Nordic Larp

Tag: Feminism

  • We Were Always Here: Representation, Queer Erasure, and Use of History in Larp

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    We Were Always Here: Representation, Queer Erasure, and Use of History in Larp

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    I’ve been openly queer for about as long as I’ve been a larper. After my first trembling steps on the Swedish sandbox fantasy scene back in 2004, I was hooked, and have played about a hundred larps since then. And like many larpers, I enjoy historical larps. Still, I often struggle with the feeling that historical larps aren’t really made for people like me.

    There are a few reasons why. One approach to historical larping is a conservative perspective on history where the focus is on “male narratives” and Great Men of Power. It is the larps about soldiers, kings, and politicians, often told in a way where women are simply not present at all. These larps were a staple of my first decade as a larper, and many of my first feminist battles on the larp scene was about whether female players could be kings and soldiers too.

    Another approach is larps with a women’s history perspective, where designers chose to keep the narrow gender roles and sexist fiction, but focus on “female narratives” centered around private matters, marriage, and housekeeping. Both of these uses of history tend to make me, a queer female player, feel deeply alienated, because people like me rarely exists in either of them. In this essay,  I make an attempt to explore how it affects players like me and why that is actually a problem. Both because it is problematic larp design, and because it is a problematic use of history.

    Part One: Were There Any Women in History?

    The first thing we need to remember is that there is no neutral history. If this thought is new to you and you want to explore it in more depth, check out this great article by Mo Holkar about class and gender representation, which includes a toolbox for how to do it in historical larp. A quick summary is that everything we know about history is filtered through the views of the people who wrote the sources, and more often than not they were people of power, focusing on what they themselves found meaningful to tell about.

    But this is also true for historians: what aspects of history that get the focus in research, what you learn in school, watch in fictionalised forms on Netflix, or that is considered important is also heavily biased from the perspective of the people who made that research, those textbooks, or movie scripts. Thus, even when we just try to get a brief overview of a historical subject through some hits on Google, a high school textbook, or a Wikipedia overview, we will probably get a pretty conservative version of history, filtered through the lens of men in power. And this has bigger consequences than you might be aware of at first sight.

    In her feminist classic The Second Sex from 1949, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the core of the female experience is that of being percieved as the Other in relation to men. Man is the norm, Woman the exception. As most of us are probably aware, gender roles are arbitrary and change with time and culture, and thus answering the question of what it essentially means to be a Woman is almost impossible. According to Beauvoir, Woman is a socially constructed role — you aren’t born a woman, you become one — and what defines this role is largely that she is not a man.

    What this means is that we as a culture have a tendency to assume that women are whatever men are not. If men are brain, women are body. If men are professional, women are private. If men are violent, women are nurturing and so on. This tendency is also commonly seen in history books as well as in daily conversations and Wikipedia articles, where men are more likely to be described by professional roles (king, soldier, professor, author, farmer, shoemaker, doctor, priest) while women get defined through their private relationships to men (wife, daughter, mother, sister, spinster, courtesan, mistress). Thus it can sometimes be easy to read a history book and think that there simply were no women involved in economy, technology, or the political conflicts of the past. And if we make larps about women historically, it must be something different than making historical larps about men.

    This is not necessarily true. In her book Mother of Inventions (2021), Kathrine Marcal explores how this othering of women has the consequence that many great ideas are overlooked because we live in a sexist society that gives men more credit than women, and generally considers men’s achievements more important to tell about than women’s. Female inventors, working women, women’s ideas and needs get overlooked because of the male hegemony in our society, where being a woman must be something different, and less interesting, than being a human.

    I believe that if we reproduce the idea that women simply did not do anything of historical importance, we buy into this sexist myth. The natural counter-argument is of course that “women were more oppressed a few hundred years ago, so unfortunately they didn’t have as much agency as men did,” but it is not like this focus on men is absent in today’s society. I can simply look back at experiences from my own youth as a larping woman. I have seen many competent women being credited as “helpers” after doing just as much work as the male “organisers” of larps. I have also met many female larpers being introduced as someone’s girlfriend, while male larpers who just happen to be in a relationship with a larping woman for some reason still get to be defined with their name or what larps they are associated with. Since we are in fact aware that women exist and do creative work in the larp scene today despite these sexist patterns, is it really so hard to imagine the same about women in the past?

