Roles in Historical Settings. In Larp Politics. Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi. Ropecon ry.
Rodney Harrison (2013): Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge.
Xenia Salomonsen (2003): The Use of History in Larp. In As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp, edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup, and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03.
Zoë Antoinette Eddy (2020): Playing at the Margins: Colonizing Fictions in New England Larp. In Humanities 9(4), 143. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/4/143.
Ludography
4th of July (2022): Poland. Bartosz Bruski, Paweł Jasiński & Ewa Żygadło.
Completorium (2012): Finland. Mikko Heimola & Minna Heimola.
Dungeons & Dragons (1974): TSR, USA. Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson.
Dzikie Pola (1997): Wydawnictwo MAG, Poland. Jacek Komuda, Maciej Jurewicz & Marcin Baryłka.
Halat hisar (2013): Finland. Fatima AbdulKarim, Faris Arouri, Kaisa Kangas, Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson & Mohamad Rabah.
Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (2018): Finland. Ada-Maria Hyvärinen & Aino Haavisto.
Tähtiin kirjoitettu / Written in the Stars (upcoming 2025): Finland. Kristel Nyberg
Museum exhibitions
Egypt of Glory – The Last Great Dynasties (2020-2021): Amos Rex.
Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan – The Homecoming (2021-2022): The National Museum of Finland.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Nyberg, Kristel. 2024. “History is Our Playground – On Playing with People’s Lives.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Larp criticism often travels through whisper networks. After a larp event, we dissect it in private company but rarely write our thoughts – at least critically analytical ones – publicly. It has often felt like we – as a community – focus more on feedback and documentation than critical reviews, let alone critique.
A proper critique is a well-argued analysis that assesses the larp for a wider audience than organizers and previous players. Its purpose is not to help the designers develop the larp nor to record it for future larp historians but to evaluate the larp in the context of its tradition and place it on a continuum of other larps. Critique should transcend the writer’s personal experience and give a more general assessment of the larp.
Desirably, critique and critical reviews should not only evaluate the design but also voice questions about the message and meaning of the larp. Was there a point to this larp? Is it reasonable to think the participants got some insights out of it? For example, in his article “These but the trappings and the suits of woe” – Tragedy and Politics in Inside Hamlet” published in the book Larp Politics Syksy Räsänen relates the larp Inside Hamlet to the Shakespearean and Aristotelian notions of tragedy and concludes that it was more of a moral tale than a tragedy.
Our larp tradition is not completely devoid of critical reviews. They appear in blog posts and documentation books. At some point, the website nordiclarp.org made an attempt to publish more critical reviews. And yet, it is hard to find reviews or critique of well-known larps such as Baphomet, House of Craving or Forbidden History which are run several times.
Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
Culture of Critique
In more than two decades of Knutepunkt culture, we have not developed similar institutions of critique as exist in the world of passive art like film, theatre, and literature. In assessing works, the larp community seems to rely on hearsay, impressions and publicity materials. Larp organizers have many tools to control the image of their work, ranging from documentation to the Week of Stories (a rule which prohibits players from publishing negative thoughts in the week after the larp). When we decide whether to sign up for a larp or not, we rarely (if ever) rely on public reviews.
There are many reasons for the lack of a culture of critique. The community is tightly knit. Few people wish to review their friends’ work. Some might worry how writing a review might affect their position in the community or whether negative reviews could reduce their chances to get into larps. A designer might wish to give private feedback to other designers rather than criticize them publicly. It is rarely a good idea to cross the line between making and criticizing art.
It is often pointed out that in larp every participant is a co-creator. Usually it is the players who make the larp, both in the good and in the bad. As a critic, should you evaluate your own contribution (against usual norms of criticism)? Or assess other players’ performance ?
Most of us probably would not feel comfortable playing a larp where this was going to happen!
However, you can argue that there is, especially in commercial larps, a clear distinction between designers/organizers and participants, and that different social contracts apply to these two groups. Moreover, the designers/organizers can be to some extent held responsible for player behavior. After all, they choose the participants and prepare them forthe desired genre and playing style.
