Knutepunkt | Nordic Larp

Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

Published on

2017-02-20

in

Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

Written by

Muriel Algayres

We like to engage in larp through compelling and vivid characters. However, the available tools to create them are many and diverse: whether we go with short or detailed characters, give them a lot of background or just create a short frame for the players to develop, whether we leave the control of the story to the larpwright or give more leeway towards the player’s agenda. All of these approaches are tools that can be calibrated according to each designer’s purposes.

France has in the past fifteen years enjoyed the development of its specific, character based, drama-oriented larp scene called the romanesque genre. With a heavy emphasis on character development and personal relationships, this type of game has garnered a huge, devoted following. Though it has been but recently documented (Choupaut, 2013; Algayres, 2016a), the romanesque scene has steadily evolved through almost two decades and developed some specific traits regarding game design.

This article will endeavour to present the romanesque style larp in relation to other similar larp styles in Europe, and establish some tools we use to create characters and narration in this type of larps. The objectives are to expand both the knowledge about larp production in Europe and the narrator’s toolbox to create characters.

What Is the French Style Romanesque Genre?

An Overview of the Genre

The romanesque term started being applied to games in 2010, by Frédéric Barnabé for l’Agonie du Poète (2010). However, that game was the last iteration of a long series of games coined as “emotional” or “dramatic,” which was almost as old as the practice of larp in the country. In its primary sense, romanesque means “which belongs to the realm of a novel,” a descriptive for dramatic events or actions. Therefore, it is used to describe games that are constructed as rich, narrative experiences, with pre-written characters whose rich backstory and psychology are the driving forces of the larp.

Since then, the term has been appropriated to qualify many games following the same general features. While these features might still be debated, we have focused on the following traits (Algayres, 2016a):

Focus on the character. Character creation is mostly in the hands of the organisers, and they will be very detailed, with a lot of intertwining backstory and built-in information.
A huge impact of the past which explains the details in the character. The backstory gets a significant importance in building the potential for narration and the character’s psyche. Some elements might be kept secret, to be discovered for dramatic impact.
An environment built as a microcosm. The diversity of characters serves as a means to establish the workings of society in the specific time and context of the game, which is why the romanesque usually love historically inspired settings.
The use of narrative archetypes. Romanesque larps often draw inspiration from literary classics and embrace the romanesque genre’s common tropes as a means to drive narration.
The dominance of tragedy, with character-based narrative integrating a lot of human drama, conflicts and character dilemma. This is not an absolute, though, some games advocate a lighter atmosphere or tragedy-comedy mix, such as Rêves d’Absinthe (Algayres and D’authie, 2011), or Prima La Musica (Primoot, 2016).
Tightly-knit narrative arcs, which are meant to reach their climax during the game, with characters living out an exceptional destiny or a defining moment of their lives over the course of the game.
A focus on the characters’ emotions and on each participant’s identification with their character, in the same manner as a reader identifies with a character in a work of fiction. Bleed may occur as a result of identification with the character.

The generally recognised strength of these larps is that they provide a very rich, detailed frame, with complex characters thoroughly inserted in their context and network of relationships. However, as a significant part of the world, character-building and control of the story remains in the hands of the organisers. This type of larp places greater limitations on players’ agenda and freedom (in character selection and creation especially). This is usually a design choice that creators justify by that they are using it to enrich the overall story and narrative, to create more closely connected characters and potential for tight narratives and complex story arcs.

The Historically Inspired Larp in France and in Europe

While the term romanesque has been coined to describe a very specific sub-genre of French larp culture, we can observe games with similar intent in several other European countries. It is also interesting to see that we can find similar traits in the games in the historically inspired genre. History and larp have always worked well together, since “a historical larp can have a more interesting and challenging gameplay because of the richly faceted social situations history brings with it” (Salomonsen, 2003, p. 94). Game designers from all over Europe have had the opportunity to exploit the richness of history all the while retaining the creative licence to twist accuracy for practical or dramatic purposes, and we’ll quote some significant, but by no means exhaustive, examples.