    Another important point that Marcal makes is how our tendency to take arbitrary character traits and assign them the label feminine hurts everyone. Her book is full of examples of men being forced to prove that they are real men by e.g. carrying their suitcases instead of rolling them, or driving loud and dirty petrol cars instead of silent and clean electric ones, as the latter were considered feminine. Treating women’s experiences as something inherently different and separate from men’s experiences also forces men to distance themselves from a big part of what it means to be human. By this logic, we can consider e.g. romance plots or an interest in fashion and costuming girly, despite the fact that all men wear clothes and all heterosexual love stories contain at least one man.

    Changing the Perspective

    Conservative history, with its focus on white men of power, has been challenged throughout the 20th century in academia as well as outside of it. Women’s history draws attention to different roles women have played throughout the times and focuses on female narratives; people’s history focuses on the ordinary people instead of the upper classes; queer theory deconstructs ideas of gender and sexuality; and postcolonial history switches the perspective from the colonisers to the colonised. The above mentioned article by Mo Holkar gives plenty of examples of larps in this tradition, re-telling historical events from the perspectives of women or the working class. I am borrowing terminology and ideas from all of these fields, even though my primary focus in this article is my perspective as a queer woman.

    But re-writing history with the Other as the protagonist comes with its own challenges. Part of why Othering is such a powerful oppression strategy is because it allows dominant groups to clump all people who do not fit the norm together into the marginalised position of the Other, and define them by what they are not instead of what they are. As we try to switch the perspective and tell the story of the Other, a common trap is to still treat them as the homogenous group they never were, keeping the variations within the group invisible. And so we get stories about upper class women to challenge those about upper class men, or stories about colonised political leaders challenging the colonisers.

    It is easy to say that we should be aware that there were other people in history than heterosexual white men of power. It is also easy to describe someone as non-male, non-white, non-rich, and non-heterosexual. Unfortunately, a larp character described like that will also be non-playable, as there is nothing in there explaining how they would independently view themself. In Marxist and post-colonial theory, these people are known as subaltern – people excluded from the hierarchy of power and institutions of society, denied agency and their own voices.

    In her 1985 article Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Spivak challenges the idea that it is even possible to re-write history from a subaltern perspective. Despite our best attempts to understand what life was like for marginalised people throughout history, we can not know for certain. Their voices are absent from most of the historical source material, and our stories about them, if they even exist, are filtered through the perspectives of people with power.

    The tragedy of the lost subaltern voices struck me pretty hard at a recent larp, Snapphaneland (Göthberg, Elofsson Edgar & Lundqvist 2022), which was set in a village during the 1660s Scanian War. My character, Stine, had multiple marginalised identities, all of which were understood through these negative definitions. A middle-age unmarried housemaid, she did not have any family or home of her own. The female gender role was defined through being a wife and mother, which left Stine as somewhat of a non-woman. She was non-heterosexual – not interested in relationships with men, and did not have a strong sense of national identity, thus being both a non-Dane and a non-Swede in the political conflict between the countries. And while I admit she was a hard character to play, I am also not sure I can blame the organisers for this. There must have been plenty of people like Stine in Skåne in the 1600s, excluded from most of the institutions of society. And their voices are lost to us. Maybe the most fair thing I can do to do them justice is to admit that I have no idea how they thought about themselves and their lives? I can guess, but I actually have no idea.

    Part Two: Collective Memory and the Danger of the Single Story

    The year is 2003 and I, a baby queer, often go to the public library after school. I am 13 and LGBTQIA-representation in mainstream media is not a thing, but I have learnt how to search for tags in the library catalogue. I read every single young adult book tagged with homosexuality. Almost all of them center around the fear of coming out, getting socially ostracized, harassed, or abused. As a young teenager, my Single Story about queerness is that it is very, very difficult.

    The Danger of the Single Story is a phrase by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her 2009 TED Talk. Adichie says that human lives and cultures are made up from a multitude of stories, and that when we only get to hear one of them, we easily reduce people into stereotypes. She argues that the problem with the Single Story is not that it is incorrect (queer people sure are more likely to be subjected to violence, and women sure have less power than men in a patriarchy), but that it is incomplete. When we reduce the many stories of a person or a group into a Single Story, it strips them of their dignity and their right to be seen as full human beings. The Single Story focuses on differences, making it harder to relate to other people as humans like ourselves.  An effective way to oppress subaltern people is to tell a single story about them, and make that the only story.

    In my first decade or so of larping, queerness is generally not present at all. And when it is, it is usually through variations on the same single story. Queer equals gay, and it is off-game to be gay, because gay people didn’t exist in the Old Days. Sexuality is all about making babies, so of course homosexuality doesn’t exist. Or, we want to make this fictional culture a bit more evil and gritty, so let’s add a death penalty on being gay. You can play gay anyway, of course, but if anyone finds out you will be ostracized, harassed, and abused.