This approach does not remove all challenges of larp critique. Some larps are more difficult to play than others, and it often requires skill to get the most out of a larp. Our traditions are built on assumptions about for example what you can do in a larp and how to react to different cues. Do you need to explicitly say that no murders will happen if the larp is marketed as family drama at a dinner party?
It is impossible to spell out all the implicit norms. Often we just learn them through playing.
Thus, people with different backgrounds and player skills will write different reviews. However, this does not really differ from passive art. To write a good review, a movie critic has to understand the genre and the intellectual tradition of the film.
Nevertheless, in larp the extent to which our own actions and attitudes determine the experience is on a different scale than in passive arts. And sometimes, you have a better larp if you turn some of your critical faculties off. On the other hand, to write a good review, you have to have them on.
What if you were to take frequent off-game breaks to write down notes about the larp? How do you think it would affect your larp experience? Or the way you see the larp, more generally? As a larp critic, you cannot escape self-reflection. Players often steer their larp towards interesting directions. Can you always be sure whether an outcome results from the design or your own play (or both)? Should the critic pause to think about it during play? How would it affect their larp and that of others?
Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
Hype
Player expectations and pre-event hype affect larps. Too high expectations can ruin the experience if the larp fails to deliver. On the other hand, high expectations can also enhance the larp. Players will give their best performance and press themselves to see things in a positive light. Your attitude frames your experience.
Hype and critical thinking can rarely coexist. If you are to write a review, you cannot strive to see things positively. When you decide to evaluate the experience, you might be already giving up parts of it.
In larps, we have learned to explain away inconsistencies and to play around them. We often steer ourselves away from places where the shortcomings of the design would become too visible. But if you are to critically assess the larp, shouldn’t you take note of them? A critic has to balance between getting most out of the experience and maintaining an analytical distance.
The same problem exists with passive art: there always is tension between analysis and sensation. However, there is a qualitative difference with larp. A critic always uses themselves as an instrument to analyze an artwork, but in a larp, the instrument becomes part of the artwork. As Jussi Ahlroth put it in an article about larp criticism he published in the book Playground Worlds, we have no other alternative than let the violinist review the concert they were playing in.
Moreover, there is no possibility of going back to the objective reality of the larp. The borderline between the things that actually happened and memories/interpretations blurs. In contrast, with a novel, you can always turn to previous pages and read what the text literally says.
These challenges are not a reason to give up attempts on larp critique but they are something to keep in mind. They also partly explain why criticizing larps often is a thankless process. It might also be worth mentioning that there are ways around them. You could use a pen name to avoid community issues. To rise above a subjective vantage point, you might review the larp as a team or interview other participants. Of course, this probably does not make the task more appealing as it adds to the workload.
Is it a problem, then, that larp has no institutions of critique? Lately, there has been more and more interest in larp from inside the arts. For example, in 2016 the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm staged Gertrudes möhippa (Gertrude’s Bachelorette), a crossover between larp and theater.
If larp is one day going to be part of the institution of art – as some of us hope and others fear – then there will be critique. Will we let people without much experience of larp write it? (A regular theater critic could never have identified the design flaws in Gertrudes möhippa that Annika Waern discussed in her review in 2016 on nordiclarp.org)
Or are we going to show them the way by creating our own institutions?
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 124-128. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Writing about larps is hard. They are ephemeral co-creations that exist both in a measurable, physical reality, and in the participants’ imagination. The participants’ experiences are not just different receptions of the same work as in passive art, but they include objectively different content. Oftentimes, no one, not even the organisers, has seen the entire piece. Finally, participants process these experiences extensively, after runtime, alone and as a group, whether on the spot through debriefs and after-party discussions — leading to ”the post-game lie” (Waern 2013) or weeks later, through in-group online chats and photo uploads.
