Nordic Larp

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  • The Interaction Engine

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    The Interaction Engine

    By

    Eleanor Saitta

    I am lying on the big double bed in the middle of the living room, all clad in white. A glass of whisky in hand and Ray-Ban Aviators on to conceal where I am looking. The memorial for Lena who committed suicide earlier that year, is ongoing. Her widower Wilhelm is giving a tear-ridden speech about how wonderful a wife and mother Lena was.

    House-Wilhelm, a ghost-character portraying both the House they are in and a previous incarnation of Wilhelm, is forcing the fingers of his son down his own throat, trying to throw up as a comment to the speech given by his human counterpart. In between, he screams that Lena was never supportive of him and that he hopes she burns in hell. None of the human characters react to this. They can not see or hear the twelve House-ghosts that are in the room with them.

    The ghosts, on the other hand, applaud Ghost-Wilhelm’s effort to throw up and laugh scornfully when he fails. He falls sobbing to the floor in front of his human counterpart while repeating “I am sorry, Lena!” over and over.

    The human characters step over him and go to get coffee and cake in the adjoining room. This scene will repeat itself in new and equally exciting ways for the next seven days when the human characters will be absorbed into the house by midnight and become the House-ghosts for the new family that will come to stay in the house.

    What I((Although the article has two authors, it is written from Bjarke Pedersen’s perspective.)) just described is a scene from the erotic horror larp House of Craving (Denmark 2019). I was there playing one of the House-ghosts as a non-player character. The larp was created by Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen and myself. Eighteen runs have been played since the premiere, and the original freeform (Længslernes Hus, 2017) has run countless times since its premiere at Fastaval in Denmark. The larp runs for eight days straight, with twelve new participants arriving each day, reiterating the story lived by the characters. On the first day, you play as the family who has come to spend time at a haunted house. Around midnight, your character is absorbed into the House, and the next day, you play a House-ghost version of your character.

    Each run is uniquely different but feels much the same. The structure of the larp is based around a few repeating fate play scenes each day that gather people together. One of them is a memorial service for Lena, the mother who has committed suicide. The fate play scenes and the ending for both the Family and the House characters are predetermined. Everything else is created by the participants on the fly, together as an ensemble. There are no quests and little connected narrative or story per se. The participants are encouraged to prepare as little as possible besides reading the larp materials and getting their costumes. The larp becomes better without preparation. With less preparation, there will be fewer assumptions about what the larp will be, and the participants are better equipped to react in the moment.

    This works because the larp is designed around what I call an interaction engine. The interaction engine is a specific type of larp design where the primary focus is on enhancing playability by ensuring that every action generates new possibilities and emotional impact. Other larp design styles may foreground structured narratives, fighting simulations, or realism, for example. These can exist in engine-driven games, but they are always in the background. The main focus in an engine larp is on what creates interactions between participants. Specifically, interactions that intensify the larp experience – the aim is not to create intensity for the sake of it, but intensity that moves both the individual and the ensemble experience in the direction of the themes of the larp. This way, the journey through the experience by the player will be way more dynamic than a plot or narrative written months before the participants arrive at the location. Scenes and experiences that players create themselves on the fly will fit better into their context and into what they want to experience.

    The interaction engine will help the players create engaging interactions that are both emotionally and physically intense, and that always lead to more interactions rather than fewer. The goal is to get the players to connect with the themes of the larp in as many ways as possible, so their actions resonate with not only their own dreams and desires but also with their cultural identity, experiences in their own lives, and how they see themselves.

    I came to this design method out of frustration. Early on in my design career, I realized that a big part of the work that my team or I had done was never used. If it was a plot or story, then the players went in another direction than I anticipated. Or if it was character relations, then the chemistry of the players was off, or the relationship was not something that was interesting for the people involved. All the hard work creating what I felt was good content for the larp, was wasted time I could have used on other aspects of the larp.

    The most scarce resource you have in larp is the organizers’ time, closely followed by the participants’ time. When a large part of the material created for the larp is not used, you have wasted both. What I realized was that to create the best possible larp and not waste time, you need to let go of the narrative control and hand it over to the participants. Instead of controlling their narrative journey in great detail, an interaction engine guides the players to understand what the themes they are supposed to explore are, and the chosen larp mechanics help them to do that in the best available way. You could say that an interaction engine larp controls the emotional arc of the character’s story, rather than the narrative arc.

    When you design a larp, you often start working on the parts that are the most exciting to you. While this can be rewarding and motivating, the design of an Interaction Engine larp needs to begin with laying down a core foundation that must form the basis of all your future decisions. In an engine design approach, you have to start with the theme or themes for your larp. You then map out the actions that your participants can do that support the exploration of those themes from as many angles as you can think of. By actions, I mean very specifically the things that the players actually will be doing during the larp. What verbs describe the actions in the best possible way? For House of Craving, some of the verbs are flirting, controlling others, lounging, and masturbating.

    These actions define the focus of your larp. All other design choices should be made to support them. If you want flirting, then flirting needs to be front and centre in the workshop, to be sure people trust each other and are comfortable with each other – and even more trust and comfort are needed when it comes to masturbation. For House of Craving, we had a masturbation mechanic that included clear jelly dildos as penis replacements, and we workshopped it extensively before the larp. The ghost-penises as they were fondly called by the players, could be used by the players no matter their character’s gender. We also instructed the players to always bring a ghost-character with them if they went to their room to masturbate. The actions we wanted to see were supported by the mechanics of the larp and the workshop design, helping the players play with otherwise private and intimate actions that are very difficult to do without support from the design.

    There are larps with themes where an interaction engine is probably not the best fit. You need the themes to be focused on emotional and relational actions for the interaction engine to truly shine. An example of a larp where an interaction engine would be less ideal could be a larp centred around detail-oriented and rules-heavy diplomacy, where the actions have to follow a predetermined structure to achieve connection to the themes.

    Building a larp around an engine demands that all elements, from scenography and food to characters, relations, and motivations, are aligned toward the themes and actions of the larp. Everything else should be removed from the design. When done well, this makes the theme of the larp accessible and playable for all. The player does not have to be at the right place at the right time to access the important plot – they can create access for themselves at any given time by being in the setting and engaging with the design and mechanics.

    When designing a larp this way, any main plot steps into the background and the potential for meaningful encounters between characters is brought to the foreground. When all the verbs or potential actions available to the players are clearly defined and understood, the players can choose the ones that make the most sense to them at any given time. If the participants understand the themes, and it is clear how the verbs connect to the themes, all the participants are able to steer their experiences in the same direction, each individually choosing the best possible path for themselves.

    The larp mechanics allow the participants to push their actions (described by the verbs) beyond what is possible without mechanics. Moreover, the mechanics make it easier and faster for the participants to take the actions described by the verbs. Thus, the mechanics work as tools to create or support powerful moments. Giving participants the responsibility and trust to follow their own desires (through the lens of their characters’ motivations) as to what to explore gives room for their imaginations to shine. Given space, they will tell far more gripping stories than you as a designer can ever create for them.((To be clear, gripping and meaningful are not always the same thing – engine-driven larps do away with a lot in the pursuit of engagement. That said, in my experience more games have failed because the players have been disengaged than because the deeper meaning of the larp did not resonate deeply enough in the lives of the players.))

    This, of course, demands a lot from the players. A high level of herd competence is required for the engine to run smoothly. With less experienced players, more workshop time is needed for a smooth larp experience. The extra workshop time should primarily be used to create trust within the ensemble and to help individual players calibrate with the norms of the ensemble. Another use for it is to ensure that the players understand what they are personally comfortable with and what they are interested in experiencing.

    Juhana Pettersson writes in his excellent article Engines of Desire:

    “When I conceptualize the process of larp design, I see it as working with the players to give them the desires required by the design and help them get in touch with their own desires so they can use them to drive action. When a player does something they’ve always wanted to do, they bring energy and power to the larp. You can see it in the way people play, carry themselves, speak, act. It’s a powerful thing and generates so much meaning.” (Pettersson 2021)

    The most important thing for an engine-based larp is to create a space where the participants feel safe and seen and where they feel they have the possibility to explore and engage with the themes of the larp without fear of being ridiculed or having their boundaries breached. In this mind-space, the participants feel empowered, with all possibilities open for them to choose. Many of my participants have told me that being in this space feels both overwhelming and totally safe. In these moments, larp can be transformative. You learn something new about both yourself and the world when you dare to step up to the edge of your safe interaction space and into unknown territory.

    That the participant feels like they have all possibilities open to choose from is of course an illusion created by well-crafted larp and participation design. This design starts way before the participants arrive on site.

    “Everything is a designable surface” is the mantra for all of my design work. It was coined by Johanna Koljonen (2019), and it means that all the design decisions you make or that are made for you by e.g. time or monetary constraints, a protected historical location, or anything else beyond your control, will have an impact on the success of your larp. For instance, if the temperature in a room is a few degrees too cold the characters will not take their coats off or sit still for very long, and your well-planned physical boudoir interaction space goes out the window – as happened in a 2018 run of Inside Hamlet.

    As a designer, you literally need to think of everything – or, more practically, you need to accept that you are responsible for all aspects of the larp even if they are out of your control. At any given moment when designing or running a larp you should ask yourself the question “What are the consequences of making this decision and not another one?”

    Use the themes you have set for your larp as a guide. If all of your decisions are aligned to support the themes, you are well on your way to creating an interaction engine larp.

    But what is the interaction engine? Can you point at it? Just like a real engine, an interaction engine is made of hundreds of parts (which we don’t have room to describe exhaustively), and no one part can be said to be the whole thing. To start identifying the core of your engine, ask yourself the following question: “What is the main part of the design that drives participants to actions that are connected to the themes of the larp?”

    The answer to this question is the core of the engine, and you should put your design effort here to support this part of the design in as many ways as possible. The more time and energy you use here, the easier your design decisions will be.

    To be able to answer the question above, you need to analyze the themes of your larp and describe them in detail – an example will follow below. With your themes locked down, you then need to figure out what design elements will most efficiently drive your participants to perform actions that connect directly to those themes. This is the core of your interaction engine.

    Once you have the core of the interaction, you need to iterate through all aspects of the design with your themes and the core engine in mind. This means looking at your larp mechanics, your set and spatial design, costume guidelines, your workshop structure, how food is served, the website, participant communication, and everything else. All of these should be focused on supporting the themes and the core engine to drive participants to take actions during the larp that explore the themes in the ways that you think will be most worthwhile. As you make new decisions about different parts of the larp, you need to continually cross-reference with all the other decisions you have made to ensure that you do not make choices in one place that push players toward an action that you have made harder for them in another place.

    As you are doing this, you may identify actions that your design pushes participants to do that are not connected to the themes of the larp. In a few specific cases, these might feel necessary to make the larp feel coherent to some players, allowing them to access the rest of the game, but this is rare, and almost without exception you should remove them from your larp. If you do not, these actions will feel disconnected from the rest of the larp and be uninteresting to engage with for your participants and may lead to participants falling out of play or being confused about the things that they should be doing.

    For example, if you are making a larp about a decadent court and some of the characters are guards designed to stand still and guard the court, then you will have a group of characters that are not able to engage with the themes of the larp. At Inside Hamlet, we solved this challenge by making the royal guard more like celebrities that the members of the court wanted to become or to bed. These celebrity guards did not need to stand guard at all.

    An Example: PAN

    PAN (Denmark 2013) is an example of an engine-based larp. A group of couples from various walks of life are at a couple’s therapy workshop retreat run by a new-age husband and wife. Over the course of a weekend, the participants go through various exercises trying to save or improve their relationships. In one of the more new-age exercises, the workshop leader does a seance, trying to connect with people from the other side. This fails spectacularly when the Great God Pan enters our reality and possesses her. Pan then starts to jump from person to person over the next few days until all notions of reality and identity are stripped from the characters and all characters are willingly destroyed.

    The themes of PAN are an exploration of self-actualization in a couple structure, what ethics, morality, and being civilized actually mean, and what happens when this is stripped away. What is then left of a person’s humanity? Some of the actions that are connected to the themes are possessing, indulging, taking control, losing control, being shameful, being fearful, exploring the self, and destroying your relationship, among others.

    The core of the engine in PAN is the possession mechanic. The Great God Pan is symbolized by a necklace. The necklace is only visible to participants, not their characters. Wearing the necklace, and seeing someone else wearing it, both have specific interaction scripts.

    When you are wearing the necklace, you become possessed by Pan and must pursue your biggest basic needs as soon as possible – if you are hungry you must eat and if you are horny you must find release. Pan does not care for what is proper or in good taste.

    If you see someone wearing the necklace, your character will ignore everything around themselves, and the possessed person becomes the single most interesting thing in the world. You will do anything at all to get their attention, to have them see you, touch you.

    This leads to mayhem. The necklace leaves broken and embarrassed characters in its wake, with each possession adding a new and different layer of emotional chaos to the characters impacted by it. Every possession is unique, driven by what the participant wearing the necklace wants and desires from the larp at that moment. The agency goes both ways, too – if a participant around the possessed doesn’t find their desires in the interactions around the necklace, that participant leaves the room and pursues play somewhere else.

    The only planned scenes in the larp are the seance where Pan enters the world and the ending where everyone follows the god into oblivion. All scenes that arise because the necklace travels from participant to participant are unscripted. They evolve and change in each iteration like a beautiful fractal pattern. This way, the participants tell stories that we the designers never could imagine in our wildest dreams.

    Conclusion

    Creating a larp designed around an interaction engine demands more design work at the beginning of the process, but it pays off later by giving you a guiding light for every decision you make. When you identify the core themes and verbs for your larp it helps you focus on the actions and larp mechanics you should be designing, leading your participants to do engaging and coherent things together.

    Finally, this essay includes some of the questions you can ask yourself to help you design an interaction engine larp. As an example, I will in the next section answer some of the relevant questions for my larp PAN. Please add your own questions to the list as you work with this design style:

    • What are the core themes of your larp idea?
    • How would you describe each theme in such a way that every participant will be able to understand it?
    • Why these themes and not other ones?
    • What actions explore the theme? How many different types of actions can be used to do so?
    • Are there any actions currently in the larp design which do not connect to the themes? Can they be removed?
    • How can you support the core actions by planning secondary actions around them?
    • Are the core actions accessible to all characters and participants? If not, why?
    • What affordances in the design, site, mechanics, characters, or costumes are required to make those actions possible and legible to participants?
    • How can you design all aspects of the physical space to support the actions that you want and make them desirable to participants?
    • How can you shape the use of time, either the participants’ time on site or before the larp or the structure of time inside the larp, to support those actions?
    • What communication strategy will best support the interaction engine?

    The origins of PAN

    The design of PAN began when my co-designer Linda Udby and I were sitting and complaining that there were no larps to sign up to that we were interested in. After some time we ended with a conclusion that I can highly recommend: we decided to make our own damn larp!

    I was really interested in exploring the, at the time, new idea that you need an alibi to be able to play a larp that is intense and outside your comfort zone, and that you can design such an alibi. We wanted to make something quick and dirty that would not take a year to design and produce nor require endless preparation from the participants. This restricted what kind of larp we could make in many ways. For example, we needed a location that we could use as it is without having to build or dress.

    I had just read the gothic horror story The Great God Pan (Machen 1890) and was fascinated with the idea that there was merely a thin veil protecting us from a reality so alien that seeing it would shatter our morals and beliefs and drive us insane. With these restrictions and ideas, we came up with the core idea for PAN. The larp is set in the present day since this choice made it easier for us to find a location and to produce the larp and easier for the participants to find costumes. We chose a summer house as the location. The number of characters in the larp was decided based on the number of beds at that summer house.

    Back in 2012 when we designed PAN, I would have answered the (relevant) design questions from the previous section as follows (as far as I can remember).

    What are the core themes of your larp idea?
    Exploration of self-actualization in a couple structure; what ethics, morality, and being civilized actually mean, and what happens when this is stripped away.

    How would you describe each theme in such a way that every participant will be able to understand it?
    The experience of PAN will take your character through working on your relationship in a new age therapy weekend in a group with people you have never met. Suddenly you will be face to face with a god that will slowly strip you of everything you know. You will end up betraying yourself and your partner in the most heinous and terrible ways.

    Why these themes and not other ones?
    They fit this specific larp very well, they are themes that I am very interested in right now, and they will expand my knowledge of designing and running larps. Moreover, the themes can be explored within the time and production restrictions we have set.

    What actions explore the theme? How many different types of actions can be used to do so?
    The actions available are grouped into two different categories. The first is a group of actions that are connected to the self-actualisation and therapy part. Here the verbs are going to be: engage with therapy, argue, expose shame and lust, meditate, perform relationships, help others to open up, etc. The second group of actions are the ones that the god forces upon the participants via the game mechanics and instructions on what to do when possessed or seeing someone who is possessed. Here the verbs are indulge, scream in terror, give in to lust, and abuse others and yourself.

    How can you support the core actions by planning secondary actions around them?
    Since the larp was so small (8–12 players), there was little room for secondary actions. Each couple in the larp had their own story that had some secondary actions embedded. It was not a priority to make this consistent across all characters during the design process (the larp would be better for it, though).

    What affordances in the design, site, mechanics, characters, or costumes are required to make those actions possible and legible to participants?
    To play PAN, you had to agree to play the larp in a very physical style, and you needed to understand that you are not in control of the character’s journey. Even if the ending of the larp was predetermined, neither the participant nor we the designers were in control of what would happen during the larp. This was due to the chaotic narrative the possession mechanic enforced on the larp.