    In 2012, two of my heterosexual friends have just fallen in love and play a couple in the larps we attend. Me and my girlfriend never get to play a couple. Because of these homophobic larp fictions, we chose to play straight characters. After one larp I write a blog post about the amount of microaggressions I’ve felt forced to play the entire larp, because in this kind of setting, it is a matter of life and death to prove that one is not homosexual, and how this has affected me as a queer player. The blog post causes a 250 posts long thread on the larp campaign’s Facebook page, most being aggressive comments directed towards me. The most baffling criticism is the way too common “all larps can’t suit your personal taste, Anneli.” At that time, I have still never gotten to play a queer story without the violent oppression narrative. The Single Story about queerness hides the multitude of other possible queer stories we could tell instead.

    “But, maybe,” you think, “This has nothing to do with contemporary homophobia. That is just how it was historically. Organisers can’t be blamed for writing sexist and homophobic narratives into the fiction when history was in fact sexist and homophobic.”

    Well actually, no. As queer activist and historian Samuel Sjöberg (2019) has shown, the attitudes to LGBTQIA people throughout Swedish history are much more complex. The stories about abuse and oppression are there, and I know that there are players who enjoy them, but they should not be treated as the single story.

    In recent years more larps focus on queer people in historical settings, a development I love that gives us more opportunities to play a multitude of stories. Some examples are Häxorna på Ästad Gård (Edman 2016) and Vedergällningen (Edman 2019), Oss Imellom (Hatlestrand & Edland 2015), Cabaret (Arvidsson, Fladvad, Sandrén & Waern 2014) and Violetas (NotOnlyLarp 2022). Still, these don’t seem to be considered “mainstream” historical larps. Still, queer history is something different from human history, just like women’s experiences are still considered something different than human experiences.

    And in actual fact, this has everything to do with contemporary homophobia. As French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argues, our collective memories about history are actually not about the past but about ourselves. We use history not to remember any random past, but to form group identities (on a macro level like national or class identities, but also on a micro level by identifying with e.g., a subculture or a family) based on a shared history.

    Kaisa Kangas makes a similar point about larping other cultures in her talk Experimental Anthropology. These games do not give us the experience to live in another culture, just like historical larps does not teach us about the actual past. But through juxtaposition, they can give interesting new perspectives on ourselves and our own culture, what we are and what we are not.
    When we are aware that history has the function of building group identities, what we choose to remember and to forget, whom to include and exclude, is a highly political choice.

    I think this is probably why the fact that I can rarely play queer female characters with relateable plot lines in historical larps affects me so strongly. It doesn’t only say that people like myself did not exist in history (which they did), but also that our contemporary understanding of meaningful stories and our shared group identity as historical larpers does not include people like me. And that is why I so often feel like the Other, or frankly like an alien, after historical larps.

    Part Three: We Were Always Here

    So, what is there to win when we do historical larps without diminishing women and erasing queers? The time has come for me to address Just a Little Lovin’.

    In his article Play the Gay Away – Confessions of a Queer Larper, Eric Winther Paisley describes the strong experience of playing Just a Little Lovin’ (Groth, Jacobsen, Edland & Grasmo, 2015). By putting gayness in the foreground, he describes how the game instead allowed him to play around with other aspects of his queerness, creating challenging, deep and emotionally fulfilling experiences. I was at the same run of JaLL 2015, and for me it was a transformative and mind-blowing experience.

    By centering LGBTQ-narratives and offering a multitude of ways to portray them, Just a Little Lovin’ was the first larp that allowed me to play a character that was queer in a similar way to how I myself am queer. I have played it twice, both times as bisexual polyamorous women in the Saratoga friend group, and it has given me the chance to explore aspects of my own queerness that I’ve never seen anything even close to depicting in other larps. These larps have created a sense of belonging and strong positive feelings in me, something along the lines of relief, validation, and empowerment. This is not the article for delving deeper into how these can be achieved, but I recommend Jonaya Kemper’s works on emancipatory bleed, The Battle of Primrose Park and Wyrding the Self, as they are really interesting and useful further reading.

    I think part of what makes Just a Little Lovin’ such an important game for many queer players is that it is a historical larp that offers us to be part of that collective memory. On the surface, JaLL is a story about the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, but in reality, it is a story about the queer community. For players like myself, and many others I have spoken with in the growing group of alumni, it offers us a sense of belonging by placing our current lives and identities in the context of a queer community and a queer history. It tells a story that takes place a decade before I was born, yet it feels like a story about people just like me. The result is magical.