These challenges have been eloquently discussed by Nordic larpers for over 15 years, with people alternatively referring to public larp feedback as reviews, criticism, or critiques. However, these categories may not always translate well to certain countries (Ahlroth 2008). In a series of educational articles, North American larpers used passive art definitions to define what would be larp critique vs. criticism vs. review (Roberts & Stark 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d). A critique focuses on one particular aspect of a larp and frames it in its artistic context, and it is more aimed at scholars. Criticism would be rather aimed at providing feedback to the designers/organisers (I’ll use “organisers” for short). A review would talk more about the writer’s own global experience at the event and be aimed at potential future players. In the latest Nordic article on the topic, Kangas (2022) mentions larp critique in the title, but also extensively covers challenges of reviews, pointing out the lack of both. And yet, in spite of these well thought-through pieces, in 2024, there is still no comprehensive repository for larp feedback that would be:
public and easily accessible (neither requiring sign-up to a closed Facebook group or Discord, nor having to search for each individual larper’s blog)
in English (international larps have a global audience)
online (not everyone can afford to travel to Solmukohta to hear feedback in person)
free from organiser control.
There are no print larp magazines with global reach, and there is not enough space in a single Knutebook per year to review a significant portion of the scene. The Nordic Larp website (nordiclarp.org) is receiving more submissions (see below), but it is still nowhere near a RottenTomatoes / GoodReads / TripAdvisor / Google Reviews of larp. The last two are indeed not art review websites: in my opinion, a larp event cannot just be a work of art, it is also a real-life physical experience, often paid for, and should also be reviewed as such.
If you end up being beaten by a cast member at an immersive theatre experience that advertised “no physical contact”, poisoned by a chef in a restaurant, or if your AirBnB had bed bugs, your review would probably mention it. All three can happen in a larp, and could therefore be in the scope of any public larp feedback. Most larp organisers are not paid professionals, and this should be taken into account, but neither are many AirBnB hosts. The monetary transaction to an unknown party can make larp a different activity than just “doing art with friends”.
One of the reasons there is so little public larp feedback is that these articles may have unintendedly discouraged some players from writing any. First by emphasising intrinsic challenges overtly, second by using passive art criticism as a benchmark. For example, the requirement to put things in context of the artform bans any first time larpers from writing a critique – and might discourage them from writing a review. Even an old fart like myself cannot be bothered with carefully referencing other games in his reviews or thinking about his reader’s cultural environment, and thus the messy walls of text stay in friends-only Facebook posts. As Kangas (2022) writes, larp criticism is a “thankless process”, and the final straw is the fear of retaliation. No novelist can prevent reviewers from reading their next book once it’s published. A larp organiser can totally ban a reviewer for life.
But why would anyone want to review larp events anyway?
For both Ahlroth and Kangas, the main ethical conundrum around larp reviews is that, to fully experience the larp, the reviewer needs to participate, hence will be a co-creator, the “violinist reviewing the orchestra’s performance”. Kangas also discussed the effects of active decisions from one participant that may not even have been part of the larp’s initial design (e.g. steering). But both authors concluded that larp critique is really required for larp to be taken seriously as an art form.
I do not care whether larp gets taken seriously as an art form. What I do care about is participants – they matter more than the games. Right now the discourse is controlled by only one type of participant: organisers. From pre-game online material to sign-up/casting process, to highly curated audiovisual content (sometimes posed, off-game photos, or highly edited video clips), organisers control most channels. Even talks at Solmukohta about specific larps are usually given by the organisers themselves. When players are invited to speak, they are usually sandwiched between two organiser speeches in which the organisers get to introduce and reframe the testimonies.
In private conversations with organisers and unrecorded Knutepunkt presentations by larp scholars, I have heard about structured before/after assessments in two famous Nordic larps that were intended to be transformative. One was found to be no more effective than a dance class, and the other one was sometimes actually detrimental to the values the larp intended to foster. The organisers just did not include this key player feedback in their post-game communication. For a scene that prides itself on transparency and free speech, there sure is a strong culture of omertà.
But I don’t want to be trashed as an organiser!
First, this is not about you. If you want private feedback as an organiser, read Waern’s (2017) great article on this very topic. This is about players. I have been both a player and an organiser. As a player, I have given candid feedback to larp organisers, in person, by private email, and in public blog posts. As an organiser, my larps have been both praised and trashed by their players, to my face while still at the game site, in private emails, and online. I know full well that organising larps can be extremely taxing physically, mentally, and financially. Any negative feedback about something you have invested so much of yourself in can feel extremely painful.