    How can you design all aspects of the physical space to support the actions that you want and make them desirable to participants?
    The location needed to be open and small, with few places to hide and be private. We needed to be able to hear where the participants were and where the participant that was currently possessed by Pan was moving.

    How can you shape the use of time, either the participants’ time on site or before the larp or the structure of time inside the larp, to support those actions?
    The biggest challenge in a larp like PAN is to make the participants feel safe enough to fully engage in the actions the larp is aiming for. This is why we decided to use more time in the workshop to create trust amongst the participants than in many other larps. It also meant a quite harsh casting process. You needed to sign up with the person you would play partner with. We did this to make sure that there would be trust between the players of couples already right from the beginning.. The whole ensemble was chosen based on a signup form where you had to motivate why you wanted to participate.

    What communication strategy will best support the interaction engine?
    We had a simple website with enough information to understand what the larp was about and what was required from the participants. We deliberately avoided creating hype around the larp, since we wanted to make sure that only people who were truly interested in the themes and actions would sign up.

    Bibliography

    Arthur Machen (1890): The Great God Pan. Whirlwind magazine.

    Johanna Koljonen (2019): An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen & al. Kopenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost (Knudepunkt 2019), p. 25–29.

    Juhana Pettersson (2021): Engines of Desire in Engines of Desire: Larp As the Art of Experience, p 247. Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Ludography

    Inside Hamlet (2015): Denmark. Participation|Design|Agency

    Pan (2013): Denmark. Linda Udby & Bjarke Pedersen.

    House of Craving (2019): Denmark. Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen & Bjarke Pedersen.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Pedersen,Bjarke & Eleanor Saitta. 2024. “The Interaction Engine.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Hoover Tung on Unsplash

  • Six Levels of Larp Participation

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    Six Levels of Larp Participation

    By

    Josefin Westborg

    Introduction

    This is an attempt to provide some theoretical structure to the different, but in practice often intermingled, levels of larp participation. While some of these levels possess a more readily available terminology – like distinguishing between player and character – the corresponding expectations, responsibilities, purposes, and activities often still remain unspoken. Other levels are still most often overlooked, or maybe not even recognized as a part of the design and experience, much less discussed or communicated. By sorting and clarifying these different levels we hope that our framework can be a useful intellectual tool for both participants and organizers.

    As for all models, our framework is clearly a simplification: an attempt to separate concepts, actions, and ideas where no clear boundaries actually exist, where cultures, play styles, and preferences overlap, shift, and are context-dependent. Since larp as a cultural expression continually breaks the norms and often tests the established boundaries of the format, it isn’t hard to find examples that not only contradict the framework but also do this as a central design choice. This is only natural for a work such as this that tries to be very generic.

    The framework

    A framework is the more or less collective definition that participants in an activity have of the situation. According to Goffman (1961, 1986) it is the unspoken answer that participants could give to the question: what is going on here?

    The meaning of things like an object or something you say or do is dependent on which frame is currently established. When Fine (1983) looked at role-playing games he ended up with three different frames. The first was everyday life, the second was the game level where your actions were affected by the rules such as whose turn it is, and the third was the fantasy frame that we would call ‘in-game’ in larping.

    When talking about larps we realized that there is more going on within each frame. By looking at what the individual does, why they do it, and for whom they do it, we could identify six different levels of larping. As we see it, levels 1 and 2 both go into Fine’s first frame, levels 3 and 5 go into his second frame, and levels 4 and 6 match his third frame. These levels interact and influence each other, providing opportunities and limitations. We found that the levels are not only descriptive: there is also a hierarchy to them. In general, the lower-numbered levels have a higher priority than the higher-numbered ones. By level, they provide the groundwork that the following levels rely on to work and to be meaningful. Below you see a table overview of the framework with its different parts, and short examples.

    Table of the levels of the six levels of larping. Important terms are capitalized. Read the table as “On level 2, The participant acts as an Attendee to Perform a Task for the organizers”.

    Level Who
    The Participant acts as a/an […]    		 Action
    to […]    		 Purpose
    […]    		 Beneficiary
    for […]    		 Example
    1. Person Take care of Off-game Needs themselves sleep enough
    2. Attendee Perform (a) Task the organizer/s cook food
    3. Co-creator Uphold (the) Shared Fiction (and play culture) the other Roles use in-game names, only play in-game songs
    4. Role Provide Functions the other Players be the bully everyone fears
    5. Player Steer (their) Experience (through the character) themselves solving the plot,
    all the drama
    6. Character Portray their Personal Fiction themselves, other Characters and Players dress to stand out, swear and challenge norms

    The levels

    First, let’s start by taking a look at the different levels of the framework. We will describe each level and also give some tips to think about for participants and give some insights into what this can mean for an organizer. You can probably come up with many more examples yourself.

    Level 1 Off-game Needs

    ‘The Participant acts as a Person to Take care of Off-game Needs for themselves.’

    As a Person signed up for a larp, you have to make sure that your basic requirements will be met. This might include things like warmth, food, medicine, sleep, security, and trust. These are things that you also would need to take care of outside of a larp. If at any point higher levels challenge your ability to fulfill your Off-game Needs to your own person, the Needs should take priority. They are more important than narrative and character coherence or the Functions your Role is Providing. This doesn’t mean that you should drop everything immediately because you are getting tired, but pushing yourself over your limits because “the plot demands it” isn’t the right thing to do. If you have an Off-game Need to handle that will affect higher levels such as Function (level 4), then please make sure to tell affected organizers and co-players, and maybe help them find a working solution to your absence.

    To think about

    Go through what you need to have your Off-game Needs filled, and see what the organizers take care of and what you should handle yourself. Remember that we can have different Off-game Needs. Some people work great even on very little sleep, while others can’t operate at all. It can also be good to have backup things if someone else forgot, like an extra blanket for warmth or some energy bars.

    For the organizer

    Be clear with what you can offer and what you expect participants to take responsibility for themselves. Are there off-game sleeping areas for people if they need them? Will you accommodate all dietary demands or only some? Also, be clear about what is part of your design and what is not: maybe scarcity of food is part of the larp, and you want participants to also be hungry off-game.

    Level 2 Task

    ‘The Participant acts as an Attendee to Perform a Task for the organizer.’

    On the 2nd level, we have the Tasks that an organizer asks you as an Attendee at their larp to Perform. This may be cooking food, waking everybody up, making sure no one stands in the wrong place when the pyrotechnics go off, letting the organizers know what the council decides, and so on. In many cases, if these Tasks are in some way vital to the larp, they are performed by a non-player character or an organizer with a thin cover character, but it’s not uncommon to see these kinds of Tasks handed out to regular Attendees. It can be hard to know how to prioritize these if there arises a conflict with other Purposes without clear instructions. For example, can your character get fired from the kitchen, or quit voluntarily to go join another group? Can they be taken prisoner? Since working in the kitchen might be a Task you (hopefully) agreed to Perform, your obligation is to the organizers who asked you. In this case, you must check with the organizers before abandoning the Task. If the obligation is to yourself for level 1 reasons – maybe you need to get dry clothes or handle an off-game situation – you should still inform the organizers, if it can affect the Task in a significant way.

    To think about

    Give some thought to what the Tasks that the organizer asks you to Perform will entail, both for your gameplay and for your Experience of the larp. Consider how much time they will take, and how much energy they will require. Are there reasonable backup plans in place if things don’t go as intended? How crucial are the Tasks assigned to you, for the larp to Function at all? Will you be able to carry them out while managing your other commitments to the gaming group and fellow Players? Can you foresee a conflict of interest? Will the Task bring you out of the central playing area or isolate you from the action, and is this something you are fine with?

    For the organizer

    As an organizer, you should consider how crucial the Tasks that you assign to the paying participants are, since they will also anticipate a fulfilling game Experience. Also, consider whether there are alternative solutions if things don’t go as planned, and whether you have clearly communicated your expectations to the participants in question. It’s not automatically evident that the Role of a “guard” entails actual patrols and being on fire watch, or that a “principal” should prepare and lead recurring teacher meetings as a crucial part of the design.

    Level 3 The Shared Fiction

    ‘The Participant acts as a Co-creator to Uphold the Shared Fiction for the other Roles.’

    Level 3 is about how you, as a Co-creator, Uphold the Shared Fiction and play culture. Here we find things like the game’s genre, mood, and type of play. If the game is a horror larp, then playing it like slapstick will not be suitable. In a game about a harsh oppressing system, can you start treating everyone equally? While some things might be very obvious, others might not be, and this can also vary between different play cultures. Is it ok to play a well-known off-game ballad in-game? Will it help with setting the mood or will it break the immersion? Can you invent a witch-lord in a fantasy world if none is mentioned in the background fiction? And what consequences will this have for other Players, their Experience, and their Roles/Characters? In short, what can you do without shattering the world and the make-believe you create together?

    To think about

    Read the necessary material to understand the expectations.Try to consider the broader implications that may arise when you introduce changes or modifications to the narrative. Engage in discussions with other Players about their perspectives on the larp’s theme and the Experiences they desire. Be mindful of whether any forms of discrimination are inherent to the larp’s design, and which ones the organizer has explicitly stated as unacceptable within the larp. If you’re uncertain, you can always verify with an organizer.

    For the organizer

    Ensure your communication is explicit. This includes elements like a checklist outlining the anticipated types of gameplay, what is not desired, content summaries, mood boards, and references to other elements of popular culture. Clearly specify whether specific sensitive topics will be incorporated into the gameplay, and whether there are any that Players can expect to be protected from encountering. If you prefer greater transparency, be sure to clearly articulate what is planned to occur, including any external boundaries for fictional events. Can Characters die during the game? Can they be exiled? Is revolution a conceivable aspect of the gameplay?

    Level 4 Function

    ‘The Participant acts as a Role to Provide Functions for the other Players.’

    At level 4, there are two aspects that can sometimes be separated, but in most cases are so closely interconnected that we handle them together here: Role and Function. Role refers to the social position in the fiction that your Character occupies – a title, profession, or distinct trait – which Characters can refer to and discuss. Examples include “captain of the hockey team”, “the new student”, or “village elder”. Function, on the other hand, is about the possible play opportunities your Role creates for the other Players, within the game. Examples include “the bully others should fear” or “the one who leads the council and makes sure everyone has their say”. As you see, these are implicit positions in a social interaction, perhaps an integral part of the experience design of the larp. It’s not a given that the captain of the team is a dangerous bully; that Function could be fulfilled by someone else. However, it’s likely within the formal responsibilities of the village elder to convene the council. A Role can provide several separate Functions, and a given Function can be provided by several characters. Things are not clear-cut, and ambiguity in this area paves the way for misunderstandings and gaps in the design.

    What is needed for the story/scene/situation to work? If, at a larp about oppression and a dog-eat-dog environment, enough Players of high-status Roles don’t fill their Function to bully others, the power dynamics of the whole larp will change. This leads to problems both with the Characters not being bullied, and thereby the Players not getting the Experience they were after (level 5), and Upholding the fiction of a competitive world getting harder (level 3). Another example is if you said you would fill the Function of love interest for another Player, and then during the larp you focus on other things, leaving your co-Player with an unfilled Function. As seen here, you as a Player can have more than one Function at the same larp. You can have different Functions in different groups and situations, or towards individual Players.

    Having a responsibility to fill with your Function doesn’t mean that you can’t change what your story is about, or go for other gameplay if you wish to: but you need to make sure that the Functions you are assigned will be handled in some other way. It is usually good to start by talking to the affected Players. Maybe the Player you were going to play a romance with is happy about their gameplay, or has already found someone else they would like to play it with instead? Then your dilemma is already solved. But if the change has an impact on a larger group, it might be good to check with the organizers. They might have someone else who can fill the Function in a good way to still make it work. Maybe they know that the Function is already covered by other Players and you don’t need to worry. Either way, you should make sure that your Functions will be handled adequately, and not just leave other Players, that are depending on you to Provide a Function, hanging.

    To think about

    Understand the Role and Functions you Provide, either by reading instructions from the organizers if they have clearly articulated such, or by conversing with your fellow Players and aligning expectations. Keep in mind that a small personal relationship can be a part of a larger design where it’s intended to contribute to gameplay for many others, like the romantic plot of Romeo and Juliet, for example.

    Level 4 is closely connected to the personal skills of ensemble play and “reading the game” To learn more about this we recommend the articles Do You Want to Play Ball (Westborg & Nordblom, 2017) and Ensemble Play (Tolvanen & Macdonald, 2020).

    For the organizer

    Carefully consider the Roles your larp features and requires, along with the Functions they Provide, whether explicitly stated or implied. Can they be communicated more clearly? Are some Functions particularly vital and demanding of a substantial amount of time or energy? If a Function is particularly vital, it can be good to divide it among multiple Players. This way, the design can more easily withstand absences, distractions, or other instances where a Player might not fulfill their intended Function. Alternatively, it might be necessary to elevate a particularly significant Function to a Task, and assign it to an instructed Player or NPC.

    If there are Roles within the larp’s structure that involve stepping into another social Role or occupation in the event of a vacancy, such as a crown prince or second-in-command, do you, as the designer, hold such expectations of the Players too? Be clear in your communication about this. Should they, as Participants, prepare in the same manner as their Roles are expected to? Should they even anticipate that type of gameplay, since it’s very different to play the Role of an heir to the throne biding their time, or one that during the game is thrust into the Role of a ruler and the Functions that entails?

    Level 5 Experience

    ‘The Participant acts as a Player to Steer their Experience for themselves.’

    At level 5 we find the Experience of the larp. Just like in level 1 (Off-game Needs), this level is about the requirements for the individual. But where level 1 concerns itself with the Needs that also exist outside of the larp, level 5 is about desires that are specific to the larp. It’s connected to the participant’s playstyle and wishes about their Experience. Do you want to Experience solving the plot, playing out big drama, running around doing physical things, exploring the world, or having a deep relationship with your Character? What type of gameplay do you like and how can you get it? We use the term steering (Montola & al. 2015) here since it guides your character towards the kind of play you are looking for. This might be playing with another specific participant because you find them interesting, even though your Character does not really have a strong motivation for speaking with them. Or it might be going on all the quests, since you find solving problems and puzzles very thrilling and rewarding.

    To think about

    Be honest with yourself and be clear about what you want from your Experience, and take responsibility for making this happen. Coordinate with other Players to get the best Experience you can. Remember to check with other participants about how they prefer to communicate about this: maybe they like to do an off-game check-in each morning, or maybe they prefer to talk it through before the game. Try to accommodate each other. Approach the organizer if things aren’t working, or if you feel stuck. If you sense that your Character’s personality and internal logic are hindrances to your game, contemplate the changes needed and execute them. However, also consider the Experience of other Players and any commitments you have toward them that still need to be fulfilled. Your desire for a specific Experience shouldn’t lead to neglecting assigned Tasks, the Shared Fiction, or your Role’s Functions.

    For the organizer

    As an organizer, you can help by asking Players at signup what type of gameplay they are after, and then try to match that to the groups or Characters.

    It helps to be explicit about the types of Experiences that might be available and how Players can ensure they either engage in or avoid them. You can also assist participants by being accessible off-game during the larp to support those who might find themselves stuck in gameplay they don’t enjoy, or who are unsure of where to find the kind that they are seeking. By matching Players’ desires with each other, you can guide them towards someone who would likely appreciate that particular type of gameplay they are looking for.

    Level 6 Personal fiction

    ‘The Participant acts as a Character to Portray their Personal Fiction for themselves, other Characters and Players.’

    The 6th level is about the Characters inside the story. Where level 5 is about the Players and their experiences, level 6 is all about the Characters. Here we find things like the inner coherence of your Character, aesthetics, personalized movement, and quirks. It can also mean latching on to well-known archetypes, or deviating from them. “Does this make sense for my Character?” and “What would my Character do in this situation?” are relevant questions at this level. It’s not just about filling a Function or Upholding the Shared Fiction, it’s also about making that Shared Fiction into something intimate, emotional, and unique, about adding your personal flair to it, your interpretation of your Character, and to an extent also the other Characters.

    The 6th level is often closely connected to and restricted by the 4th level (Function), but doesn’t have to be.

    The Character Kim holds the Role of the village elder and is Tasked with the Function of equitably distributing the floor in the council, ensuring all Players have a chance to speak. If the Player finds that the inner coherence and narrative of Kim leads them towards Portraying that Kim has an internal crisis that leads to Kim stepping down as village elder, this works fine on level 6. But it will have consequences on level 4 (Function) that need to be handled, since there is not only the Role of the village elder that should be addressed but also the Function of leading the council. This Function and what it entails has to be communicated clearly to any intended replacement, to prevent the larp’s council from being affected in a manner that the organizers have expressly attempted to avoid.

    To think about

    This level is where you create and Portray your Character. It is where you add your personal twist and go deeper into what the Character would do. It encompasses everything else not defined or confined by the foundational lower levels. However, even here, it’s beneficial to reach out to the organizer and co-participants before and also during the larp for inquiries regarding your Character, calibrating Portrayal, and visual representation.

    Let’s say you have planned to Portray (level 6) a punk rocker with clear aesthetics that break the norm because the Experience you are Steering (level 5) towards is to be alternative and an outsider. If it then turns out that several other participants also choose that their Characters will be punk rockers, you risk not getting the Experience (level 5) you desire. You don’t need to change your level 5 priorities, since a change of direction at level 6 can solve the problem. Maybe playing a very religious Character now seems to be the more alternative choice.

    For the organizer

    This level is mainly relevant to the individual participants, but things you could do as an organizer include running workshops to help participants develop their Characters, adding guidelines on how to Portray the Character to the Character text, and being available and open to questions from the participants.