    When players with marginalised identities are offered a place to exist within the historical larp setting, we get reminded that people like us have actually always existed. And this is not just about painting a truer picture of history by distancing ourselves from the limiting perspective of men of power, but about allowing our identities and our stories to be included in the universal experience of being human.

    Conclusion: Let Go of the Conservative Narratives

    Historian Howard Zinn (Holkar 2017) writes that when we see the history of any country presented as the history of a select privileged few, it conceals fierce conflicts of interest between the people with power and the people without it. These can be executioners and victims; masters and slaves; capitalists and workers; dominators and dominated in race and sex. Zinn argues, in the words of Albert Camus, that in such a world it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

    One of the beauties of larp is that we can embody a character and see the world through their eyes for a short time. But that makes it even more important to consider whose eyes we chose to view the world from; whose narrative we reproduce when we make historical larps; and what parts we chose to erase. I believe that when we reproduce conservative uses of history in larps in which men of power are the obvious protagonists; women are tied to the home and children; queer people and people of colour either don’t exist at all or are reduced to the Single Story of being the oppressed Other; we risk ending up on that wrong side.

    I have tried to show you that just because women and queer people have been silenced throughout history, it doesn’t mean that we never existed or did anything worth remembering. But more importantly, I have tried to show you the importance of representation and why it matters, to avoid the dehumanising and one-dimensional Single Stories.

    I love historical larps, and I wish more players like me got to enjoy more of them without feeling alien or erased afterwards. And of course I do not speak for all women or queer larpers, but I have had that conversation with many more people after larps than anyone should be comfortable with. When we make historical larps we shape our collective memories of the past. We chose what is important and not, whom to include and exclude, and what stories to treat as universally human instead of Other. And these are highly political choices that have very real consequences.

    References

    de Beauvoir, Simone. 1972 [1949]. The Second Sex.  Trans. H. M. Parshley. Penguin.

    Holkar, Mo. 2017. History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting. In Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 161-166. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.

    Kangas, Kaisa. 2015. Experimental Anthropology. Nordic Larp Talks. February 12.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. The Battle of Primrose Park – Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity. Nordiclarp.org, June 21.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. Wyrding the Self. Nordiclarp.org, May 18.

    Marçal, Katherine. 2021. Mother of Inventions: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men. William Collins.

    Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TED. YouTube, October 7.

    Paisley, Eric Winther. 2016. Play the Gay Away – Confessions of a Queer Larper. Nordiclarp.org, April 15.

    Sjöberg, Samuel. 2019. Att Queerläsa Historia. Lecture at Prolog, February 26, 2019.

    Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271-313. Macmillan Education: Basingstroke.

    Ludography

    Snapphaneland. 2022. Mimmi Lundqvist, Alma Elofsson Edgar & Rosalind Göthberg.

    Häxorna på Ästad gård. 2016. Karin Edman aka WonderKarin.

    Vedergällningen. 2019. Karin Edman aka WonderKarin.

    Oss Imellom. 2015. Tor Kjetil Edland and Fredrik Hatlestrand.

    Cabaret. 2014. Siri Arvidsson, Staffan Fladvad, Alexis Sandrén and Annika Waern.

    Violetas. 2022. NotOnlyLarp

    Just a Little Lovin’. 2015. Written by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo. Produced by Anna Groth and Fleming Jacobsen, 2015.

    Cover photo: Photo by squarefrog on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.

  • From Winson Green Prison to Suffragette: Representations of First-Wave Feminists in Larps

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    From Winson Green Prison to Suffragette: Representations of First-Wave Feminists in Larps

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    In this article, I present feedback on my experience playing and writing on suffragettes in larps set in early 20th century Europe. I present the diverse angles through which the theme and characters were approached in these larps and contrast their differences. These games are set up at a time period with clearly separated gender roles, developing narratives around female archetypes and roles in society. As such, any mention of gender in this article will be set along the line of a strict binary division of male-female gender, which was used within the historical context of those games, and obviously does not represent the full extent of gender spectrum, identity, and expression. I examine which themes were mostly presented through these games and the challenges they created.