Does that mean organisers should get away with everything? With lying in their pre-game communication? With unethical behaviour during runtime? There will always be people who comment negatively on events, so it might as well be people who were actually there. Looking back at 10 years of Knutebook articles, it seems acceptable for authors to comment at length on larps that they did not attend, that were run in countries that they have never visited, and that were played in languages that they do not speak. Would we accept all three from a book or opera critic? Sometimes these authors have not even talked to any of the larp’s actual players: they based their articles only on curated audiovisual documentation and on the organisers’ word.
To level the playing field, player feedback should be available on a platform where it could be useful for both organisers and future players, who can then decide if they want to participate in reruns or in new events run by the same team. Consent is only truly consent when it is informed.
Some organisers have said that if such a central repository existed, they would stop organising. I do not want anyone to quit, but the current situation of hidden backchannels to obtain candid reviews reinforces cliqueishness, in-crowd phenomena that excludes newcomers. This is far from the oft-professed Nordic goal of inclusivity and learning as a community.
But it’s not objective!
There are several ways to document things that actually happened. Both Waern (2013) and Kangas (2022) describe ways of taking notes during breaks in the runtime, while Axiel Cazeneuve describes how they mentally put themselves in “recording mode” during runtime and write everything down afterwards (Cazeneuve & Freudenthal 2021). But technology can also help. Tiny cameras are now affordable, and they can be used to unobtrusively photograph or film an entire short game if other participants provide informed consent.
Years ago, I time-lapsed Le Masque de Boba Fett (Switzerland 2015, Eng. Boba Fett’s Mask), a Star Wars larp, with a tiny GoPro, from arrival on site to post game chats. The photos not only made for fun memories, but they also showed me how much I drank, and how alcohol affected my experience – positively in this case. I was also wearing a research-grade medical device that tracked my movement, blood pressure, heart rate, and sweating. This allowed me to confirm that tense scenes (even when immobile) triggered objectively measurable stress responses, but that my pre-game period was actually even more tense than runtime (B. 2016).
Nowadays, consumer-grade smartwatches can refine this data collection through unobtrusive experience sampling. I am not saying that all reviewers should always revisit hours of play on a screen without the magic of imagination, nor that they should wear wireless electroencephalograms. But both handwritten notes and recording devices can help verify whether fast-paced action was actually as constant as advertised – or whether most of the game actually consisted in boredom/quiet reflection?
Even without any technology, if people leave the game before its planned end, it is an objective event that I want to hear about as a potential player of a rerun, especially if any of these were ragequits. Objectivity can also be positive: these Star Wars larp photos showed me details I had no memory of. And even if photos do not quite look like how you remember a scene, that very difference is part of the effect of the larp. What made it different from the raw visual?
Non-anglophone examples of public larp feedback
Before it was killed by the rise of social networks, the website Au Fil du Jeu (Eng. In the Course of the Game; Aufildujeu.ch) acted as a main portal for the French-speaking Swiss larp scene. Organisers would announce their games, and participants would often write post-game feedback under the initial post. While post-event debates sometimes got heated, they were extremely useful to me, a newcomer in the Swiss larp scene. Was it really a big deal for me that some non-player characters were unkillable, or that there wasn’t enough roasted boar for every player? Maybe not, but it allowed me to learn about the local organisers and their game styles.
In France, the largest larp review site is L’univers du huis clos (Eng. Chamber Larp Universe), a repository of more than 170 larp scripts. People who have downloaded and played a script sometimes write public feedback in the comments section of its page. Some reviews are very short, others provide details about how actual runs went, but they remain mostly written by organisers rather than players.
For a more thorough journalistic review site, the French website Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp) provides both larp previews by organisers, and reviews of games by players. As many of these larps are rerun regularly, reading about how the organisers’ vision actually panned out is extremely valuable. These reviews help me assess the odds of having a satisfactory experience after taking a day off from work and 8 hours of travel to a remote game site to co-create with people I have never met.
The Czech website Larpová Databáse (Eng. Larp Database) is a larger review repository, in which larpers can comment on games. I do not find the 1-10 rating feature informative, but the most reviewed game, De la Bête (Czech Republic 2014, Eng. Of the Beast), has 192 written comments of various lengths from individual players. Now compare this to Parliament of Shadows (Belgium 2017), a high profile international larp with so few public reviews that the most sobering one is available only in Polish and on a Polish website (Skuza, 2017).