    Examples

    Here we will give two short examples of how you can apply the framework as a participant. By thinking about the different levels you can analyse what choices are available and assess what consequences these choices might have. There isn’t one right choice; it depends on the situation and what change you are striving for, but the framework might help guide you with your decision.

    Example 1: Theodora the head chef

    The Character Theodora is the head chef and is responsible for the distribution of the food on the ship. Every mealtime she keeps order in the line, shouting threats and insults to the crew, making sure everyone gets some food and no one gets too much, reminding them that they are critically short.

    What part of this situation is the Participant (playing the Character of Theodora) free to change and what can she ignore or add to when next the mealtime comes around? Can she choose to serve food at a different time? Start rationing the food even more so everyone goes hungry? Start being nice and lovely, telling everyone that everything will be ok? Give up the position of the head chef and join the marines instead?

    By applying the framework, we can deduce that distributing food is a Task (level 2) that the organizers have asked the Attendee to do. Therefore it has a very high priority. Unless there are pressing Personal Off-game Needs (Level 1), food distribution according to the schedule designed by the organizers shouldn’t be disrupted. Serving less food than agreed upon would also mean changing the Task, impacting the Off-game Needs of many participants. Even if there are very good Fictional reasons (level 3), like that the food storage of the ship has been damaged, any change in the Task should only be implemented once it’s been checked with the organizers.

    Theodora’s reminding of the dwindling supplies is part of the Shared Fiction (level 3), while her harsh attitude and jargon towards others is a Function to Provide a feeling of military discipline and a tough oppressive command system (level 4). There might be good reasons for Theodora to change these behaviours. Maybe because the Player (level 5) got tired of being a bully and would like to feel well-liked instead, or maybe the Character (level 6) found a new way of dealing with her insecurities and worries by being much more positive. No matter the reason, if the designers placed Theodora in that Role with the explicit Function of being dominant and harsh and reminding people of how rough the times ahead will be, the Player of Theodora should ensure that these things will still happen, probably by someone else shouldering the Function, even if the Role of head chef is not transferred. Or they should at least check in with the organizers to see if the game has reached a point where that Function does not need to be Provided anymore.

    Example 2: a high-status character

    It is not uncommon to be anxious about playing a high-status Character that will work in the larp, say a king or a high-rank officer. The fear is about blocking play for others, or maybe disrupting the larp by not being believable enough. Let’s now apply the framework to break this down.

    Blocking play is connected to level 4, Function. One of the most common Functions to have as a high-status Role is play distribution. Being high up in the hierarchy, a lot of information and many decisions end up in your lap. If you keep all the information to yourself and want to make all the decisions, you will create a bottleneck where everyone else is waiting for you and their play is blocked. You might also block others by having long meetings and not being available. High-status roles often have the responsibility to see that the Function of distributing play is fulfilled, either by you or by someone else.

    The next fear is about disrupting the larp, which is a concern at level 3, Uphold the Shared Fiction. This is a responsibility everyone shares. All Co-creators have the responsibility to by default treat others as would be fitting for their position. It’s not one Co-creator’s job to make everyone else treat them in a certain way. As long as you try to treat everyone else’s Characters in a fitting manner, like inviting the most prestigious people when you are holding court, you have done your part. Also, note that the Shared Fiction isn’t static and can change during the larp. If a war is declared, or an attempt on the life of the king is made, the Functions of the Role would change as the Shared Fiction adjusts to accommodate this new development. Holding court would probably be canceled, as handling the new threat demands focus.

    The last part of the fear is about not being believable enough. That is level 6, Character. Many people think that they must Portray their character with authority and realistic mannerisms in order to get others to listen to them. But as we just established, having others listen to you is part of Upholding the Shared Fiction. How you Portray a Character can be done in many different ways and is not crucial for whether the larp will work or not. As long as you fill your Function, in this case, distributing play and holding court, you don’t have to be demanding and authoritative. You can also Portray your Character as confused and incompetent, stating things like “My head hurts from all these words, let the oracles decide”. Both could work equally well.

    By using the provided framework we see that Portraying a Character is not nearly as important as Providing the Functions of the Role.

    Conclusion

    What we have shown here is a hierarchy of things for you as a participant to do and take care of for the larp to work and for all the participants to have the Experience they want. The levels are not separate: they interact and interfere with each other.

    Diagram by the authors. Graphic design: Sara Kannasvuo.
    Diagram by the authors. Graphic design: Sara Kannasvuo.

    Even though we spent most of this article talking about the levels and what they entail, what we find most important is not what level something belongs to, but the consequences of the choices we make in larps.

    We find that adding new initiatives, making changes, and handling problems would benefit from considering the framework to better assess the available scope of action and possible solutions. Since the lower levels (1–4) affect many participants and/or your personal off-game wellbeing, they need to be prioritized. This doesn’t imply that changes or initiatives on the higher levels (5–6) should be sidelined, but rather that players should make sure that these do not generate large undesired effects on lower levels before implementing them. If you do not consider this, you might commit one or more of the cardinal sins of larp (Koljonen 2021). You do not want to break the trust placed in you, just like you do not want others to break the trust you have in them. Nordic larp is not about rules, it is all about trust.

    Bibliography

    Gary Allan Fine (1983): Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. University of Chicago Press.

    Erving Goffman (1961): Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Bobbs-Merrill.

    Erving Goffman (1986): Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Northeastern University Press.

    Johanna Koljonen (2021): Cardinal Sins of Larp. Knutepunkt 2021. [Video] Youtube. https://youtu.be/d5tztYfEbcU?si=JkoFWMS9aavy0zCd

    Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Eleanor Saitta (2015): The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together. In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Rollespilsakademiet.

    Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017): Do You Want to Play Ball? In Once Upon a Nordic Larp, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 130-140. Knutepunkt 2017.

    Anni Tolvanen and James Lórien Macdonald (2020): Ensemble Play. In What Do We Do When We Play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen and Jukka Särkijärvi. Solmukohta 2020.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Westborg, Josefin, Janusz Maxe, and Gabriel March. 2024. “Six Levels of Larp Participation.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover image: Photo by geraldo stanislas on Unsplash

  • For Design

    Published on

    in

    For Design

    By

    Abbie Wolfe

    A recent article entitled “Against Design” (Nordwall and Widing 2024), republished here from this year’s Solmukohta book Liminal Encounters (Kangas, Arjoranta, and Kevätkoski eds. 2024), was the inspiration and provocation for this article, and whilst naturally I thank its authors for their frank and lively debate, I have to resoundingly disagree with just about everything said in it.

    Naturally, I would encourage you, my dear reader, to give it a read here, and then perhaps come back to read the thoughts of one who proudly claims the mantle of “designer”.

    Firstly, my most important point: designers are not the enemies of artists. In fact, I would go a step further, and say that there is no real line between designers and artists, which is one of the things I most profoundly dislike about the article. No person, filled with the spirit of the muses, is sitting in a pine forest somewhere, hewing larps from great pieces of monolithic marble. Every person who writes, weaves, conspires, or conceives of larps is doing so considering their audience, to the materials, the spaces, the minds, and to the resources they have available to them. Whether it be decisions about communicating the message of a larp, the ways it is expected to be run, or even (and hopefully so) the ways to keep their participants safe and happy.

    We create larps for human beings, real people who dwell on this earth with fears, and delights, and backstories, and jobs, and houses, and a preciously limited time to share with us. So the thought that “design”, spat out as a dirty word, as the antithesis of art, as the enemy of the artist, is in any way a bad thing, quite frankly baffles me. It would baffle me in just about any medium, be it painting, or cinema, or music, but most profoundly does it baffle me in larp.

    Because unlike all those other mediums, larp is entirely unique. I might ask the philosophers to leave the room for a moment while I say this: a sculpture remains sculpted even when no one is looking at it, paintings do not cease to be when the gallery closes for the night, the cellulose in a film doesn’t melt if it hasn’t been watched in a decade, and the air still bends to the plucking of a violin even if that air should touch no person’s ears.

    But a larp? A larp as a medium, as an artform, only exists, and can only exist, in the fleeting moments amongst a group of people, playing it, living it, creating it, in real-time, and only for as long as those people are there and building that story together. You can write the most fantastically beautiful, upliftingly soul-wrenching larp that has ever been conceived, but unlike a painting that may well be considered complete at the final stroke of the artist’s brush, a larp is not complete until the last word passes a player’s lips, until the last breath of someone, inhabiting the life of another, is taken.

    I’m sure some may argue over whether trees falling in the forest make a sound, (and perhaps by some assessments as a mere “designer” I could be seen as unfit to have those discussions). But regardless, for now I believe it can stand without question that a larp is nothing without its players, and that we have in this medium of ours possibly the most collaborative, the most actively participatory medium that has ever been devised.

    And I’d reckon that the authors of the article would agree with me, at least in broad principle, and they seem immensely passionate about protecting what they see as this special and unique medium. They might wish to hide it away, shelter it from the corrupting influences of capitalism, of commercialisation, keep it sacred, tucked away in the hills, whispered of only from the lips of ordained monks raised from birth to know the meaning of “true larp”.

    But alas, I don’t live in those hills, I live in capitalism, I live in commercialisation, I live in a society, with grit under my nails, a cheap keyboard at my finger-tips, and smog in my lungs. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes I dream of running off to those forgotten places of the Earth and rejecting the modern world and all its trappings. If I didn’t need the medicine that this modern world creates to even stay alive, maybe I would’ve done so already. But for now, I still live amidst the concrete, where money talks, and the traditional ways of living have been gutted by the gods of industry.

    And so when I can, I escape. I escape into TV, I escape into video games, I escape into movies, and even on occasions I have the brain space to escape into a book. I don’t think that’s too rare, all in all. But when I am escaping, sometimes I feel like I want to escape just a little bit more, y’know? To push that boundary just a smidge further, to immerse myself just a little bit more, in another life, in another place, in another reality…

    And on occasions, I do.

    Me and a group of my friends will get together in some field somewhere, or a scout hall, or some community centre, and dressed in cheap costumes, maybe a prop or two, and some garishly written characters, and together, we escape. And in those times, I am very glad that somebody was being a designer, because unfortunately I don’t come from a country with centuries of tradition in collaborative storytelling, at least not any that survived the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t have the opportunity to immerse myself in this artform from childhood. I don’t even generally have the luxury of knowing half the people I am playing with most of the time.

    In the article, the authors make a reference to the Norwegian term for larp creating, lage, meaning ‘to make’, and reference it being the same word as used for when one makes soup. Now I realize at this point I am committing the sin of media analysis and introducing a food metaphor, but I hope you’ll forgive me. But it does seem as though the authors feel that everyone should only be eating soup. A carefully crafted, small home-cooked larp soup, made from fresh home-grown ingredients, lovingly cultivated in some little farm somewhere.

    And I’ll be honest, that sounds delicious. But I don’t have a little farm somewhere; I live on a council estate in Manchester. My food comes in packets and tins, and sure, I could maybe spend lots of money on trekking out to produce markets, and then lots more time on making a beautiful fresh soup every day, and sometimes I do. But I can’t do that most of the time. To do so is a privilege that I, and most of the people I know, are not afforded. And so, when I am tired from work, when I am poor, when I am lonely, and when I am above all else: hungry, I’ll go get a burger.

    And that’s what we designers are: we’re burger-flippers. We make things people can get easily, as cheaply as possible, have a good time doing it, and get value for their money. And sure, it ain’t the healthiest, it ain’t the best for us, hell it ain’t even probably the cheapest most of the time. But it’s meeting people where they’re at. Because far too many people I know are tired, poor, lonely, and hungry for a bit of respite from this world that was built around us.

    So we design mechanics that allow people to jump into games without weeks of prep. We write games based on popular properties so that everyone has a baseline understanding of tone and content. We build safety systems so people can feel alright having deep personal conversations with strangers. We craft experiences that can run and give people an immersion in someone else’s world for a little while. We flip burgers. We “design”.

    And when it comes to making larps that can run, I think it’s about time we talked about the elephant in the room: selling tickets. It’s a dirty business, I’d reckon there’s no larp writer in the world who really likes it, but we have to face the facts. People only have so much money, they only have so many days off work, they only have so much time they can take away from children and pets and families, they only have so much energy at the end of the working week. And larps cost money.

    You combine these two facts, what do you get? The nemesis of my existence, the boss-fight at the end of every larp development process, the big bad horrible beast: the break-even number. How many tickets do I have to sell to cover my budget? How many butts in seats do I have to reach to allow this project to be a reality? Now you can have all the artistic craft in the world, you could craft the most effervescently perfect creation in larping history, but if you don’t get the people, you ain’t got nothing.

    And so I do marketing. In the first few months of a larp’s creation, I’m not writing characters or doing world building or thinking up mechanics, no. I’m building a website, I’m calculating budgets, I’m pricing up venues, I’m designing graphics, and I’m figuring out how to say to people, “Hey, this is a cool larp that you should come to.” And I hate it, oh boy do I hate it, and I reckon the authors of that article hate it too, if they’ve ever done it.

    So what’s the solution? Well I could just stop. I could never build another website, never create one more fancy graphic, put Facebook away, and just whisper the existence of my purely crafted larp into the breeze. Cool, well now I have a larp with no players, which as we’ve said before is less than worthless.

    Alright, so we’ll appeal to the hearts of our players, implore them to stop being so picky. Why do you have to be so demanding? Just sign up to every larp you hear about, go to them all, give us all your money! Now wouldn’t that be nice, but I won’t belabour the point, it’s not really feasible, is it.

    So what do we do?

    Well the authors of that article have a suggestion: “stop designing”. Stop making larps that haven’t been grown organically in the forests by sustainable larping communes with at least forty years of pedigree and blessed by Idunn herself. Retreat into the wilderness and just, please, stop making larps for people. Well, I’d say that’s just about as impractical as the previous two.

    Now, as said, I would love to go live in a forest for the rest of my life, with a small group of fellow larpers who I’ve known for decades and only create and share together, and let the rest of the world go kick rocks. But unfortunately for me, I was born in a failed industrial town where the smog is baked into the bricks, and where that was never really an option for me. My culture has a vibrant tradition of storytelling, mostly through song, and I am very proud that I get to carry it on into the future, and do genuine work in preserving and sharing it.

    Because contrary to the implication of the article there, we aren’t all godless barbarians in these cities, we aren’t all traditionless, religionless heathens bashing rocks together for entertainment. We have a culture, we have a history, and we want to share that. And part of the way we share that is through larp.

    This is very much close to my heart, as the sort of larps that I predominantly write are historical and theological larps, where I try and give people an opportunity to experience the lives and the beliefs of those that came before us. I feel it’s essential to understanding yourself and your world to be able to relate on a personal level to the lives of others, be that others who live with us now, or others who lived in the past. And larp is of course an unsurpassed tool for this, to allow someone to immerse themselves in the feelings, the life of another person. If that isn’t art, then I don’t quite know what is.

    And even if we’re not making the world a more harmonious place, even if we’re not giving people the opportunity to develop empathy and all we’re doing is giving people an escape: that’s okay too. I am so proud to see this medium of ours grow ever larger. It fills me with such profound joy at every event we run where there is someone who hasn’t larped before and gets to take their first steps into this brilliant community. And I love it even more when those people get a chance to contribute to the story, to bring in their experiences and their knowledge and their feelings and ideas.

    In the article, the authors accuse design of stifling innovation. They claim that designing one’s larps and focussing on the experience of participants leads to stagnation and intellectual decline. And I again, frankly, could not disagree more. Design lowers the bar to entry, it brings people in, from more places, from more backgrounds, from more peoples, and from more cultures. And that is how you innovate. By offering more people a seat at the table, from learning, and growing, and sharing, and mixing, and giving everyone you possibly can a voice to contribute and create something beautiful.

    We have in our hands an artform that is unique, because it relies on the hands, the hearts, the voices, and the souls of everyone in the audience to make it what it is. Not only to experience it, but to craft it along with us. Most of the people I play larps with or make larps for wouldn’t consider themselves artists, and yet that’s entirely what they are. And so are we, the designers. Because we are making art, by getting people there, by giving them the tools to engage with the game, to play with other people, to feel safe and supported and free to create according to where they are at. If a larp is an artistic medium, then making a larp happen is art, designing a larp is artistic.

    And I shall come at last to the final paragraph of that article, in the penultimate of my own. Therein they say, “Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.” And in this I agree, larp and collaborative experience-centred design can come from anywhere. But I am led to another quote I once heard, by Plutarch, saying, ”No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as though there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”

    Well, I and my fellow designers aren’t gonna just wait around for larps to pop out of the ground, or be handed to us on gilded tablets by our Scandinavian cousins. We are the brick-makers, and we are working very hard, with the clay we have, to build a community of wonderful players and incredible experiences, out of those bricks.

    Cover image: Photo by yazriltri on Pixabay. 

  • The Descriptor Model

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    The Descriptor Model

    By

    Petra Lindve

    This article is related to a presentation that the authors gave at Solmukohta 2024. Here is a link to the slides. It is a companion piece to Defining Nordic Larp.

    We don’t think we are alone in sometimes having created larps where what our participants wanted from the larp was far different from what we had envisioned as organizers. Communication is of course key to get the right participants with the right expectations of a larp, but how do you successfully communicate this? We believe that we have put together a model that can be helpful in classifying and describing larps.

    What we wish to present is The Descriptor Model, a toolkit that can be handy for other organizers when defining their larps and trying to communicate this vision to potential participants. This was first conceived together with the rest of Atropos, Tonja Goldblatt and Kirsi Oesch from Kimera Artist Collective, and Reflections Larp Studio.