    The Games

    I have chosen to focus on these three games because they all focus on first-wave feminism by having all or most characters being actively suffragettes, which allows for interesting parallels and comparisons. While many games handle feminism or gender:

    1. Winson Green Prison is a game written by Siri Sandquist and Rosalind Göthberg in 2016, for up to 20 players and 4 hours of play. It sets up a group of women locked in the titular prison after being arrested during a protest march, as well as the men who have the legal authority over their lives (husbands, fathers, brothers) waiting for them to be released. The game starts by having the participants workshopping the characters as pairs, and then separates them for the entirety of the game except for their reunion during a brief epilogue scene. The game allows both groups to play in parallel, but at times only one of the groups play, letting the other group observe the opposite gender’s dynamics.

    2. Sorority is part of the Belle Epoque trilogy, a series of games I wrote in 2017 questioning gender and class inequalities in early 20th century France. It plays for 8 to 12 players over 4 hours. The characters in Sorority are all women, and the game features them in three different time periods: in 1913 when patriarchal control is in full swing; in 1916 when the context of World War I has unexpectedly given women more opportunity to work and act independently; and in 1919 when, after the war, women are being pressured to return to traditional roles while the demand for suffrage gets stronger. The larp allows for the characters to evolve and change their opinions since it is played over a long period in game.

    3. Suffragette! is a game created in 2014 by Susanne Vejdemo, Siri Sandquist, Daniel Armyr, and Cecilia Billskog. It originated in Sweden and was rerun in the summer of 2018 for an international audience, adding four groups of foreign visitors to the original Swedish cast. It played for 70 players over a 12-hour period. The characters are all women meeting in Stockholm for the International Women’s Union conference and preparing for the protest march, which is supposed to take place in the morning.

    A sign that reads Vote for Women, a fan, a glass, and other props
    Post-game picture from Sorority by the author

    The Hopes of Sorority

    The three games all focus on female characters grouping together at the time when women didn’t have voting rights and were usually under the authority of their fathers or husbands. They all question the social dynamics of a non-mixed female group. They all support implicitly or explicitly the ideas that solidarity and union between women can really be a positive force for change, and that women should be more supportive of each other in the face of pressure from patriarchal structures.

    In this regard, Winson Green Prison was especially powerful, since being imprisoned together in the same space instantly sets the stakes for the female characters very high. Trying to support each other and not break down in panic, within the context of being imprisoned, immediately felt important. For some characters, having been arrested meant the possibility of punishments at the hands of the men, when others had participated in the march against their express orders. In that context, those fears played as very real.

    Sorority starts with a group of diverse women coming together over the years. They are clearly divided at first, especially along class lines, but solidarity between the women eventually manages to gain traction, when they are all able to take part together in a protest march. As such, the game is meant to be a metaphor of the collapse of old social structures after WWI, and to illustrate how solidarity can appear among women.

    Suffragette presents a variety of women coming from diverse organizations or foreign countries. Being part of an organization or a specific group was definitely the frame wherein support was the strongest: the solidarity between the French group was a strong part of my personal experience. Solidarity was also quite apparent in the socialist and anarchist groups of the game, who were an active minority that seemed very supportive of their members. With a bigger player base, the sense of companionship worked more within small groups, or during specific activities such as the suffragitstu — a model of self-defense lessons developed specifically for women. On a larger scale, the game presented more the fracture lines around some controversial subjects such as prostitution, the status of natural children, and access to contraception.

    Dozens of suffragette characters holding signs and posing
    Post-game picture of Suffragettes! by Herman Langland / Big Picture Larping

    The Pitfalls of Division

    This part of the experience will obviously differ according to each individual player’s personal narrative. However, I do feel that all games show the limits of female solidarity. They could sometimes have a bittersweet ending in the sense that there were limitations to what women could really accomplish and change, in the world as well as in themselves. Sometimes, the trappings of society and social conditioning just got the better of the characters.

    In Winson Green Prison, the context of the women being arrested is the main conflict: for some of the prisoners, being in prison carries serious consequences, punishment, or social exclusion. In Sorority, the division comes from the class conflicts. In the beginning of the game, there is a strong class divide between the rich ladies and the working-class women. After the Great War, the richer characters get ruined and the class divisions start changing, though they do not disappear completely. As a consequence, some characters decided to leave the group before the final march, feeling that they didn’t belong and were not sufficiently integrated with the others.

    The divisions become even more pronounced in Suffragette, possibly because the game was longer and had a larger number of participants who represented conflicting ideologies. Suffragette is a highly political game, with a significant part of the running time devoted to committees where the participants discuss various subjects such as voting rights, contraception, sex work, and the marching order of the morning march. The end of Suffragette brings together the whole audience to listen to two closing speeches. While to some extent uplifting and unifying, the speeches also emphasized the fact that in reality not much was accomplished, as the divisions remained significant.