So, are such sites reserved to larpers from fiery Romance or Slavic debating cultures? Can people raised with protestant moderation under Jante’s law do it in English for the whole world to see?
Elements I would appreciate in a larp review
First of all, there is a lot of excellent advice in English out there. The recommendations that Waern (2013) provides for larp historians are also useful for reviewers:
PLAY!
Talk to both players and designers (and game masters)
Collect multiple views on key events
Collect media
Unlike Waern, I am not looking for neutral larp history. I do want to know what you, as a player, liked, what you did not like, and why was that. I do want to hear whether the larp was run as advertised. Kangas provides additional tips and tricks, such as using a pen name or providing group feedback. Stark and Roberts proposed a structure for larp critique, but it could be useful for any larp feedback: “Theme, Setting, Tone, Pre-game activities, Structure, Techniques/Rules/Mechanics, Facilitation/GM Role, Post-larp activities”. They also advise to show compassion, assume the best and avoid snark. However, I think some snark is OK, especially if the organisers treated you badly.
It seems like the Nordic Larp website has also noticed that meeting art critique standards may be one of the reasons they have not been receiving much reviews, and thus they decided to call this public feedback “larp documentation”, specifying:
Does it have to be a critique/criticism/review? No. We are very happy to publish those, for sure, but what we mostly want is straightforward accounts of people’s experiences. We don’t need you to say what you thought was wrong about the larp, or to suggest how to improve it, or so analyse it within some critical framework. Just what it was like, and how it was for you, will be perfect.
Should I write a long narrative about my character’s journey? A documentation piece is not a long account of your character’s narrative arc, but rather discussion about your overall experience and your reflections about it. Ideally, you will be able to provide some details about the basics about the larp setting, themes, and organisation, along with a brief account of your experience, and any takeaways. Bonus points if you can connect the larp to other texts, larps, or theories in the discourse, but this is not required. (Nordic Larp 2023)
Since participants matter more than the games, I would also love to read about player well-being.
Corporeal well-being
A book may give you paper cuts and move you emotionally, but a larp will by definition affect your body, potentially up to bodily harm. Players’ pre-game health affects their experience and could be relevant to it. I started The Monitor Celestra (Sweden 2013) with gut issues and cut my scalp open on a doorway – literal pre-game bleed. An eye infection at Conquest of Mythodea (Germany 2004) required immediate antibiotic treatment, making me miss a full day of game. To avoid sweat dripping into my eye, I could not wear the silicone mask that fully covered my entire head and neck, and therefore had to change character, which affected my experience.
Quite often, organiser choices affect players’ physical well-being, so it makes sense to write about those experiences in a review. One example is hygiene: were there enough bathrooms for everyone? Could people change their sanitary products and contact lenses in the bathrooms? Also, did you get accurate information about the conditions where you would be living and playing? For example, pre-game information about De la Bête mentioned that I would sleep in a castle, but not that it would be so dusty that my black costume would become grey every day. It was honestly not a big deal, but it could be relevant for future players. When discussing health related issues, you should obviously only share what you are comfortable with, what is relevant to your experience at the game, and you should always respect the privacy of other participants.
Emotional well-being
In Fat Man Down (Denmark 2009), a 2-4 hour jeepform/freeform scenario originally designed for the Fastaval festival, players consent to roleplaying scenes from the life of a fat man and the people making his life miserable. Just before going in character, players are told by the organiser (without the player of the “fat man” hearing) that his use of the safeword should be ignored. Meanwhile, the player of the “fat man” is given the real safe word and will therefore get to observe the other players breaking a game rule.
This constitutes bait and switch as the players did not consent to participate in an experiment testing their willingness to break agreed-upon rules and to potentially abuse a co-player. In a scientific setting, this type of “forced insight” experiment, without the oversight of an external ethics committee, would get the organisers fired or disbarred. But in the Nordic larp scene, several larpers have told me: “Sure it’s a bit unethical, but it’s an innovative design! It’s great art, so it’s OK!” Parts of the Nordic freeform/larp scenes may have moved on from this “provocation first, people second” approach, but how many players have signed up for this game without even having the option to read player feedback?