    The Descriptor Model defines three types of descriptors that can be used together to communicate the style, atmosphere, and target audience of a larp. It’s good to note that all of these target the player, rather than the character experience. The first of these is the Audience Descriptor.

    Audience Descriptor

    Audience Descriptor
    Audience Descriptor (diagram by the authors)

    An audience descriptor in larp is a term used in larp websites, materials, and promotions to:

    • Target a specific audience
    • Tell prospective participants what kind of co-participants they can expect
    • Communicate other things that are associated with that particular target audience

    In this, we use audience in the traditional meaning of “target audience” for marketing or promoting your larp, not in the theatrical meaning where audience would mean onlookers or passive enjoyers of the larp itself.

    Together with other descriptors, it can be used in larp design to identify and clarify the audience, style, atmosphere, and genre of a larp.

    Some examples of this are: Nordic Larp, Blockbuster, Luxury, Exclusive, International, or phrases starting with things like “You who…” or “Have you…”

    They are firmly targeting an audience. In the examples above people who like what they perceive to be Nordic larp, blockbusters, etc. They can also say something about the crowd that would typically be attracted to the larp.

    To communicate something about how the larp will actually be played, you can use a style descriptor.

    Style Descriptor

    Audience and Style
    Audience and Style (diagram by the authors)

    A style descriptor tells you something about the playstyle of the larp. Examples of this are: Pressure-cooker, Blackbox, Abstract, Slice-of-life, Adrenaline-pumping, and so on.

    It can also be used to describe a regional or national style of larping that has a clearly defined style, for example Mediterranean larping, Romanesque, Southern Way, etc.

    Finally, it can also tell you the rule-based system that will be used, like Vampire MET or boffer fighting.

    The style descriptor can in this way convey the playstyle of the larp, what rules it might use, as well as what to expect when it comes to rules, workshops, and setting. When it comes to the more abstract style descriptors like ‘theatrical’ or ‘surreal’, they instead say something about what the larp is striving for when it comes to feeling, i.e. what the larp’s potential meta techniques, workshops, and characters will try to support when it comes to mood or feeling. They do not tell you the actual aesthetic of the larp.

    With the target audience and larping style defined, we also need something to describe the visual impressions, along with things like sounds or even smells.

    Atmosphere Descriptor

    Sans Gateway
    Audience, Style, and Atmosphere (diagram by the authors)

    An Atmosphere Descriptor explains what the larp will look like. This can include aesthetics, periods of history, or genres. Some examples are: Noir, Futuristic, Vintage Era, Regency, 1950s, and Dark academia.

    However these can also be more narrow. They can describe a moment in time, or an overarching mood of the larp. For example: “Eating noodles in the rain in a near future” and “The festive spirit of Christmas in an assembly line dystopia”.

    The Atmosphere Descriptor is there to give an idea of the visuals of the larp: what people will see as they’re larping. It creates a joint aesthetic vision for the larp that participants can use when putting together their costumes. It can also include music or even smell that contributes to the atmosphere.

    Something to be aware of is that the same word can be used both as a style descriptor and an atmosphere descriptor but mean different things. For example a surrealist style of larping can be different to a surrealist atmosphere or aesthetic. There’s a clear difference between a larp played with abstract aesthetics in a teen drama style, compared to teen drama aesthetics in an abstract style.

    This was the last part of the model, but in our discussions we realized that something was missing. How would we be able to classify the concept larps that used clearly defined existing IPs? So we created a broader term called Gateways.

    Gateways

    Descriptor Model – Full
    Descriptor Model – Full (diagram by the authors)

    Gateways are something broader than a style, atmosphere, or audience descriptor. They are frequently associated with an existing IP, and bring a herd competence when it comes to the setting of the larp: but they also present some difficulties when it comes to communicating the larp vision. Examples of Gateways are Star Wars, Harry Potter, Westworld, Jane Austen, and Twin Peaks.

    Gateways are not just a genre, but function as a big open door to the public. They often have mass market appeal and reach out to people who are not larpers, but feel strongly about the particular IP that the gateway is using. This means that a larp that uses a gateway can see a lot of first-time larpers; and it quickly communicates the atmosphere and style of the larp itself, because most people attending will already understand the aesthetics and tone of the fiction.

    However, like most things it also presents some challenges. It can lead to players having vastly different expectations of how the larp will be played, what they can expect, and what is typical for your story. Some might lack experience entirely, others are veterans of the genre with favorite characters already, while yet others come expecting a Nordic larp because of who the organizers are.

    You also risk losing the co-creative nature of the larp because of preconceived notions about what kind of story you will tell. Sometimes there are clashes between organizers and participants; other times between different groups of participants. People might disagree on what aspects of the known IP is actually being played out, and what role everyone should be playing. There is also a chance that it’ll feel like some people are playing the main characters of the story, while the rest are NPCs in a filmic drama.

    Some Examples

    The descriptor model contains three parts – audience, style, and atmosphere descriptors – as well as the term gateway. Sometimes these are communicated more broadly or in longer text passages, but we believe that many larps out there can be condensed into these three aspects.

    To better illustrate this we have put together some short examples. Hopefully these will paint a clear picture of the type of larp they’re describing:

    • A Nordic pressure-cooker 1950s larp
    • A high drama 1920s luxury larp
    • A surreal vintage-era larp for those who always wanted to be poets
    • A blockbuster adrenaline-pumping cyberpunk larp
    • An exclusive, slice-of-life dark academia larp
      • Audience descriptors in the examples above: Nordic, luxury, “for those who always wanted to be poets”, blockbuster, exclusive.
      • Style descriptors: Pressure-cooker, high drama, surreal, adrenaline-pumping, slice-of-life.
      • Atmosphere descriptors: 1950s, 1920s, vintage-era, cyberpunk, dark academia.

    What we’re hoping by presenting this is that the model can be useful to analyze and document existing ideas and projects, as well as in decisions on how to market or design a larp.

    But How Do I Actually Use It?

    One simple use for the model is to create one-sentence descriptions of your larp, which are beneficial for quick pitches and to market it.

    For example, we frequently describe Love and Duty as “a grimdark regency larp by Atropos and Lu Larpová”.

    • Grimdark=style descriptor. It will not be moving towards happy endings or light stories. “[A] kind of nihilism that portrays right action … as either impossible or futile.” – Liz Bourke
    • Regency=atmosphere descriptor. The visual style is for the most part regency.
    • by Atropos and Lu Larpová=Audience descriptor. People who like Atropos larps will like this. People who like Lu’s projects or want to support her might like this.

    Of course, in practice, ‘grimdark regency’ could also be an audience descriptor. It tells you that you will enjoy this if you enjoy a more realistic regency game without fairytale endings. But, anything could be – after all, we expect participants to sign up for things they will like.

    In the examples above we’re keeping the terms very short and precise, but when actually making a larp website you often use more words to set the scene for the larp that you wish to make.

    The descriptor model can be a good stepping stone when trying to determine the vision of your game. It might start with an atmosphere descriptor like “I want a larp about eating noodles in the rain”. From there you can try to determine what your audience could be: “People who like the mundane parts of futuristic society. People who aren’t scared of low-drama and focus on small human interactions. People who don’t need drama to have a good larp. People who want to explore humanity and dehumanization.”

    And then your next step might be determining the style: “Think Blade Runner and Cyberpunk, but not cool prosthetics and special effects, but instead simple signifiers, with the color scheme as seen through the lens of rain. Where everything becomes duller and less cool.” With all that in place you might have designed an Androids larp inspired by Blade Runner (a gateway), but with enough thought put into the atmosphere, style, and audience that with time little remains of the original movie inspiration, and instead it has become its own concept.

    Essentially it boils down to some simple questions:

    • Who is this larp for? (Audience)
    • How will we play this larp? (Style)
    • How will the larp look? (Atmosphere)
    • What is our main inspiration, if any? (Gateway)

    A question missing here is “How do we want our participants to feel?” or perhaps “What do we want them to experience?” The reason for this is that these things are part of the entire designed experience. The Descriptor Model instead sets out to create a framework for potential participants. When it comes down to what they will internally experience or feel, that is both a part of what you are continuously designing as an organizer, and something that participants need to be co-creative in.

    Sometimes organizers know from the beginning what they want participants to experience. Sometimes they want to create a cool event and see what stories come out of it. In any case, this is something that might change along the process, and that is continuously being worked with.

    In many ways, that is the idea of the larp itself: while the Descriptor Model exists to better provide tools that will prime potential participants on what to expect, and to know if this larp is for them.

    It could also be used to pinpoint early in the process that there might be too many things going on with your larp idea at the same time. For example, if you as a team have multiple styles that are supposed to mesh without having designed a new joint vision, people might get confused about how to play the larp. If you’re targeting multiple audiences without giving tools for how those different groups will play together, you risk the larp splitting into groups with separate experiences. Finally, if you give people too many options for atmosphere, you risk people stressing about costume and what the larp is actually supposed to look like.

    All of these together risk diluting the core idea of what the larp should be about.

    It can also be used to make sure that your organizing team is on the same page about what larp you are designing, instead of finding out down the line that you have envisioned completely different things.

    Nordic Larp and the Descriptor Model

    So what is the relationship between Nordic Larp and the model? Well, as we discuss in our companion article Defining Nordic Larp, the term itself still has meaning to people. ‘Nordic larp’ as a term attracts a certain crowd. This makes it valid as an Audience Descriptor, by attracting people who enjoy the style.

    Adding the word Nordic can also change people’s idea of how a larp will be played. For example, there is a difference between a fantasy or vampire larp, compared to a Nordic fantasy or vampire larp. In that way, ‘Nordic larp’ could also be seen as a Style Descriptor, just like many other regional or national larp traditions. It might communicate that there will be workshops, that there won’t be a lot of rules, and that there will be a play-to-lose mentality. Style descriptors do not have to be unique, as long as there’s a group of connotations connected to it.

    However, we do not think that ‘Nordic larp’ can be used as an Atmosphere Descriptor. Perhaps a case could have been made at one time for it meaning modern-day clothes without a costume aspect to them, but looking at the broad use of the term Nordic larp we surmise that it can have many different types of aesthetics.

    Finally, ‘Nordic larp’ can be used as a gateway. If a community learns about the concept by watching videos or being told about it, then the term itself can be used to recruit broadly without defining the term too specifically. This will lead to the same type of issues as with other gateways, i.e. that people will have different views of what Nordic larp actually is, and therefore be acting according to different ideas and rules.

    Final Words

    That was what we had to offer. We hope this will be helpful to someone, and if you end up using it, let us know! We are available on social media, and are always curious to see if there are any ripples in the water.

    Cover image: Photo by fabio on Unsplash

  • Defining Nordic Larp

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    Defining Nordic Larp

    By

    Petra Lindve

    This article is related to a presentation that the authors gave at Solmukohta 2024. Here is a link to the slides. It is a companion piece to The Descriptor Model.

    Over the last few months we have both been in many discussions about if ‘Nordic larp’ means anything anymore. Points that have been raised are if it has simply become a regional description, i.e. a larp from the Nordics, as well as if it has any connotations at all or if it is now too broad to have meaning. Another talking point has been what using the term ‘Nordic’ means to players, and how a larp becomes specifically Nordic, rather than using some other clearer terms.

    These discussions led to the basis of this talk, and the definition of a model that has become its own article: The Descriptor Model.

    A Brief History

    The history of Nordic Larp and its definitions is a long and tangled one. Lizzie Stark wrote about it in 2013’s Leaving Mundania, with a resulting discussion where the stylistic elements of Nordic Larp were brought up by multiple people commenting: Immersion, communal storytelling, 360 degrees ideals, or simply that Nordic larp was nothing but nordic larp – larp made in and by the Nordic countries.

    Soon thereafter, Jaakko Stenros attempted to define the term in his keynote from 2013: “A larp that is influenced by the Nordic Larp tradition or contributes to the ongoing Nordic larp discourse.”

    It was at that time also defined as a term that contained some expectations of the playstyle and content, though these aspects were not necessarily unique to Nordic larp. Jaakko Stenros again:

    “A tradition that views larp as a valid form of expression, worthy of debate, analysis and continuous experimentation, which emerged around the Knutepunkt convention. It typically values thematic coherence, continuous illusion, action and immersion, while keeping the larp co-creative and its production uncommercial. Workshops and debriefs are common.”

    In 2016, Steve Deutsch went through the various definitions but found them all lacking to some degree, while concluding that no-one knows what Nordic Larp is, and yet we recognize it when we see it.

    In 2017, Jaakko Stenros again discussed the concept, where he stated that the label was no longer as useful as it had been. Just as movements in art fluidly ended, Nordic Larp was no longer the exciting thing. He brought up some newly spawned traditions as well as some other regional terms such as “Castle larps”, “Ninaform”, “Southern Way”

    He stated: “I’m not ready to declare Nordic larp dead. But as a label it is not particularly useful when thinking about the present, and certainly not when designing the future. However, as a term referring to a historical moment, one that has all but passed, it is practical.”

    In 2018 Shoshana Kessock wrote the article “Your larp is not a Nordic larp, and that’s okay”. In it she points out the increased market value of ‘Nordic Larp’ or ‘Nordic-inspired’ in international markets, and cites cases of how it is used in the US to distinguish itself from local larp traditions.

    She writes: “‘Nordic-inspired’ games are the fusion food of the larp world, considered pretty trendy, attention-grabbing and fun. Fusion is sexy, it’s mysterious: what can this combination create, bringing together the best of both worlds for something we’ve never seen before.”

    The post discusses a rift between the US larp scene and the Nordic label, and warns about the dangers of devaluing local scenes and traditions.

    Halfdan Keller Justesen also published a video titled “What even is Nordic larp” in 2024, discussing the term Nordic Larp and its value. The points raised in the video are, among others: a focus on the styles common in Nordic larp, and the fact that Nordic larp can be used as a definition to attract people who like Nordic larp.

    Of course many others have theorized about the subject, but this is a quick overview of some of the discussions of the last years’ discourse.

    A photo by Karin Källström from the larp Love and Duty by Atropos and Lu Larpová. A larp about generational trauma, social realism, and societal expectations.
    A photo by Karin Källström from the larp Love and Duty by Atropos and Lu Larpová. A larp about generational trauma, social realism, and societal expectations.

    Why Do We Want to Talk about Nordic Larp?

    So with this brief history in the back of our minds, why do we specifically want to talk about Nordic Larp? Well, this is in part due to a number of people claiming that the term no longer has any meaning. And we do agree that the meaning is hard to pinpoint and that the concept of Nordic Larp has become diluted over time, and especially with an increased knowledge of other traditions and playstyles. However, that does not mean that the concept of Nordic Larp is irrelevant.

    Continuing with this article we need to first establish why we think the term still is relevant, and after talking it through it has boiled down to this. It is relevant:

    • Because it is used
    • Because it still has meaning
    • Because those who belong to the Nordic larp tradition see meaning in discussing it

    This made us start looking at different websites to see if what we believed was actually true. Was the term still being used, and did it have meaning?

    Observations

    By looking through some larp websites we were able to see how ‘Nordic larp’ and affiliated terms were used today. The first thing we saw was that a number of websites actually use the term ‘Nordic Larp’ to describe their larps. Some examples of this are: The Circle, Midwinter Revisited, The Future is Straight, Love and Duty, Sunkissed Affairs, Spoils of War, Mad about the Boy, and many more.

    On top of this, many larps outside of the Nordic countries use either affiliated terms like ‘in the Nordic tradition’ or ‘Nordic inspired’, or the term ‘Nordic Larp’. Some examples of this are Shattered Sanctuary (UK), Blankspace (Germany), Together at Last (UK, taking place in the Netherlands), Ultimate Football League (France), Fracture (US), The Last Supper (UK).

    There were however a number of larps that could be considered Nordic Larps, that did not use the term on their websites, such as: Daemon, Gothic, Forbidden History, and Dollars & Nobles. They all shared the following traits: Predominantly Nordic designers, sharing the most common stylistic elements associated with Nordic Larp, and by people who have been active and visible on the Nordic Larp scene (through the KP/SK tradition and/or through other larps that have used the term).

    Finally, we saw quite a few examples of larps instead using the terms blockbuster or “international larp” to describe the larp on their websites. Examples of this: Charmed Plume Productions (Meeting of Monarchs, Dawn at Kaer Seren, Heirs of the Dragon), College of Wizardry, Poltergeist Larps, and more. Very few of these had predominantly Nordic designers, if any, and many of them had their roots in multiple non-Nordic countries.

    So, just from these observations it seems that the term is deliberately used on some websites, and deliberately not used in other cases, which brings us to the question: When do you actually want to use the term ‘Nordic Larp’?

    When Do You Use the Term?

    We tried to think of a few times when using the term ‘Nordic Larp’ makes sense while promoting your larp, and actually changes the view of the larp based on this term. Some of the things we came up with were:

    • If your larp is NOT implicitly placed in the Nordic Larp tradition by association. For example, there is a difference between a Nordic fantasy larp and a fantasy larp, and a Nordic vampire larp compared to a regular one.
    • If you are seeking to make a different kind of larp from the ones you might normally be associated with. Perhaps you usually make rules-heavy larps and want to signal that this will be different.
    • If you think that the people who’d find your larp would understand it better if it was described as Nordic-inspired or even Nordic.
    • If you are trying to establish yourselves as Nordic Larp designers and approach the Nordic Larp crowd.

    Of course, you can also use it out of habit, either because you are from the Nordic countries or because you mainly make what you would classify as Nordic larps.

    Is Nordic Larp an Ad?