    As such, all three games question the difficulties of bringing different feminist views together, and show how solidarity can sometimes be difficult to achieve. It resonates with contemporary issues: there are a variety of feminist approaches and divisions and conflicted views and political takes do exist.

    The Debate: Men Playing Female Narratives

    Interestingly, Suffragette also raised issues regarding the participation of male players in what are clearly female and feminist narratives. This section will focus mostly on this issue  regarding mostly cis-gendered males in light of social expectation and gender roles, which will be the group I will subsequently refer as “men” for this writing.

    All games allowed for any participant to sign up, regardless of player gender. In my opinion, the integration of male participants (as female characters) was made easier in Winson Green Prison and Sorority, as the context of playing in larp conventions involves more abstraction and no costume and setting. Therefore, suspension of disbelief felt easier to achieve. In Suffragette, male players wore women’s costumes, but there were no specific workshops or demands regarding accuracy.

    While the number of male participants playing female characters remained limited, the choice to allow male participants was motivated by expanding interest in sharing female narratives, and promoting the idea that female narratives can and should be of interest to people regardless of their gender. The educational value of playing a different gender as oneself can also be a motivation.  As one of the male players of Sorority wrote to me afterwards,

    “Seeing all the issues and learning more about the situation in France was eye-opening. It would be another 25 years before women secured the right to vote in France — and I’m glad I played it and was made to feel welcome by the other players.”

    However, concerns were expressed regarding the fact that male players could end up taking the space in female narratives, especially if playing high-profile characters such as Emmeline Pankhurst, a role that was played by a man in Suffragette. Some argued that casting men in leading female roles would restrain opportunities for women to play powerful female narratives. Others argued that if female narratives are to be opened and embraced by all regardless of gender, then all roles should be also accessible to all regardless of gender. This is a legitimate issue and, while I support and hope to see more men play female narrative, the conditions to make them more accessible remain to be discussed. This debate is, therefore, still ongoing.

    Conclusion

    These games provide an interesting insight into different approaches to exploring the same theme. They demonstrate the tension in feminist narratives between promotion of sorority ideals and the reality of the conflicts and divisions inherent to any political movement. They also question the place of male players in female and feminist narratives, which, while an unresolved debate, is an interesting aspect of design to take into consideration for any who write and promote female narratives.

    Cover photo: Winson Green Prison by Vicki Pipe for the Smoke Festival 2017.

    Editing by Elina Gouliou.

  • #Feminism – Reviewing the Nano-Game Anthology

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    #Feminism – Reviewing the Nano-Game Anthology

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    A couple of months ago, I received my copy of #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology. It took me only two days to read all the games, and I was very excited about testing a lot of them.

    So, first of all, I needed to figure out how to set up a time and place where we could play. I realised that some of the games are written to be played by only women but others required the presence of men for play to be the most interesting. The second problem was choosing a space. We (as Producciones Gorgona) don’t have a meeting place so, we needed to find one.

    After thinking a lot about it, we highlighted the characteristics of the place we need:

    • Two or more rooms (so we can play at least two games at the same time).
    • Intimate
    • Places we could sleep

    So, finally, to avoid paying a lot of money, I decided to offer my parents’ house in the countryside. We could sleep there, it was big enough, and it was intimate. In addition, we decided to go for a whole weekend of feminism games, where Saturday and Saturday night would be for women only, and the Sunday the men would be welcome.

    And we did so last weekend (May 14-15, 2016). We loved all the games we had time to test. So, I will not focus this review on the anthology as a whole, but on our experiences of running the games we chose.

    Reviewing #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology

    Selfie

    Selfie

    Selfie is a game written by Kira Magrana. It’s part of the section called ‘The Digital Age’. We consider it a very good way to create trust and to form a new group (we knew each other but not very well). And it worked quite well!

    The game consists of taking some selfies and trying to guess what feelings we wanted to convey. I’m not going to explain it here (you’ll have to get the amazing book for that). But I want to give you some advice if you’re going to run it.

    • If you decide to use the soundtrack proposed by the author, you can find it already prepared in my Spotify account so you don’t have to make it again.
    • During the game, we discovered that it was funnier if we not only tried to guess the feeling by naming it, but also tried to build the history behind them by using hashtags.
    • We played it with 7 players (not the 3 to 5 recommended in the book), and it worked smoothly. So don’t be afraid to increase the number to adapt to the group you have.