People often joke about Type II fun and extreme emotional sports, but do larpers sign up to get abused? I need to see whether limits are clearly announced on a larp’s website, but I would also like to hear whether they were actually respected. Not just by the organisers, but also by supporting casts and co-players. And if all of the above was perfectly healthy and safe, well, that’s a great thing to know for future players too!
Financial well-being
Since the advent of international blockbuster larps, sign-up fees have been getting closer to the median monthly income of several European countries. It would be only fair to get some accurate information about the larp before spending such an amount of money (plus costume and transportation). Furthermore, personal time investment for larps that rely heavily on co-creation by the players can mean allocating weeks into online pre-play. Before investing these resources, it would be great to be able to check whether the game is a good fit for the player, and not have to rely solely on the organiser’s website. An ageing population of players may have more money, but also less free time. Between raising children and minding their carbon footprint, a lot of people are ready to larp less – if they can larp better.
Creative well-being
Once all of the above have been considered, I want to hear about the game itself, but not just in a neutral, descriptive manner. Did the themes come to life as communicated? How? Did cheesy aliens with green antennae crash the Dangerous Liaisons larp that was announced as historically accurate? Did the much-touted lavish set and prop design live up to the hype?
If your own character’s plot was not satisfactory, what happened? Do you think it was because of your own playing, a confusing character text, or other players refusing to play to lift? Or did an interdimensional demon portal “main plot train” run over the intimate love stories that were supposed to be the core of your experience? Conversely, if you had ecstatic, life-changing scenes, how did they happen? Did they resonate with your own, pre-game interests, or did you discover an entire new side of your personality? And what about the other players? Did they seem bored or did they seem to get more out of the larp than you did? Any of this information could be useful. And the best part is that you do not have to actually include any of it for your public written feedback to be more valid and useful than the current silence.
Just do it. Please.
Two of the Nordic Larp website’s latest player “documentation pieces” perfectly illustrate the value of ignoring the strict requirements of artistic critique. In his “documentation” of Gothic (Denmark 2023), Juhana Pettersson (2023) discusses his past personal interest in the topic, takes a behind-the-scenes look at specific aspects of the design, and describes some key scenes and his feelings about it all. Simon Brind’s (2023) documentation of the erotic horror larp House of Craving (Denmark 2019) is self-described as “a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened”, but both pieces are really useful.
These two are great examples of reviews/testimonies/public larp feedback, and we need more (including on the very same games, even the very same runs) to hear more perspectives. We especially need reviews by people who are less known in the Nordic larp scene and may suffer from impostor syndrome.
If none of the advice above helps, you can always start by just writing down three things you liked, three things you didn’t, and then explain why you did or did not like them. That would already be better than the current situation. Other future participants would thank you, and again, they, like you, matter more than the games.
References
Ahlroth, Jussi. 2008. “Leave the Cat in the Box: Some Remarks on the Possibilities of Role-Playing Game Criticism.” In Playground Worlds, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Jyvaskyla, Finland: Ropecon ry.
B., Thomas. 2016. “Your Brain on Larp: Questions and Tools for Neuroludology.” Presentation at Solmukohta.
Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp). 2024. Electro-GN.com.
Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt https://leavingmundania.com/2017/05/30/why-larp-critique-is-awesome/2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Waern, Annika. 2019. “How to Gather Feedback from Players.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 373-388. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Ludography
Conquest of Mythodea. 2004. Live Adventure Event GmbH, Germany.
De la Bête. 2014. Rolling, Czech Republic.
Fat Man Down. 2009. Frederik Berg Østergaard, Denmark.
Gothic. 2023. Avalon Larp Studio, Denmark.
House of Craving. 2019. Participation Design Agency, Denmark.
Le Masque de Boba Fett. 2015. Nugerôle, Switzerland.
Parliament of Shadows. 2017. Participation Design Agency in collaboration with Oneiros and White Wolf Entertainment, Belgium.
The Monitor Celestra. 2013. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet, Sweden.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
B., Thomas. 2024. “This Larp Sucked – and Everyone Should Get to Read About It.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