    The idea of Nordic Larp as an ad, a commercial for the larp using the term, is something akin to what Jaakko Stenros said in his keynote speech in 2013, and what dozens have said after that as well. It’s simply a label you put on in order to market your larp. A commercial. It is used to tell your prospective participants some things about your larp, and hopefully attract people, and the right people to the larp.

    But is it really an ad?

    We would argue not.

    Nordic larp is too wide a term to easily define, and contains a lot of different assumptions. Some examples of this could be: Few rules, that there will be pre-larp workshops, few mechanics, and some cultural connotations when it comes to playstyle and a play-to-lose/play-to-lift mentality.

    But those things are often shared by other traditions, larp cultures, and even larp styles. They are not unique to Nordic Larp. They might be accurate, but you could replace ‘Nordic Larp’ with many different international styles and the same would apply.

    Is Nordic Larp an AD?

    Instead we want to make the case for Nordic larp being an A.D., an audience descriptor, which is one of the bases in our Descriptor Model.

    An audience descriptor targets the intended audience and participants of a larp. In this case it can be used to:

    • Target a specific audience (People who like Nordic larp).
    • Tell prospective participants what kind of co-participants they can expect (People who go to other Nordic larps or are interested in them).
    • Give people an idea of the styles and preferences that the others at this larp will be familiar with or prefer, or what the organizers expect of them.
    • Place oneself in the Nordic tradition and discourse.

    In this, we use audience in the traditional meaning of “target audience” for marketing or promoting your larp, not in the theatrical meaning where the audience would be onlookers or passive enjoyers of the larp itself.

    A photo by Carl Nordblom from Club Inferno by Atropos. The Androids larps are in part about the feeling of eating noodles in the rain.
    A photo by Carl Nordblom from Club Inferno by Atropos. The Androids larps are in part about the feeling of eating noodles in the rain.

    So, What Else is Nordic Larp?

    ‘Nordic Larp’ can also be used to describe the style of larping. One thing to remember here is that multiple styles can have the same associations to them. So while ‘Nordic Larp’ does say something about the expected playstyle of the larp, it does not do so in ways that are unique and not shared by other traditions. Many styles of larping include workshops for example, as well as meta techniques, collaborative larping, and a play-to-lose/play-to-lift mentality. But the term ‘Nordic Larp’ does come with a lot of these cultural connotations, and can therefore be used to signal this, just like some other traditions might have similar connotations.

    ‘Nordic Larp’ can also be a Gateway. If people in your community have heard about Nordic Larp as a concept and want to try it, then you can attract a broad group of people to your larp simply by labeling it as Nordic. This could for example be what has happened when the concept has been exported to other countries and continents, including the USA.

    Our Personal Reasoning

    As designers for Atropos we have made a lot of larps and consider ourselves to be Nordic Larp designers. However, it has often been a conscious choice to include the term ‘Nordic Larp’ on some of our websites. Perhaps this could help illustrate what we mean.

    Love and Duty is a grimdark, realistic regency larp. It is played in Germany and includes the term ‘Nordic Larp’ to describe it. The reasoning behind this is that many regency larps are lighter in mood and center on Austenesque romance. Using the term ‘Nordic’ signals that there will be more of a focus on realism and consequences, rather than a rosy romance story. Since the larp is also played in Germany, we wanted to signal both that parts of the organizing team would be from the Nordics and that it was distinct from the German larp traditions. In this, we primarily use it as an audience descriptor and secondarily for its style associations.

    It was a deliberate wording in order to better set the expectations of the larp.

    The Forbidden History is a dark academia larp set at an elite college in 1986. It is about friendship, discovery, and the search for the sublime. The website does not use the term ‘Nordic Larp’ to describe it, even though we would absolutely consider it a Nordic larp. The reasoning behind this is that using the term ‘Nordic’ does not actually change the meaning of anything on the website. We already describe the playstyle, and what players can expect, and with our pictures, testimonials, and words we already set the tone. It was not a conscious design choice but rather an act of omission, illustrating how firmly entrenched it is in our own reading of it as a Nordic Larp. Even so, we see no reason to change it – using ‘Nordic Larp’ would not distinguish it further. Unlike Love & Duty, there is no established style for this kind of larp, nor is there a geographical association. Thus, we do not need to contrast it against anything, which is one of our primary uses for the term ‘Nordic Larp’.

    Summary

    ‘Nordic Larp’ as a term has not only survived since the debates of the early 10s but has also remained useful and frequently used. It remains useful for many outside, where the implicit assumption is that larps are not Nordic. There, it is used to both communicate what their larps are, and what they are not, often using ‘Nordic inspired’ rather than ‘Nordic’.

    In the Nordics, it is used to get away from genre assumptions (compare “A high fantasy larp” with “A Nordic fantasy larp” and the associations you get), it is used to signal a commitment to being part of the Nordic tradition, or to set you aside from the other local scenes (particularly when the larps are played in the local language).

    ‘Nordic Larp’ can be used as an audience descriptor, a style descriptor, and a way to tie your larp to cultural and geographical larp traditions or contrast with them.

    As such, ‘Nordic Larp’ has a function. It still signals something to the public. These things might not be unique, or they might have other equivalents within other traditions, but to participants it still says something. Many associations with ‘Nordic Larp’ can help to define it more concretely, but local communities might disagree on if those things are actually universally Nordic.

    Since different national styles tie into the Nordic term, there might be contradictions within it. For example, is Nordic larp highly transparent? The Finnish larp community might not agree with this. Is it light on mechanics? Well, not if you ask the people who include a lot of meta techniques. Does being from the Nordics make you a Nordic larp designer? Well, the people who organize fantasy larps, vampire larps, and rule-based scenarios would not necessarily feel at home in that definition.

    Perhaps the solution to using the term ‘Nordic Larp’ in regards to your own creation is to also define what that means for you, and to communicate that to your public. Otherwise you risk people having very different ideas of what it entails, which can cause unnecessary misunderstandings. But that doesn’t mean that the term doesn’t have any meaning, just that it might include contradictory meanings at the same time, just like many art and literary movements. Defining what ‘Nordic Larp’ means to you as a designer might also help create a broader definition in the future, as some scholar could use a birds-eye view and find the similarities and differences in people’s different takes on the term.

    Cover image: Photo by Carl Nordblom from Lord of Lies, by Atropos. Lord of Lies is a larp about trying and failing to be a satanic sex cult in 1950s America.

  • Rules, Trust, and Care: the Nordic Larper’s Risk Management Toolkit

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    Rules, Trust, and Care: the Nordic Larper’s Risk Management Toolkit

    By

    Sergio Losilla

    In 2018, I brought a friend to A Nice Evening with the Family (Sweden 2018). I was concerned, because he had very little experience with role-playing games, let alone with a very emotionally intense game. Despite my efforts to discourage him, he insisted that he wanted to join. The morning after the larp finished, he was a crying mess and it took him quite some effort to convince me that he would be fine and that I should not regret having brought him over. The next time we spoke, he told me that several friends had confronted him about this new hobby that left him shaken for several days. 

    It was his first larp. Since then, he has chosen to become a crying mess several times. It does not look like he will stop any time soon. What might look reckless from the outside is actually a well planned process: he knows his limits, but when he ventures to cross them, he is aware of the scars he may bring back, and prepares as well as he can to alleviate the consequences. This is the same process he goes through when he goes rock-climbing, an activity arguably more dangerous, which does not raise such concerns.

    As larp has evolved, pushing for new limits of intense play, we have developed a wealth of expertise to larp more safely. However, this is not limited to larp: as humankind’s ability to cause catastrophes has increased, so has our ability to avoid causing them. Pharmaceutical companies, nuclear power plants, financial institutions, airplane manufacturers all have had to change their ways of working (enforced by legislation, obviously) not to bring about tragedy. The most critical part of it is the object of this article: how to come to terms with the fact that risks cannot be eliminated, and how to manage them instead.

    In practice, there is nothing revolutionary about risk management. It is just a systematization of common sense. This article will hardly reveal anything new. However, I will hopefully provide a new perspective that will help to view larp safety in a new way, and shine light on how powerful the tools are that we already have at our disposal.

    Risk

    Attempting to find a definition of “safe” that everyone will agree on is futile. Any communication relying on the word “safe” will be misleadingly dangerous. Any financial adviser, surgeon, engineer, or martial arts or scuba diving instructor worth their salt will never claim that something is safe. Instead, they will try to clearly explain what the negative consequences might be, and let their client make an informed decision. Similarly, a larp organizer that promises that their larp is safe, implying that no harm will happen to any participant, is promising something that they have no control over.

    Risk, on the other hand, is a word most people can agree on. There may be disagreement if a certain risk is worth worrying over or not, but if somebody says “This rusty nail is a risk” or “There is a risk that we will run out of money”, everybody understands it the same way: something bad may happen.

    Risk means that harm, more or less severe, has a certain likelihood of happening.

    Harm

    Harm is something that we do not wish to happen. Harm is the ultimate negative consequence of a series of events. Falling off a cliff is not harm, but getting injured as a consequence of a fall is. Being yelled at is not harm, but becoming emotionally distressed is. Hazards are the direct sources of harm: fire, physical impact, toxic chemicals, and verbal abuse are examples of hazards.

    In larp, there are many things that we do not wish to happen: trauma (physical or mental) and property damage are the first that come to mind, but other things can be also regarded as harm: damage to reputation, loss of friendship, or even boredom. From a risk-management perspective, they are all the same, and you must decide what to focus on.

    In Nordic larp, the focus has been centred on psychological harm. Psychological harm is a slippery concept, and to my knowledge there is no conclusive source to refer to. Because of that, most of the examples I will use throughout this article will be about physical harm, which is much easier to agree on. Hopefully, it will become clear that the same techniques that can be used to manage one can be applied to manage the other.

    Severity

    Harm presents itself in varying degrees of severity. We think of a bruise as less serious than a broken rib, which is itself less serious than the loss of a limb. Often though things are not so clear-cut, and determining the severity of harm is context-dependent, subjective, and hence challenging.

    Generally speaking, severity should correlate to how longer-term prospects are negatively impacted. For example, in a medical context, severity is assigned depending on the consequences to patients, from a minor nuisance to permanent disability or death; broken bones are usually considered minor injuries, since the prognosis for total recovery is often excellent. Financial risk could be quantified not just in terms of how much money might be lost, but how likely it is to be able to recover from such loss; structural risks could be related to the ease of repairing a building; environmental risk measured by how likely it is that the previous situation can be recovered, etc.

    As many have experienced, larp can cause serious emotional harm. However, let us admit that larp is, by definition, a simulation, and hence the severity of emotional harm is going to be always lower that being exposed to the real situation: a larp about prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, as harrowing as it may be, will hardly ever be an experience as horrifying as being imprisoned at the actual camp. In a way, larp is an exercise in risk management, eliminating most sources of harm when mimicking extreme real-life situations.

    Likelihood

    Severity is not the only thing that matters about harm. A meteorite crashing on your larp location would certainly be catastrophic, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth considering. On the other hand, a mosquito is normally considered a minor source of harm, but it becomes a concern if it happens constantly: having a bunch of larpers going back home covered in bites after spending a weekend by an infested swamp is something that everyone would want to avoid.

    The likelihood of harm can be understood either in terms of how probable it is or how frequently it will happen. Such probabilities are difficult to estimate accurately. In any case, knowing that the probability of falling off the staircase at your larp is 1.3% is not very useful compared to “I would be surprised if no one trips here over the weekend”. As with severity, organizations normally simply assign terms in a scale, corresponding to qualitative likelihoods. One common example is to have five levels of likelihood: improbable (not expected to ever happen), remote (it would be very exceptional if it happens, but it is not impossible), occasional (rare, but given enough time, it will happen), probable (nobody will be surprised if it happens), and frequent (it would be surprising if it did not happen).

    A quick introduction to risk management

    Risk management, as daunting as it may sound, is a fairly straightforward process which consists of three steps: analysing the risks, deciding whether to accept the risks or not, and mitigating the risks. 

    Analysing risk

    The starting point to manage risks is to analyse them: finding as many things as possible that can go wrong and figuring out how severe and likely they are.

    Risk analysis requires honesty to be useful. It is hard to admit that we are putting people in danger, but dismissing a risk without careful consideration is a recipe for disaster. Airplanes rarely crash because of saboteurs, and drug dealers are not planning to hurt their customers when they cut their product with rat poison: behind all these cases, there is somebody who believes everything will be fine. Crooks are a piece of cake to catch and stop in time compared to reckless optimists who take everyone down with them.

    In any case, identifying risks is never easy. Reality always finds ways to surprise us, no matter how thorough our analysis was. So, how much effort should you spend analysing risks? The unsatisfactory answer is “as much as reasonably possible”. One way to evaluate your analysis is to think about how you would view it in the future if something goes wrong. Was it reasonable not to reach out for an expert? Was it reasonable that you did not check out your larp location in advance? Was it reasonable to conclude that no serious mental distress could be expected? All of this is context dependent. If you have doubts, maybe you can try to run your analysis by somebody else.

    Analysing the risks that lie beyond the limits may seem impossible, but it is not: we may not know how things may go wrong, but at least we know what wrong means. In other words, we know the severity, but not the likelihood. The safest approach is to assume that the likelihood is higher than you expect.

    Accepting risk (or not)

    After identifying and determining the severity and likelihood of a risk, a natural question arises: can we live with it? Some risks are obviously intolerable, and some are so trivial that it is even hard to consider them as risks. But quite often this is not clear at all.

    Deciding when we can accept a risk is a tricky question. Even after bad things have already happened, people often disagree on whether the risk was worth taking. Even the same person might have doubts about it. So, how to decide about something that may not even happen?

    The methods used in risk management (risk matrices being the primary example) help us very little here: they have been designed to leave a paper trail which can be used as evidence. They are too bureaucratic to use in larps, but most importantly they are not much of a moral reference we can adhere to. Sadly, nobody can give you any easy answers here.

    Whatever you consider as your criteria, they should fulfil two conditions. First, a criterion has to be systematic: if you find yourself adding exceptions one after the other, it is probably not a very good criterion. Secondly, it must be easy for anybody to understand the criteria and agree that they are reasonable.

    One criterion that you could use is the following: a risk is acceptable if, even when harm happens, we expect nobody to regret having been part of the larp.

    This implies that the organization did everything within reason to analyse and mitigate the risks, all participants understood and accepted those risks, and whatever harm happened was either predicted and handled as well as possible, and nobody can be blamed for having been reckless. In reality, this goal is not achievable: but since it is clear, and the absolute best one can hope for, it is a good target to aim at.

    If we decide that a given risk is acceptable, we can move on to the next one. But if we conclude that it is not, then it must be mitigated.

    Mitigating risk

    Mitigating a risk means reducing its likelihood, its severity, or both. Risk mitigation (also referred to as risk control) must be continued until we decide that the risk is acceptable. Let us review several strategies.

    If you encounter a risk which you have tried mitigating by all means possible, but it is still unacceptable, there is one way to completely remove the risk: just do not do what you were planning. If it looks like in your larp something horrible might happen which you have no control over, and you have no idea on how to fix the problem without it becoming a different larp, the best idea is to cancel the larp.

    The second approach is to change the design, that is, adding, removing, or modifying elements of your original plan. Moving to a different location, locking doors, removing game content, forcing off-game breaks, adding non-diegetic safety elements (such as mattresses), or changing your player selection process can all be used to mitigate risks. If you are lucky, your larp may be unaffected – possibly even improved! However, it is more likely that the changes will impact your larp, possibly even to the point that you feel it is not worth organizing.

    If there is nothing you can change, the next thing you can attempt is to affect how people will behave. You can instruct them not to enter an area under any circumstance, or remind them to stay hydrated under the scorching Tunisian sun. Since this relies on participants’ efforts and attention, you may want to go through these procedures during a workshop. Do not hesitate to make participation compulsory, if absence would lead to risks that you cannot accept. Of these behavioural mitigations (called administrative controls), the weakest form is what we can call, in general, labelling, which is any kind of passive, static visual information, such as signs, warning messages in manuals, pop-up windows, safety brochures, and actual labels found in packages, control panels, etc. If the only thing between a player and disaster is a paragraph somewhere on your website, or a danger sign that looks perfectly diegetic, get ready for disaster.

    The final option is protective equipment. Unfortunately, as effective as they may be for other purposes, helmets and hazmat suits will do very little to protect your participants from emotional harm.

    The Nordic larper’s risk management toolkit

    By now, you hopefully have a good idea about what risk management is. In this section, we will zone in into the peculiarities of emotionally intense larp.

    In emotionally intense larp, like in combat sports, enjoyment is inextricably linked to the potentially harmful things that players do to each other. Somewhat counterintuitively, risk management in both cases revolves around the same key concepts: the restrictions to what participants can do, the measures to ensure that participants will follow such restrictions, and the contingency plans to be used if something goes wrong. In other words, rules, trust, and care.

    Rules

    If you run or design larps, you should appreciate that you have a huge control over players: if you can convince them that they are capable of throwing fireballs by extending both index fingers, you can surely convince them that they cannot touch each other at all, thereby creating a world where the risk of hurting other people is non-existent. This is what rules are for.

    By “rules” I refer to all the constraints on the things that can possibly happen during a larp. From a risk management perspective, rules are control measures which either reduce the likelihood of risks – or remove the risks altogether – or replace hazards with different ones. Rules define what may or may not happen in- and off-game. Sometimes larp rules are introduced for other purposes than risk mitigation, and in some cases, rules may control risks at the same time as they contribute to a more interesting game experience.