    After lunch, we divided into two groups to play simultaneously. Three of us (myself included) played My Sister Malala (me included) and the other four went to the other terrace to play Mum, I Made This Sex Tape.

    My Sister Malala

    My Sister Malala is a game designed by Elsa Helin. It’s a free form for only three players. In this game, you play one of three Pakistani teenagers who can use the Internet in their schools, and the different lives they experience. Each of them has two scenes: a Facebook state and its conversation, and a short live-role playing scene.

    We only made two changes to the original design. The first one was starting the Facebook conversation with an actual written status just below the Facebook page we designed in the workshop (we decided not only to describe the photos, but also to draw them). We think that helps to reenact how a real Facebook post is. After that, we continued the conversation orally, as described in the game.

    The second change was to the short scenes. According to the designer, all the players have to decide together how the scene will end. In Spanish larp culture, this is a very strange concept. We prefer playing the larps without knowing the ending, going with the flow of events. So we agreed to adapt it. Before the scene began, the other two players (non-protagonists ) talked about how they would play their characters and how they wanted to finish it. The entire scene was therefore a surprise for the main character, in the same way that it would have been for a real teenager. I think this change worked marvelously.

    Overall, I think the design is very solid. The way in which it creates a scale of tension and identification with the different girls was amazing. I totally recommend playing it if you can.

    Mum, I Made This Sex Tape

    The other four girls played Mum, I Made This Sex Tape, designed by Susanne Vejdemo. I can’t review this larp completely, as I didn’t play it. One of the players who did provided this review:

    Four of us decided to play this game due to the topic, which is funny and taboo at the same time. The game is designed for 3-5 players with pre-written characters. One of them is a girl who has made a sex tape and is proud of it but she wants to know the opinions of other female members of her family.

    It is a good way to know the evolution of feminism from its beginnings, through the role of the grandmother, until today thanks to the role of the girl. All the characters are strong in their convictions about the way women should live and think about sex and porn.

    If you want to play this game, here are some tips:

    -With 4 players, it is better to include the aunt rather than the sister. It will be very refreshing and good support for the girl.

    -Don’t create tense relationships. Mother and aunt should be sisters, not sisters-in-law.

    -We played for 20 minutes and it was too short! We could have played for at least 10 more minutes.

    -And most importantly: enjoy every moment and have fun.

    Janire Roldán

    Mentioning the Unmentionables

    After two hard games, we decided to play something more light-hearted; our choice was Mentioning the Unmentionables by Kajsa Greger. It was the funniest game I’ve ever played, especially the first two parts.

    As with the other games, we wanted to play all together, so we adapted the game for seven players. It wasn’t a problem for the two first games (“Vulvas” and “Dying for a cup of coffee”) but it was for the last one (“Just Put Some Salt on It”). Since you have to replay each scene three times, the game can run very long if you play with more than five people.. As the games can be played separately, I highly recommend to playing the first two with more people if you like, but not the third one.

    “Vulvas” is an easy game, but so much fun. We nearly doubled the number of objectives, so we were very happy about it (afterwards, we continued with it all day long when we remembered a new film). For Spanish speakers that want to play this game, we translated the word “vulva” for “vagina” as the meaning in Spanish is funnier (The Spanish tend to be more open about saying some words, such as “coño” (c***) – and “vulva” is like a high level word for us).

    I’m not going to say much about the other two games, as they should be played without knowing the twists they have. However, if you need a game that is funny but at the same time addresses important issues , Mentioning the Unmentionables is your choice. It is time for women’s anatomies, problems and needs to be called by their true names.

    Glitzy Nails

    Later, we came together again and decided to play Glitzy Nails, designed by Kat Jones. Glitzy Nails explores the relations between women of different social classes, and how their problems are not only different but also they separated them in the fight for women’s rights.

    Drawing made by Sky as we were playing Glizty Nails. Drawing made by Sky as we were playing Glitzy Nails.

    The larp is for 2 or 4 players, but we decided to play with 6 (3 clients and 3 workers). Moreover, as we were 7, two of them played as one (one played the immigrant and the other the executive). Also, it is not a problem to increase the number of players in pairs (2, 4, 6, 8…), I highly recommend not playing it in pairs; it is more interesting if you can play both roles.

    We decided to make other changes to the settings. According to the design, you must play it at a table, as manicures are done in most Western countries. But, based on our experiences visiting countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam and Cambodia, we put out three armchairs for the clients and we did the manicures on our knees. It increases the feeling of humiliation and the differences between the roles. It worked very well (even all of us had pain in our legs the day after).