    Perhaps the most representative rules of larp are those used to represent violence: I have never heard of any larp with WYSIWYG violence, that is where violence between characters is not governed by restrictions of some kind. Requiring padded weapons, using rules systems similar to table-top role-playing games, theatrical representation – where the outcomes are either pre-planned or improvised during play using some signalling mechanic, or even removing violence altogether from the game, are all different ways of reducing the severity or likelihood of harm, or even eliminating it altogether.

    Sex seems to be the other major perceived source of risk. In this case, the hazards are not so clear-cut as getting a broken nose, but it is generally accepted that sex requires a state of vulnerability which opens the gates for extremely severe psychological harm. Again, the forms in which sex appears in a game are restricted, from total avoidance to “dry-humping”, including more abstract mechanics, such as the Phallus technique used in Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway 2011), or Ars Amandi which, after its introduction in Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea), has been used in numerous larps of many different genres.

    In the daring type of play of many Nordic larps, characters are often exposed to many other sources of emotional harm, which are often a central part of the game: family abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, slavery, imprisonment, political repression, torture, manipulation, etc. Harm happens when these emotions exceed the level the player is willing to experience. This may lead to emotional distress, and even trauma. These, in their turn, may be worsened because of triggering past traumatic experiences.

    Interestingly, it is rare to find rules to handle emotional risks arising from something other than physical violence or sex in a specific manner: and these other elements are usually supposed to be represented realistically. For example, players playing prison guards are expected to shout at other players’ faces, and to represent mental torture scenes as they would think would happen in reality.

    Instead, emotional risks are managed generically by check-in, de-escalation, and game interruption mechanics. These mechanics are forms of inter-player communication to avoid harmful situations. Check-in mechanics are used to verify, during or after a risky scene, that players are doing fine. A popular one is using the OK hand sign to silently ask a co-player if they are OK when it is difficult to tell if a negative display of emotions (grief, anger) is a sign of an emotional distress that the player cannot handle. De-escalation and interruption techniques function in the opposite way, providing signals (like safe words or taps) to ask co-players to not escalate further or to lower the intensity of the scene, or to stop the game altogether.

    These techniques have become standard. If you decide not to include any of them in your larp, it is a good idea to explain your alternative risk management plan before players sign up.

    It is important that safety rules are, in the first place, clear. But it is equally important that you, as an organizer, as well as every other participant, get a clear picture that everyone has understood them.. I strongly recommended practising them explicitly in a workshop before runtime, particularly in case of subtle diegetic mechanics, which may be easily missed. The number of safety mechanics should be kept to a minimum to prevent confusion. Well-meaning players may spontaneously suggest adding their favourite mechanics to your game: it is preferable to firmly – but kindly – not allow this. An overabundance of mechanics may have the same effect as too many warning signs: none of them are meaningful in the end.

    Trust

    Trust is the degree of the certainty we have in our predictions that no harm will happen to us. Trust is critical in daring larp, because participants will compensate for lack of trust by acting as if risks were worse (either more probable or more harmful) than in reality, refraining from fully engaging with the content.

    When we trust someone, we know that they will not hurt us, neither by directly causing us harm, nor by neglecting doing their part in keeping us safe. When we do not trust someone, it is because we suspect they may fail at the moment of truth, or because they actively seek to hurt us. Trust has two components: a cognitive one and a primal one. Having enough information to make predictions is critical, but so is having the “gut feeling” that we are right. These two aspects need to be considered all the time.

    The first step is building trust. In other words, convincing every participant that nobody will hurt them. Easier said than done.

    For starters, participants must be on the same page about the possible risks. Make sure that you provide enough information during the sign-up process so that everyone has an understanding of risks as similar to yours as possible.

    Another important aspect is the player selection process. A player may wish not to play with another player, for a variety of reasons. It is reasonable to publish a list of players and offer a channel for players to give feedback. Flagging, which consists of assigning a colour to other players to indicate the level of trust (from “will not share scenes” to “will not attend same larp”), is a popular approach. It may put you in the difficult position of leaving people out. In such a case, remember that your goal is to ensure a less risky game, and not to act as a moral judge. If you believe that your larp may present such risks that it requires that you completely trust all the players – trust that they can care for themselves and others – then you may need to do something more drastic, such as hand-pick your players or have an invite-only run.

    Once your players have arrived at the larp location, the most effective way to create trust is pre-game workshops. On the cognitive side, you should cover all your rules and mechanics thoroughly, and rehearse them as necessary, until players are convinced that everybody can play their part. Safety-critical workshops should be compulsory, not just opt-in. A bit like how beginners are required to show that they can do an 8-figure knot before they are allowed to start top-rope climbing. Finally, do not rush through safety workshops: besides failing to communicate critical information, players may get the impression that you do not care enough about safety, and that you included the safety workshop as a nuisance that must be there.

    On the primal side, you need to tickle the brains of participants to convince them that they are of the same tribe. Things like physical contact, or locking eyes and smiling, may help. Baphomet (Denmark 2017) used a simple and powerful technique where participants hug each other randomly in silence for a very long time. This had a profound effect in creating a trusting atmosphere. These exercises are not a replacement for the safety rehearsals discussed above, and can be counterproductive if they create a sense of false security.

    When someone causes us harm, either directly or indirectly, we immediately lose trust, to a larger or smaller degree: our predictions that they would not hurt us failed, which means that they may hurt us again. Our brain will then activate the alarm and deploy its defences. Suddenly we will dislike, fear, or lose respect for those people. This defence mechanism is quite clever: even if our feelings for those people are unfair (for example, they tried to protect us and failed), our brain will override our reasoning, tricking us into being convinced we are absolutely right, pushing us to avoid that person.

    Restoring trust is not easy. At a cognitive level, we need to know that the other person is sensitive to our pain – that’s the purpose of a (real) apology —, and that we can accept that something bad happened exceptionally, that is, that either the other person didn’t know something important or simply made a mistake, or that there was actually a very good reason we did not know about. The primal level also needs to be readjusted to lift the defences after they are not needed. For example, a hug or a smile can have a magical effect after a fight. However, be careful when using this approach: I can tell from my own experience that a forced hug from a perceived aggressor has the opposite effect, and can cause even more harm. In case of doubt, do not push it and simply try to figure out a way for the larp to continue with everyone feeling safe. This, in extreme cases, may require removing players from the game.

    Care

    Care is a particularly versatile tool, because it can reduce the severity of harm which we had not even predicted could happen. In our quest for pushing the limits of daring larp, it is very valuable to deploy a solid care infrastructure, in the same way that a campaign hospital will help dealing with all kinds of physical harm, without needing to predict its exact nature. Making participants part of a care infrastructure is similar to demanding that everybody must take first-aid training before joining an expedition.

    Similar to trust, it is possible to enforce care using rules. Off-game rooms and dedicated staff to support players are very common; although it may not look like such, giving players the option to walk out of the game into guaranteed support is just a larp rule. In many larps, each character has a connection with whom they have a positive relationship. This connection can be used to seek in-game support, which translates into support for the player. This could be further exploited by means of explicit rules, for example adding a hand sign directed at the support connection which forces them to go play a blackbox scene reminiscing of happier times. A larp designed around one-on-one abusive scenes could impose that after every such scene the players must go off-game together to provide mandatory after-care.

    Care rules could take many forms: the key is that larp designers should not be afraid to impose such seemingly awkward game elements, because the fact is that this can be much more effective than leaving care to the skill and initiative of the participants.

    Conclusion

    Nobody – including, first of all, me – expects that larp organizations will start conducting formal risk review meetings, performing external audits, filling risk matrices, and writing down risk mitigation plans.

    Let’s be daring! But daring does not mean reckless. Let’s learn from the lessons of the past and, for those disasters yet to come, let them be the kind that, despite the pain they cause, leave us with the feeling that it was worth trying.

          Take home messages:

    • Be brave! At least as much as you want to.
    • Be honest. Do not fool participants, but most of all do not fool yourself.
    • Be open. Your level of risk is not the same as most people’s. You do not want to drag anyone into something they will regret.
    • Be kind. If other people fail, and they honestly tried their very best to avoid disaster, be thankful that they discovered for all of us where the hard limits are.
    • Be creative. Pushing the limits will demand of you to come up with new techniques to go where no larper has gone before, and come back in one piece. Hopefully, you know now that you have more tools at your disposal than you thought before.

     

    Bibliography

    Anneli Friedner. 2019. “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps“. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/10/07/the-brave-space-some-thoughts-on-safety-in-larps/ , ref. Dec 12th, 2023.

    Ludography

    Anna Westerling & Anders Hultman. 2018. A Nice Evening With the Family. Sweden. (Originally En stilla middag med familjen (2007): Sweden. Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman & al.)

    Eliot Wieslander & Katarina Björk. 2003. Mellan himmel och hav. Sweden.

    Linda Udby & Bjarke Pedersen. 2016. Baphomet. Denmark. 

    Tor Kjetil Edland & Hanne Grasmo. 2011. Just a Little Lovin’. Norway.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Losilla, Sergio. 2024. “Rules, Trust, and Care: the Nordic Larper’s Risk Management Toolkit.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Eamon up North on Pexels.com. Photo has been cropped.

  • Remember That Time… We Tried to Film a Larp

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    Remember That Time… We Tried to Film a Larp

    By

    Sophia Seymour

    Is it possible to capture the magic of larp on film? This was the question filmmaker Sophia Seymour and larp creator Martine Svanevik decided to explore in the spring of 2023. 

    As we write, we are three months into the edit, and the workings of a finished film is on the horizon. This article is part confessional, part conversation, and part inspiration for those of you who want to join us in trying to document and create something more permanent when we play. 

    We are the Remember that Time players and film crew, and we tried to create something new. 

    In 2019, Martine designed the larp Remember that Time. It’s a bittersweet piece about a group of friends that have stayed together through good times and bad. The friends meet up to reminisce after the death of one of the key members of their group, and the experience lends itself to feelings of reminiscing, grief, and catharsis. 

    Both Martine and Sophia felt that the larp had film potential. It was  small and self-contained: and it dealt delicately with a tender yet important issue of grief, which lent itself to exploring the breadth and width of emotional bleed on film. 

    Setting up the descreete cameras
    Readying the set for filming. Photo by Olivia Song.

    To film a larp – you have to play it

    Remember that Time was written as a black box larp and it only takes three hours. It can be played without costumes and has very few props. Originally, Martine wanted to lean into this black box nature of the larp, to shoot it on an empty stage with only a table. But after playing, Sophia and Edward, the cinematographer, had a different idea.

    Edward Hamilton Stubber (Cinematographer): “After going out to Oslo to meet and play Remember that Time with Sophia, I was super inspired by the idea of filming a larp to see how far we could push the idea that something doesn’t need to be real to be felt.This is obviously true when we watch films as they are by their very nature dramatisations of fiction, yet we still feel something. But larp seems to offer a more visceral and personal experience of a given story, as instead of watching the story passively, you are part of it. I thought that if we could showcase the journey that participants go through in a larp, in a way that blurred lines with fiction filmmaking, then we might offer a reflection on why it is that we want to experience these emotions, in films and beyond.

    Sophia: “After playing the game in Oslo and seeking counsel with some very helpful veteran larpers, we knew that comfort and safety were key to the success of the project. We knew we only had one chance to film the larp (larpers are not professional actors and there are no retakes) and so creating a safe environment for the larpers was key. This started well before we turned on the cameras and fed into every decision from where to film, how to film and what the eventual story would be. We had to treat the filming very carefully and had two somewhat contradictory main goals: to capture all the micro interactions and dynamics unfolding in the larp, and to make the larpers feel as comfortable and as little under observation as possible.”

    Edward (Cinematographer): “The challenge for us was that we were going to be trying to create an atmosphere in front of the camera that didn’t disturb the authenticity of the larp. In conventional filmmaking, there is often a menagerie of different pieces of equipment and crew just outside of the frame lines, that are put in place to create a look and feeling that elevates the emotion of a given scene. But we knew that we couldn’t do this in the larp. We had to give all five participants the freedom to move around and explore the space without restriction, whilst also maintaining a look with lighting and camera movement that felt cinematic. This meant I had to put a lot of thought into where I would be placing cameras and lights, much more than I would have done in conventional film. It was a good challenge and I think it bore something unique.

    Moreover, we decided to invite both crew and contributors to stay for the whole weekend in a large country house in the South of England to create a unique atmosphere of trust and collaboration. We played group bonding games and made sitting down for meals together a priority. By the end of the weekend we all felt like we had gone through an experience together, with each member of the crew and cast feeling like they were a part of a collaboration. This all contributed to the authenticity of the footage and veracity of the emotions on screen.” 

    Players and crew socializing outside of filming.
    Players and crew socializing outside of filming. Photo by Olivia Song.

    Martine (larp designer and facilitator): “Unlike fiction film, the larp could only be shot in one take. How did you manage to capture all the dynamics while also filming so that the players didn’t feel the presence of the crew and kit?”

    Edward: “We knew that we needed different camera angles in the edit to allow us to fit the three-hour game into a short film length. So as not to disturb the atmosphere of the game, we chose a room that had two adjoining rooms either side of it, which meant that I could light the game room and then have operators in total darkness operating cameras on sliders in the two other rooms, hunting for close-ups as the game developed. We also had three stationary cameras inside the room that were unmanned, which we used as broader catchall angles to use as a back-up in the edit.

    This constellation kept the operators out of the eyelines of the participants, and I made sure to pump the main room with light so that once their eyes had compensated, the rooms either side appeared entirely dark. Myself and another colleague operated the cameras and it was quite thrilling – it felt like a mixture between live TV and fiction.”

    Still from the documentary.
    Anna and Fredrik larping in front of the cameras. Still from the documentary.

    To translate the story – you have to chop it up 

    Sophia (Film director): “Larp has sometimes been portrayed in a rather trite or negative light – were you ever nervous that the same might happen with this film?”

    Martine: “Not after I met you. I thought the pitch for what you wanted to accomplish – to explore why we chase emotions when we experience art – was beautiful and interesting, and that you were approaching it in just the right way, so I wasn’t worried you would make the larpers look bad. What did worry me, however, was how moviemaking is about telling one story, whereas this larp – and most good larps, in my opinion – are about making every story equally important. 

    Since it’s difficult for audiences to equally care about everyone in a piece of fiction, I wondered how you would choose to frame what went on in the larp. Who would become the villain of the piece? Whose story would be told and whose would be lost? The larp lasts for three hours, and we were making a twenty-minute documentary. A lot of things would end up on the cutting-room floor, so what story would remain? 

    Although I never worried that you would approach it as a reality TV producer would, I was aware that the cutting, framing, and focus of the piece would change the story. “

    Sophia: “I was also really concerned about where the editing process would take us. You often don’t know what is going to materialise in the cutting room and how to make sense of more than 20 hours of footage. My aim was to explore the impulse in Nordic larping to seek out emotional bleed through play. I knew there would be people who were unfamiliar with larp who might find it odd to play make-believe grief, but I was determined to make something that underlined how normal it is to seek out environments and situations that allow for feeling – be it at the theatre, in the cinema, or playing a larp.

    To do this, I knew I did not want to sensationalise the game. It was about following the players’ emotional journey as faithfully as possible, rather than projecting my own version of events onto the film.”

    Martine: “Do you think the documentary tells the story of the larp in a true way? What happened in the editing room? How do you feel about editing and changing the story to make it fit into a 20-minute documentary and tell a story that others can understand?”

    Mariana Moraes (editor): “The editing of this documentary was the most difficult I’ve ever experienced, because in the footage the larp looks like bad acting. In movies, people rarely talk over each other and no-one stumbles looking for their next line. In this piece, the conversations were closer to the way real people speak, but that made them seem less truthful on camera. 

    Since the goal was to get the viewer to empathise with the emotional journey of the players inside the fiction, while also showing them that this was a game the players played, we had to find the balance between it feeling real (in a fictionalised way) and not real (since it is a game), without throwing off the audience. We struggled in early versions of the film with the ‘real’ feelings of grief that came off as fake or badly acted. So, in order to make those feelings feel as real as they were for the players in the game, we ended up drawing on the tools of fiction and cutting together the most ‘real’ moments. 

    It’s common to find the story of a documentary in the editing room, but in this case we had to experiment a lot more to find the film. The film plays with the audience’s perception: we had to experiment a lot with the drops of information we would release or withhold about what was happening. We wanted the audience to think in the beginning that the emotions they were watching were real, and by the end understand that emotions were real but not triggered by real events. 

    Still from the documentary.
    Still from the documentary.

    The balance between over-telling and under-telling was our main challenge. At one point we had a conventional cut where we catered to an audience that had no understanding of larp. The focus in this cut became the players themselves – why do they play, how do they play, and what do they get out of it. This cut was an interesting showcase of why someone might larp, but it failed to take the audience on an emotional journey with the players. 

    Therefore, we ended up going with a version that required more active participation from the audience to fill in the blanks in order to understand the story. This lets us show more of the larp and join in with the players’ journey. We hope that the audience will still understand what is going on, even if they know less about what larp is and what exactly is happening. 

    Our hope is that we have created a comment on the power of storytelling and the way filmmaking and larping trigger emotions – be they real or not. It’s interesting because this version also allows the audience to project their own emotions and stories onto the film.”

    Martine: “How did you approach the editing as a director?”

    Sophia: “How to capture the essence of something and not get too bogged down in the minutiae of details and story threads became a huge question. I had to stay true to my vision that I wanted the audience to experience the larp rather than look at it. This was my compass. 

    We eventually landed on the idea that Martine would guide both players and audience through the game through a voiceover that takes us through the film. We realised that the audience needed to feel close to the players by relating to them as a group of old friends on a broader level, instead of following intricate story lines. We chose to include more abstract conversations – laughter, a little quip or a joke, a glance or a touch, which lent itself to feeling more immersive. We then intercut the larp with interviews with the players telling us how they were feeling during the larp, allowing the audience to follow the players’ emotional bleed.”

    Martine: “One of the things I loved most about this process was that I wasn’t just running the larp, I was also invited to give feedback on the different cuts of the film and to join in the decision-making of the eventual story we were telling across the different mediums. This made me a more active part of the filmmaking process than I initially thought I would be, and I believe it is a strength of the final piece to have the larp designer’s input on the editing. I tried to always have the vision of the larp in mind when I looked at the footage, and tried to be the advocate of the larp inside the film.

    We had to make hard choices about losing interesting stories in order to fit the documentary into 20 minutes. But at the same time, it was a good exercise in focusing on the essentials to build the narrative. For example, all the contributors had recent grief experiences in their real lives that influenced their bleed in the game, and those added a lot of nuance to the story. There wasn’t space to include all of them, however, and including one and leaving out the others felt like it shifted the focus of the story too much to what was happening with one of the players outside the larp. 

    The hardest for me was to come to terms with the fact that there wasn’t space for everyone’s emotional arc. Even though there were a lot of stories in the larp, the film did have to focus on one of them to keep the audience invested. However, we tried to balance it by showing more of the interviews and conversations happening during play, and I believe that we got the balance right, eventually.  Nevertheless, if there’s ever a 90-minute version of this documentary, the story will be a lot more nuanced and many-faceted, and that is going to be even more beautiful.”

    A larper prepping for play.
    One of the larpers, Nadja, prepping for play. Still from the documentary.

    Is it possible to play authentically while being on camera? 

    We knew the presence of the cameras and crew would be the main obstacle for us. We kept coming back to the same questions – would they make the players play differently? More stiff and awkward? Would they feel the need to perform in a different way than they normally would? Would the crew as an audience change the feel of the piece? 

    This is what our players said.

    Frederik Hatlestrand (player): “It was a little bit surreal at first, but when I started playing, I kind of ignored the cameras because I’m used to playing in spaces where you have to ignore stuff. I’m just used to ignoring things that aren’t in there, so surprisingly I had some moments where I saw a camera and I was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s a camera. Okay, I’m looking another way now.” “

    Anna Emilie Groth (player): “To be honest, I actually forgot pretty quickly (about the filming) because you did such a great job with hiding the cameras in the dark. I think there were only a few moments where I thought about it being a film set. It felt just like a black box larp. However, the experience that I had in the larp will not be what’s on the film, because it will never show the whole thing. But I’m really curious to see what the camera caught. I want to see what you can see from the outside. I’m not an actor, so I’m not used to seeing myself on film.”

    Simon Brind (player): “I was super nervous about it for a number of reasons.  The biggest reason was as I’ve said this before, that we’re not actors, we’re not used to performing. We’re certainly not used to cameras but incredibly I didn’t see them. It was very strange because when we went onto the set, there was a boom at head height which meant I had to be careful where I stood up, and there were cameras hidden by the windows and at the doors. But once the larp started they pretty much ceased to exist. I don’t think the filming affected what I was doing in the end, which makes me excited to see the end result.”

    Erik Winther Paisley (player): “Maybe larp is not impossible to film. I don’t know yet. I have not seen it yet. The impossibility for me, I think, is whether our private states will actually come through enough, whether those little glances and moments that mean something for us will show. The example I give you is karaoke: you could document karaoke, but I think the worst possible way you could do that would be just to release an album of people’s karaoke singing.”

    Larp creator Martine Svanevik (left) and filmmaker Sophia Seymour (right) on set. Photo by Olivia Song.
    Larp creator Martine Svanevik (left) and filmmaker Sophia Seymour (right) on set. Photo by Olivia Song.

    Can we capture the magic?

    Martine: “Do you think we captured the magic of larp on camera?”

    Sophia: “I hope so! We wanted the film to connect with both larpers and audiences who knew nothing about larp, and so have trod a fine line between throwing the audience into the deep end of the game and providing clues as to what this is all about. My secret is not in the filming of it – although Edward did a fantastic technical job in hiding the crew from the larp space – but the emphasis I placed on creating the right environment. I wanted to film in the perfect location where everyone could stay together to feel comfortable and safe. 

    Larp can be such a personal and vulnerable process that one of my priorities was to dedicate a large proportion of our budget on lodging and catering, to create a homely environment where crew and contributors could be together, sit around chatting, and get to know each other before filming. I firmly believe that these behind-the-scenes comforts meant that when we did begin filming there was a lot of trust between everyone involved. This in turn meant less nerves, less performance anxiety, and much more fun. I had the sense that we were all collaborating for a collective vision of the film, which I hope has translated on screen.”

    Sophia (film director): “By the end, did you feel that we had captured the larp? What were your hopes and concerns?”

    Martine: “I think the way you filmed the larp gave us a very good position to start from, and that it would be possible to tell many stories from the footage – all of them true even if none of them were real. We had to create an emotional story that the audience connected to and related to, while explaining what larp is to those that have never heard of it. 

    I got to watch every second of the larp on camera as it was played, and I know how beautiful the whole piece was, and there were of course stories that got lost in the translation from larp to film. However, the film shows the artform in a cinematic way, despite having to focus on only one or two character threads. 

    There are many possible stories you could have made from the footage, but I think you made the right editing choices in the end to create a cohesive whole. I am very happy that we stayed true to the vision of wanting to let the audience experience the larp and the emotional journey, rather than explain via the more traditional cut simply what larp is. Here, I think we might have captured something that speaks to how we all seek out and need to feel – perhaps even more than we tend to allow ourselves in everyday life.”

    Sophia: “Where do you see this heading in the future?”

    Martine: “I am super keen to try more transmedia stuff now, to try VR in game, to try filming parts of an experience and show it to players in different areas to see how they react, to have in-game confession booths active during play, etc. I think there are possibilities here to create something that transcends art forms. Nadja, one of our players, put it so well.”

    Nadja Lipsyc (player): “I think it’s impossible to film what it is to larp. Because larpers are not actors. It might look just like bad acting and bad dialogue and cringe interactions on screen while the interaction in the larp feels entirely different. However, I think having larp as a layer in an artistic project is very interesting and very promising.”

    Martine: “Would you do it again?”

    Sophia (Film director): “Definitely! We learnt so much, the next time will be even better! Who’s up for it?”

    The documentary Remember that Time will be released in February 2024. 

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Seymour, Sophia & Martine Svanevik. 2024. “Remember That Time… We Tried to Film a 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.

    Cover photo: Backstage while filming the documentary. Photo by Olivia Song. Photo has been cropped.

  • Against Design

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    Against Design

    By

    Andrea Nordwall

    Larp in general, and Nordic style larp in particular, is often claimed to be an artistic practice, a frontier of participatory arts. However, discourse on larp by larp organizers, larp participants and game studies researchers has, in recent years, started to frame larp making primarily as a design practice. By that logic larps are now designed by larp designers using larp-specific participatory interaction design methods. Discussions on these design methods have become the mainstay of larp conferences such as Knutpunkt/Solmukohta. Let’s discuss what this hegemony of design thinking does to our practice.

    The overall project of design thinking is constructive. Design has lowered the thresholds of participation as well as enabled and structured larp organizing. In the best case, larp designers evaluate best practices and share methods. Although every step in this direction seems like a small success of self-understanding and self-improvement, we argue that the long-term consequences do not necessarily benefit larp as a culture nor as an artistic form. The current hegemony of larp as design does the groundwork for an ongoing reification and commodification of larp. Design transforms larp participants into larp consumers.

    New larp projects are now pitched to participants with methods catering to various larp audiences (or rather intended target groups). Post-mortems of past projects serve the function of user experience (UX) evaluation examples to optimize the design of future projects. The design methods are reevaluated based on past successes in relation to informally segmented target groups (such as fantasy-chillout, dystopian-play-to-lose, or post-apocalypse-over-the-top larp consumers), combining setting with interaction style to form specific and recurring audiences. These target groups can then be matched to tried and tested larp design methods to successfully form an iterative and recursive feed-forward UX loop. In practice, this leads to repeating ideas and design elements that have proven to be successful, at the expense of new innovation.

    In their marketing, larps can “attach” themselves to commercially successful and well-known IPs and franchises to pitch projects with similar names, using brand recognition to drive participance, forming a secondary volunteer-run streaming service experience. The success of this strategy indicates an environment where even the overall set and setting for a larp is purposefully used as a design method to drive interest in and communicate intended participation. Adopting commercially successful mass media culture is the optimal strategy for producing predictable participance.

    There was a time when mass media enviously glanced at the rich culture and engagement surrounding Nordic larp. By now, the roles are reversed. When larp designers take turns riding on various commercial successes in mass media, larp becomes a cecum of Hollywood film and streaming culture. Such an approach would be highly unusual in artistic fields, where originality merits artistic value.

    We argue that larp as a form is being restricted by its own success as a participatory design practice and that innovation in larp is over (other than sporadic and local). We see several reasons why larp as design practice hampers larp innovation.

    Firstly, design thinking avoids conflict at all costs to deliver a product. Any kind of conflict or disagreement is considered a failed interaction design. But culture can be nurtured by conflict, and we would argue that Nordic larp developed through cultural and subcultural clashes, not through consensus-based “everything is okay as long as you know what you want” design thinking. Bring back dialectics; it’s not smooth, but it’s also not harmful.

    We are concerned that larp as a field at this point is emulating some of the worst aspects of experience design commodity culture: start-up ambitions among organizers (including burn-out syndrome) and reification of participants’ social interactions: social interaction becomes a “product” that is delivered by the larp through strategic employment of larp design methods.

    The idea of clarity of purpose that design brings makes larp a “readerly” practice – a practice where interpretation (and interaction) is “prepared” for the participant, rather than a “writerly” or artistic-oriented practice, open for the plurality of interpretation (and potential conflict). Clarity of interpretation is optimal for designing and delivering predictable and serviceable interaction for a defined target group. This results in predictable and shallow cultural practices and artifacts.

    Remember, there are many ways to make larps. Norwegians use the word lage, a verb that could be utilized for larp making as well as for cooking a soup. Larps can be written, created, organized, dreamt up, or they can be born from artistic practice. We want to encourage a plurality of ways of creating larp.

    Think about larp as a culture. It has been said that design is “the opposite of tradition.” Then maybe it’s time to value some of our subcultural traditions, the mutual knowledge of gathering and making stories come alive through our community. Here, we have to understand the limits of design thinking. For example, one of the key features of Nordic larp is trust. We have developed trust in our subculture by nurturing it for many years and events, to the point where we can say trust is part of our tradition. This makes some scenarios possible that would otherwise not be possible. However, you can not replace the tradition of trust by design. The harder you try, the further you fall when something goes wrong.

    We argue that larp should not be reduced to a streamlined, well-designed experience product, but rather nurture an aesthetic field, an artistic form in dialogue with the participants as well as the culture at large. The reason larp fails to claim a culturally relevant position is because the primary focus on design optimization reduces our capacity to form an aesthetic or artistic field in dialogue with the wider culture. As an artistic form, larp makers should look for autonomy and integrity in our practice.

    Stop using experience product delivery as the primary factor when evaluating larp projects. Instead, focus on how it innovates the form and how it can reshape culture by doing so. The latter is not necessarily realized through “good design”, but through good art.

    Know that there is a difference between feedback and critique. We know how to give and get the former, not the latter. When engaging in society, larp will become criticized for how it, as a participatory form, approaches important issues. Be ready for, welcome, and enable criticism, not just on how well participatory methods worked out or whether the experience delivered quality time, but on how the form of larp itself can interpret and address cultural issues relevant to society in a wider context. Instead of targeting cultural and societal matters, larp has become a recursive product design improvement loop that is increasingly optimized for a decreasingly creative field.

    If we consider larp-making as an artistic creation process, it does not necessarily involve problem-solving or a user-centered approach. Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Nordwall, Andrea, and Gabriel Widing. 2024. “Against Design.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Image by Andrea Nordwall.

  • Did We Wake?

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    Did We Wake?

    By

    Eirik Fatland

    I have not yet met the woman who is a crab.

    drrr. drrr. drrr.

    Awakening to a smartphone, dumbly vibrating.

    Below me, in that murky swamp from which I (the one who thinks) am emerging, there are silhouettes of moments, echoes of emotion, the kind of shadows that colours cast. A boat? A canoe? A sailing ship? Yes. But. A dream.

    I fumble, sluggishly desperate, for the pad and pencil that I know to be there, somewhere, on the nightstand.
    The weird thing about dreams is that they live only in the brain’s short-term memory, which expires after roughly 10 minutes. If you don’t capture them, they’re gone. Sailing down the creek beneath the schoolway concrete bridge. My hand finds the pad but loses the pencil, nervous system still booting up. The pencil dinks onto the floor. Rolls. Someone is with me on the boat, rowing. Someone significant. I search for the pencil with my hands under the bed, find it, grab it, bring it to the pad.

    The organisers of the larp Before We Wake (Denmark 2015) will not give us pre-written characters of any kind. We know only that the larp will be “surreal”, that it will be played on a black box stage, and that there will be workshops in advance. The only thing we can do to prepare ourselves as players, is to record our dreams. The woman who is a crab lunges for me, strange reflections in her obsidian claw… no. Not yet! With the pencil finally in a hand that does not shake, I write:

    • The creek by the school at Greverud, except it is a river.
    • We are paddling down it.
    • Large mountains on either side, wilderness. Boulders amongst the trees.
    • I am exploring together with …

    The other person on the boat is someone I knew in childhood. But who? Already, the dream is … sinking … The creek under the concrete bridge is, in reality, barely wide enough for a toy boat. I crossed it every day, on my way to school. It leads to the swampy area by the garden-supply store. Yet in the dream, me and… Christian, my closest friend? No. And suddenly, I know: Me and Asgeir. My brother, 3 years my junior.((I have a younger brother in reality as well as in dreams, but his name is not Asgeir. Apart from that, the stories I have shared in this article are as true as memory permits.))

    • I am exploring together with Asgeir.

    Where are we heading? Did we arrive there? Echoes fade. Silhouettes soften. Shadows disintegrate. An impression of calm ocean? strings of light beneath the beaches? the distant sound of storm-waves breaking towards boulders (not yet!) The harder I attempt to grab the memories, the more thoroughly they slip away.

    I let the pen drop.

    Irrevocably, the dream has gone.

    Untangling

    Is it possible to understand a larp without distance?

    Larps are complex, intense affairs. A great tangle of new and old relationships, creativity, creation, emotional affect and intellectual growth co-occurring. A community comes into existence for a brief while to create something trivial, entertaining, that can also, possibly, be moving and meaningful. Playing a larp is immediate and intense. Understanding a larp, however, requires the unravelling of all those threads. Which you can only do, properly, if you played it yourself, if you yourself became a thread to untangle, thereby losing all claims to objectivity.

    Untangling takes time. The more ambitious the larp, the more complex its tangle of experiences, the more time will be required.

    So I find myself, in 2023, reflecting on Before We Wake, a larp played in 2015, a larp which refused to let go, which insisted on being untangled, not just for the mystery it left behind (more on that later), but for how it managed to be, simultaneously, a textbook example of “live roleplaying”, and utterly unlike any other larp ever played.

    This is what it looked like

    Københavns musikteater.

    A room. Industrial-scale. Many metres from floor to ceiling, many more metres between the walls. All painted black. Large, empty, regions of black floor. But also clusters of props of unclear function and meaning – pipes interwoven with threads, stairs to nowhere, platforms that are not stages. Above and to the sides: stage lights, loudspeakers, projectors.

    Before We Wake 2015. Photo: Mathias Kromman Rode
    Before We Wake 2015. Photo: Mathias Kromman Rode

    It smelled of chalk. Of old house, summer sweat, and smoke machine.

    There was always sound. Sometimes a discrete melodious ambient, sometimes sirens wailing and wars being fought.

    Things changed. Gradually. Organisers moved things around, weaving together pieces of scenography with white thread. The room’s state at larp’s end was entirely different from its state at the beginning.

    And (of course) there were people. Hippie-like, cult-member-like, in similar flowing white clothes, perfect canvases for the stage lights or video projectors.

    Imagine being there. Seeing them. Seeing us: we behave in ways that people do not usually behave, even at larps. One sits, head in hands, crying, while the person next to them giggles and blows soap bubbles. Three people, back to back, arms locked together, make the same strange humming repetitive noise. Someone in the corner is plausibly pretending to vomit. A dancer impersonates a bird. Each person, or group of people, entirely in their own social worlds, pretending that the others are not there. Except when they want them to be.

    There is a tremendous freedom in this room – the freedom to not care that your tears might ruin the mood, that your childish giggles might lead people to think worse of you. An alibi even more powerful than that usually granted by larp. But an alibi for strangeness, and vulnerability.

    Here is one of the things that happened

    As I walk through the forest, lost, I find the woman. Bound between two dead trees.

    Excuse me! Can you help me?

    Sure! I respond, What seems to be the problem?

    Well, as you can see, I am a crab.

    And so she is. Her enormous claws are bound with rubber bands, but I still take a step back, out of fear.

    Please, she begs, please, please don’t go away. I won’t hurt you. I promise! This is very new to me. I’ve never been a crab before. I just need a little bit of help.

    OK, I say, cautiously, stepping forward.

    Please untie me!

    OK, I say, again, cautiously – very cautiously, removing the rubber band from her left claw.

    The claw clacks loudly, centimetres from my neck. I take three steps back. She is attacking me, with her free claw. But the other claw is still bound to the tree.

    Sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt you! She pleads, as her claw continues to grab for me. Please untie me!

    Absolutely not! You’re attacking me!

    I’ll stop. I promise! This is just very new to me.

    And as tears flow from her crab-eyes, as she pleads for someone to please help, as her free claw stabs at me again, I walk away.

    The dreamer, imagining

    At the workshop before the larp, we trained to perform the three different roles available to us in play: the dreamer, the envoy, and the weaver. We could alternate between these roles as we wished. At the second run of the larp, the run I attended, the Envoy (a kind of director-of-dreams) did not see much use. The two other roles, however, did. The Woman Who Was a Crab was a player in the dreamer role. So, in that scene, was I.

    The dreamer was a person, dreaming. But which person? Was I to pretend I was Eirik, dreaming, or merely a human who dreams? This was left ambiguous. We were instructed to use the dreams from our own diaries as source material, but also permitted to improvise, and encouraged to join in the dreams of others. Other players would not necessarily know whether we were making stuff up on the fly, or revealing our most profound hopes and anxieties.

    At some point during the second act, with no particular thing to do, I notice a large empty space on the floor. In my mind I make it the river under the schoolway bridge, the river that leads past the garden-supply store and towards unknown shores. I sit down / I climb into the canoe on the floor and start paddling. Imagining the oar. Imagining the presence of Asgeir, my brother.

    Except. Another player, also in the dreamer role, sits down next to me, and begins paddling with me. Was he simply reacting to my play, joining in to reinforce it, or did my co-player have a boat-dream of his own? Asgeir is here, now, next to me, paddling, downriver, through the rapids, into wilderness, between ancient boulders.

    Who was I in his dream – stranger, colleague, father, wife? I do not know, and it did not matter. While we pretended that our characters coexisted in the same reality, the same fictive world or diegesis in larp theoryspeak, we likely had different mental and emotional images of that reality.

    This is true of all roleplaying. Players of Dungeons & Dragons form different mental images of the orcs and dragons their characters fight, different ideas of what it means to fight them. The role of Dungeon Master and the copious rules of the game help establish shared truths about the diegesis when they are needed, but the remaining truths are left to the individual interpretations and imaginations of players. This is also true of larp, even of larps that aspire to the 360° illusion (where everything that you see, touch, smell, hear, feel is entirely in-game; see Koljonen 2007), as that illusion is never perfect. Players must still imagine that their bodies are the bodies of characters, that the aeroplane is not there, and that the characters have memories from lives that the players have not lived. And where we must imagine, we will imagine differently. All diegeses, to paraphrase Markus Montola (2003), are subjective. Imagining is a core player skill. Without it roleplaying is not possible.

    Before We Wake, brilliantly, made a virtue of that which to most larps is a necessary evil. Each player experienced their own dream, pursued their own dream-goals, using their imaginations to paint entirely different realities onto the same scaffolding of scenography and player actions. Thereby the larp allowed us 25 players to engage in hundreds of mini-larps, overlapping with each other in space and time like some surreal four-dimensional Venn diagram. You did not need to understand this to play the larp. Playing, itself, was enough.

    The weaver

    The third role available to us players, the weaver, was a nonverbal creature of the dreamworld, a force of nature. Two or more players could make a weaver by finding a shared rhythm, humming or drumming or chanting, and a shared movement, and going with that flow, creating impulses for other players to follow.

    Before We Wake 2015. Photo: Karin Pedersen
    Before We Wake 2015. Photo: Karin Pedersen

    The weavers I played in arose organically: two players interacting, discovering a pattern to our interaction, and emphasising that pattern until we were a weaver. To play a weaver, I recall, was pleasant, trance-like, reminiscent of drum-circles and unstructured ritual improv. To meet a weaver, however, could be terrifying.

    After a long journey, past the garden-supply store and great mountains, we come at last to the mouth of the dark river. Before us: an ocean in twilight, the silhouettes of islands drawn by the sun’s last rays, strings of light beneath the beaches. Uninhabited, undiscovered, begging to be explored.

    At this point two additional players have joined the boat, sitting behind me and Asgeir’s player. I interpret, imagine, them as childhood friends, who had been on board since the beginning, though I would later call one of them “the Chef” and forget him. Three other players have formed a weaver, and as we paddle they approach us, making windy sounds, wave sounds, moving their arms as if to illustrate an ocean, with increasing intensity.

    Abruptly, a cold gale hits our boat. Dark clouds from the east, quickly sliding across the sky. Asgeir reacts. Paddles with fear, and vigour, hoping to escape the storm. I join him. My oar-strokes are strong, exhausting. Sprays of sweat and salt water.

    The weaver is gesturing, violently, from floor to ceiling. And then. And then. My co-player throws himself to the left. A great wave washes across the boat, taking Asgeir with it. I panic. Shout his name. Asgeir! Asgeir! But he does not hear me. The waves are impossibly tall, our voices in the gale are impossibly small. I throw a rope into the ocean. Grab this! I shout / I whisper. I can see him. Trying to swim. Another great wave hits, and when it has passed, he is gone.

    The co-player who portrayed Asgeir has let his character drown and moved on to another dream. The weaver, having achieved catharsis at the peak of their Aristotelian arc, calms down, disbands, the three players seeking out new dreams to participate in.

    Wreckage drifting in calm waters, stars reflected in the deep. I stand there, alone. A real person in the midst of an imagined ocean. Dealing with the death of my brother.

    Of butterflies and REM sleep

    Your dream home. A dream come true. These “dreams” are things that are good, but perhaps unattainable. Real dreams are not like that. They may be happy, indulgent, erotic, beautiful, but also terrifying, awkward, guilt-ridden, anxious or just plain strange. Dreams bleed. You can awake from them devastated at an imagined loss, terrified at a hallucinated monster, emotions so strong that no amount of repeating “it was only a dream!” will remove them entirely.

    The Chef died because we forgot him. He had been with us, on the canoe, paddling. But no-one looked at him, all my attention went to my brother. And so the Chef died. Someone explains that “If you forget someone, they can die”. It made perfect sense. It meant I now carried with me the guilt of two deaths.

    Neuroscientists have plenty of explanations for the strange sensations of dreams – neurons firing at random, REM sleep as the trash-removal function of the mind. But just as the discovery of oxytocin (“the love hormone”) has not saved any marriages or given us better love poetry, the neuroscience of sleep is surprisingly useless when we wonder why dreams feel the way they do, or why a given dream resonates so strongly with us.

    The mourners congregate, the pall-bearers lift the body. The minister intones the eulogy. We play a funeral that is (of course) 15 different funerals, for 15 different people, 15 diegeses overlapping. But in my diegesis, we are burying the Chef, and I am guilty of his murder-by-forgetfulness. One of the mourners is my brother. Asgeir is alive! I notice with deeply felt relief and gratitude. But he has become enormous – a mountain-sized person in the distant ocean. All is well with him, but we can never meet again.

    The Chef, too, isn’t actually dead. He just needed a hug. In the midst of his funeral, the Messiah appears and resurrects him. She cheerily tells us that she is a new Messiah, she only found out this morning, and asks us to please be patient with her as she figures out how to messiah properly.

    “Was I a man dreaming he was a butterfly,” the sage Zhuangzi asked following a particularly vivid dream, “or am I now a butterfly dreaming that it is a man?” In 2300 years, no philosopher has been able to conclusively answer Zhuangzi’s question.

    To play at Before We Wake, to bring our dreams out of sleep and the subconscious and into shared play, was to enter into that ambiguity. To be unsure of whether one was larping a dream, or dreaming a larp. All larps invite this kind of doubt, but many larp cultures treat it as something undesirable. To risk losing oneself? To mess up one’s grip on reality? Never! Here too, Before We Wake made a virtue out of an inherent fault line in the larp medium.

    For: if this reality is a dream, then all possible realities might be there when we truly wake. And even if it is not so, then acting as if it is may allow us to see our reality as changeable, improvable, open to creativity. Strings of light beneath distant shores, numinous with meaning.

    50 shades of ultraviolet

    There can be no doubt that Before We Wake was a significant achievement – a bold idea, beautifully executed, pushing the boundaries of what roleplaying can be. The peak, perhaps, of the Nordic avant-garde larp movement.

    50 players. 50 different larps. 50 different meanings and evaluations. In my circle of contact, the players with the least experience as roleplayers were the ones who were the most adept at enjoying Before We Wake. The larp lacked characters, coherent narratives, and causality. What would my character do?, we experienced larpers ask when stuck, what does the genre suggest? what is the logical thing here? To which this particular larp replied: There is no character! No genre! The most logical thing to do is one that doesn’t make sense!

    As the organisers, beginning the larp, told us to pretend to be asleep, I was attacked by pre-larp anxiety, and desperately deployed my meditation practice to ward it off. Have I prepared well enough? Breathe in. Does my costume suck? Breathe ouut. Will I be able to meet their expectations? Breeeaaatheeee iiiinnnn. This never works. Except, it did. I managed to find that place of calm and slow breathing where thoughts and anxieties could just float by. I later wrote in my notebook:

    I have woken into the dream as a small child awakens into the world, awed by existence, captivated even by the wriggling of fingers. I lean against a tree. A web is woven above me. I watch the web materialising. I play with the strips of cloth, blowing at them. I, too, have a piece of white cloth. My white cloth is taken away by the wind, and I follow it, knocking on the trunks of trees to hear whether it is in there. Sometimes I can hear it reply, but before I can grab it, it is blown away again, laughing.

    The “wind” in this scene was, I think, another player. My notes from the larp are not entirely coherent. But I recall the feelings evoked from this larp; child-like wonder, the weight of adult responsibility, saudade, relief. The strangeness and vulnerability of us sharing dreams. And the mystery.

    Awakening

    The end, of the larp and of this untangling, is another awakening. An awakening into “the real world”, and an awakening into the mental twilight between the end of roleplay and the beginning of debriefs, where I can sit writing down my memories of the larp, free from the tyranny of consensus.

    I have spent roughly 10 minutes writing about the boat, and the storm, and the funeral. I have written about the woman who was a crab. But there were many more moments I had wanted to capture. A door, thunder, the people lost in the forest … clouds.

    Echoes fade. Silhouettes soften. Shadows disintegrate. Strangely, I can feel these things, but no longer see them clearly. Gunshot wounds in the flesh of trees. A wise man perched below the spider’s peak. The small thing, beneath your foot… The harder I attempt to grab the memories, the more thoroughly they slip away.

    I let the pen drop.

    Irrevocably, the larp has gone.

    Before We Wake

    CREDITS: Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn, Kirstine Hedda Fich, Kristoffer Thurøe, Mathias Kromann Rode, Nina Runa Essendrop, Peter Schønnemann Andreasen, Sanne Harder and a team of 8 technicians and helpers.
    DATE: August 5–8, 2015
    LOCATION: Københavns Musikteater, Copenhagen, Denmark
    DURATION: 6 hours + 1 day of pre-larp
    PARTICIPANTS: 2 runs, each with 25 participants

    Bibliography

    Markus Montola (2003): Role-Playing as Interactive Construction of Subjective Diegeses. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp (pp. 82–89), edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander, http://www.laivforum.dk/kp03_book/

    Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Lifelike (pp. 175–187), edited by Jesper Donnis, Line Thorup and Morten Gade. Projektgruppen KP07, Copenhagen 2007.

    Kristoffer Thurøe (2016): Before We Wake: Weaving with the Fabric of Dreams in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2015, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted and Erik Sonne Georg, Rollespillsakademiet 2016.

    Further Reading

    Ole Peder Giæver (2015): “The Night Shift.” by Ole Peder Giæver 2015, https://snarglebarf.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/the-night-shift/

    Thais Munk (2015): “Before We Wake: About dreams, a damn wise silverback gorilla and blackbox larp as a media.” by Thais Munk 2015
    https://thaismunk.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/before-we-wake-about-dreams-a-damn-wise-silverback-gorilla-and-blackbox-larp-as-a-media/

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Fatland, Eirik. 2024. “Did We Wake?” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Before We Wake 2015. Photo: Karin Pedersen

  • Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

    Published on

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    Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

    By

    Syksy Räsänen

    In the past decade there has been an upsurge of sensual content in larps, brought to spotlight by international productions such as Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway 2011), Inside Hamlet (Denmark 2015), Baphomet (Denmark 2018), and others. With this focus, the sensual has at times eclipsed the intellectual, and House of Craving (Denmark 2019) provides an example.

    The larp has a trim structure. Twelve characters are friends and family who retire to a newly inherited summer house for a few relaxed days. Unknown to them, the house is self-aware, and evokes twelve ghosts to control the characters. The ghosts vicariously play out carnal desires and delicate disappointments through the humans for a few hours, until their personalities are broken and the house absorbs the humans into itself, remaking them into ghosts.

    On the next day, the same human characters freshly arrive into the house again, portrayed by new players. The previous characters continue as ghosts of who they were, locked into repetition, haunted by echoes of life, and driven by regret. Their players now embody the manipulative house, as the ghosts try to make good their lives through the humans, before facing final passage into darkness.

    The ghost players are dressed in white, and their characters are wholly invisible to the humans. They can take hold of and move human players and objects. The humans can only initiate interaction with the ghosts by treating them as objects of the house, or as participants in their masturbation fantasies.

    With six consecutive runs, the players (first and last set aside) get to experience the same day and the same characters twice: first from the point of view of the victimised humans, then as the shattered ghosts. It is a clever composition that, for me, tapped into the l’esprit de l’escalier of larp: regret born from realising too late what I should have said and remorse over how I should have played. In the House of Craving this self-reflection is sublimated into the emotive mechanism of the ghosts who revisit their lives, hopelessly trying to repair the fragments.

    The instrumentalisation of the humans also has a slapdash side to it, as the ghosts exploit them for instinctive ends. In a set-piece scene, the ghosts interject themselves into human affairs for the first time over formal lunch. My run featured a competition of ghosts over which human could eat the fastest when food is stuffed into its unwilling mouth.

    The scene highlights how House of Craving used physical play to depict the horror of being manipulated, being violated, the horror of taking actions that are not your own, whether in the course of eating or sex. The small group of characters makes for an intimate game, and the larp earned its place in the self-described genre of erotic horror.

    Although the larp sported a surfeit of sex, there was also some gravitas in the proceedings. The human characters were rather shallow in personality and interest, and the ghosts had more substance to highlight very human horrors. The ghosts enter the larp in a fractured state, and there is something frightfully moving in their sterile replay of old scenes, reaching out for closure and meeting only the encroaching dissolution of memory and sense.

    Compared to the setup for erotica, the existential horror sadly received little attention in the game materials and the workshop. The designers – Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, and Bjarke Pedersen – instructed the players that the larp is ”mainly designed to be an entertainingly horrible experience. A premise for this, is that we all agree that we are doing this for the fun of it, and that it isn’t more serious than that.”

    These words curtail and contextualise the erotic elements in the larp to build a safe environment, but they also speak of an abridgment of ambition. There is no shame in entertainment, but House of Craving had material for a more meaningful enterprise.

    Especially when playing as a human, the sexual content often felt like an end unto itself, too unmoored from things of import to have the impact it deserved. Existential horror can enhance erotic elements, providing context and counterpoise and turning them from the default mode of play into meaningful trespasses. More than that, looking not only into the body but also at a wider context could make for a more intellectually satisfying engagement.

    For example, if the new family are real people, does that mean that the ghosts’ memories of last night are false, and the ghosts are echoes of people yet alive? Or do the ghosts remember true, and the family are only untamed memories of the recent dead? If the player takes their character down this road, they will soon run into the edge of the narrative set by the organisers. There is a limit to how far players can inject meaning into a larp designed just for fun.

    The problem is that the setting has been manufactured as a vehicle for social dynamics and an alibi for physical interaction, not as something to stimulate the intellect or support reflection. The casually instrumental approach to setting may be a counter-reaction to old-fashioned plot-centred writing, but the pendulum swings both ways. Superficiality of story invites the haunting question of meaning: what is it that the designers want to convey?

    Building a setting with intellectual depth that players can seriously engage with is hardly a new idea, but it has rarely been artfully mixed with the strong bodily experience design seen in larps like House of Craving. Inside Hamlet attempted this, although, as I have written elsewhere (Räsänen 2016), not with unreserved success.

    In contrast, Just a Little Lovin’ provides an example of a robust design in this regard (with quite a different take on physicality). One reason for the effectiveness and lasting impact of that larp is, I would argue, the balance between its physical, social, and intellectual elements. The design approaches the themes of friendship, desire, and fear of death from multiple points of view, and the game facilitates exploration in any direction: not with a set of answers to be discovered, but with a full-bodied setting to interact with and reflect on.

    One critic characterised the author Yukio Mishima’s lesser stories as “fine gems roughly polished”, a comparison that also encapsulates my feelings about House of Craving. There is untapped potential for more multi-faceted work, more comprehensive immersion that would not sacrifice meaning on the altar of sensation.

    Bibliography

    Syksy Räsänen (2016): “These but the trappings and the suits of woe”: tragedy and politics in Inside Hamlet. In Larp Politics: Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi. Ropecon ry.

    Ludography

    Baphomet (2018): Denmark. Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen. Participation Design Agency.

    House of Craving (2019): Denmark. Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen & Bjarke Pedersen. Participation Design Agency.

    Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen & Bjarke Pedersen.

    Inside Hamlet (2015): Denmark. Martin Elricsson, Bjarke Pedersen et al. Odyssé.

    Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Norway. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Räsänen, Syksy. 2024. “Searching for Meaning in House of Craving.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover image: Photo by Nick Magwood from Pixabay