    For me, this game was one of the better designed in the book. It was well thought-out, well written, and it was even better when we played it. We could totally understand how women lose everything when they leave their native countries to find a new life.

    Flesh

    Writing about Flesh is, maybe, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Flesh is designed by Frederik Berg, Rebecka Eriksson and Tobias Wrigstad, and it turned out to be the strongest experience of the weekend – even a life-changing one for most of us. Trying to write a review without telling personal histories thus becomes difficult.

    First of all, Flesh it’s not a larp. It’s more like therapy. And it’s only for women (trans or cis), at least the way we played it. It requires a private space and a certain level of trust between the players. We weren’t exactly sure about how to play it (if we had to do it all together, the timing of each action…).

    This is why we adapted the game in a way we think it could work. Maybe, when you read it, you will realise we were totally wrong about it. Yes, we admit that.

    We played it in turns. Each of us chose a song that really meant something to them so they could – literally – bare their bodies and souls. Once we did that, we wrote on our bodies the problems we have with them, and our strengths. We objectified ourselves to the point of being nothing but a body. After that, the other players erase our writing for us while explaining why it is not important, letting us be only flesh.

    It was wonderful, and terrifying. We discovered things about ourselves that we had never realised before. We opened our souls, and let others in. We became broken, but managed to rebuild ourselves in a newer, stronger way.

    6066

    Writing about 6066 after Flesh is hard, because they are two totally opposite experiences. 6066 is a comedy larp written by Elin Nilsen. We played it on Sunday morning, once some guys and other girls had shown up. Even if it’s supposed to be from 3 to 6 players, there were 11 of us. I think it is a larp that can be scaled up, but I don’t recommend more than 8 (there were too many people for some of the actions).

    I have to admit that it was one of the most appealing larps for me. As a PhD in archaeology, I’m personally interested in how you can know a society by the things they left behind. In that way, using a soap opera was a really amazing way to highlight the gender role problems we are leaving behind.

    On the other hand, it was hilarious to play. We were inspired by the South American soap operas (the most common in Spain) and we translated the title as: “Amor, Lujuria y Desconfianza”. One of our friends composed the entire song for the credits, and we were singing it for days.

    I have to confess that we played it for nearly two hours, but it was so much fun. The mechanic of changing between the soap opera and the students seeing it, and being able to stop, pause and rewind was very well designed. Totally recommended.

    Conclusion

    We found all the games of #feminism that we played very interesting. It was a pity we didn’t have more time on Sunday to play more of them (we wanted to test Catcalling and A Friend in Need with the guys). So we decided two important things: first of all, we’ll have to play them another day; second , the girls will meet once a year, alone, to enjoying this amazing experience. We hope to design our own games next time.

    It was an incredible experience for us (the girls who spent the whole weekend). After that, we have become like sisters; we have shared too much to not having real bonds – something special. And that’s something that money cannot buy.

    #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology was released in 2016 after a successful crowd-funding campaign. You can read more about it here: https://feministnanogames.wordpress.com/

    #Feminism has also been chosen to be part of the E3 IndieCade 2016: http://www.indiecade.com/games/selected/feminism

  • A Tsunami of Testimonies

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    A Tsunami of Testimonies

    Written by

    Kristin Nilsdotter Isaksson has written an article, translated from Swedish by Charlie Charlotta Haldén, on the ongoing discussions about sexual assault within the Swedish larp community.

    On June 17, 2014, a new Facebook group was created for Swedish-speaking larpers who identify wholly or partially as women. The idea was to create a sanctuary for discussions about different aspects of being a female larper. Small questions, big questions, and questions of vital importance.

    Lately, a darker subject has crept into the discussion threads, and during the past few weeks, a tsunami of voices has swept over us. Post after post, comment after comment, telling stories of painful experiences. We’re talking about sexual assault. At larps, or in larping circles. Over a thousand posts detailing experiences, sharing thoughts, discussing preventive measures, and not least, holding out hands in support.

    ”It’s so important that we talk about our experiences. About how common this is, and that it’s not OK. About our right to say no, and that it’s never, ever, acceptable for someone not to listen. Everybody knows a victim, but nobody knows a perpetrator, and it’s time to take a stand now.” (anonymous)

    You can read the complete article over at Spelkult:
    http://spelkult.se/testimonies/

    The article got a lot of attention in the swedsh LARP-society and also outside, with a interview in Swedish radio. There is a lot of discussions going on and preventive arrangements from organizers and fellow larpers to immediate stop this kind of acts.