In Finland, historically-inspired larps are a part of the scene, with Viking history, the Victorian era, and Finnish history around the time of independence featured as time periods of interest. Finland, like France and for similar reasons, has had a tradition of long, very detailed characters, as the absence of workshops made it necessary to include a lot of information about the character’s psyche and environment in written form.

An interesting example is provided by the Czech larp Skoro Rassvet (Haladová, Platir et al., 2013).((Whose international runs were organised in Denmark through the organisation Solhverv.)) Skoro Rassvet is a game set in 19th century Russia, heavily influenced by Russian literature and especially Tolstoy. The game is played in a day, with a half day of workshops, and the action takes place during a family gathering for a formal dinner. In its approach and objectives, this game would certainly have been dubbed romanesque in France. The character design, however, differed sensibly. The written material was relatively short by historical larp standards (less than half a dozen pages), and most of the character development was done during the workshops, essentially through social codes and rituals, and role-playing scenes from the past (Hampejs, 2015).

Other examples from the obviously rich Czech scene include Salon Moravia (Bondy and Bondyová et al., 2104), set in a brothel during World War II, De la Bête (Pešta and Wagner et al., 2013), a super-production set in 18th century France, and Legion (Pešta and Wagner, 2015), which combines historical inspiration and hardcore larp in its depiction of a 1915 retreating military unit.

Norway also has a significant historical larp scene, which used to be dubbed “stocking larps” (Stark, 2013). Norwegian historical larps were presented at the French convention Les GNiales with great interest (Hansen, 2014). They appeared as very rich, deeply layered productions, with high requirements for historical and costume accuracy which put them close to historical reenactment, and, in keeping with Nordic larp, bigger creative agenda for the players where the building of interactions and narrative arcs were concerned. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without Stockings] (Voje and Stamnestrø et al., 2004) can be mentioned as an example of the historical drama inspiration. The game, set during a wedding in 1771, presents its objective as a mix of intrigue, personal and societal drama, integrating significant amounts of conflict and romance.

The rapidly blooming progressive scene in Italy, under the banner of the collective Terre Spezzate, has made several contributions to the historically inspired genre. I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the Mountain] (Capone and Bi , 2015) was a rich, vivid rendition of the last months of World War Two which got unprecedented media attention, support from A.N.P.I.—Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani [National Association of Italian Partisans], and praise for its thoughtful and sensitive rendition of the conflict. Chiave di Volta [Keystone] (Tireabasso and Villa Avogadro, 2015), is a lush dramatisation of the 19th century centred around the theme of power, the possibility to play both masters and servants in a complicated power play, and a huge production value. Both of these productions have cleverly integrated design elements and techniques from Nordic larp (safety mechanics, workshops etc.) while retaining their own unique style, resulting in extremely well crafted larps.

And of course, the blockbuster larp also ventured into the historical drama setting with Fairweather Manor (Boruta, Raasted and Nielsen et al., 2015), a larp set in Edwardian England and inspired by the hit TV-show Downton Abbey. While the brute force design proved partially unfit to cover the complexity of a multi-layered society (including diversity of age, rank and function), the game was effective in carrying over a lot of content and player-generated interactions. The first iteration of the larp warranted an unofficial spinoff, a second run and a sequel over the course of the following year.

Back in France, the most recent larps of the romanesque genre have shown a clear ambition to expand on the genre and make it evolve for the better through the inclusion of those nordic style techniques whose use has become widespread in recent years (workshops, black box), keener focus on directing themes, and more refined work on the societal frame. Prima la Musica (Primoot, 2016) is a larp about the French opera scene of the 19th century, using opera-inspired dramatics and music both diegetically and non-diegetically through an open, black box system. Still Water Runs Deep (Ruhja, 2014) is a Jane Austen/Dickensian inspired larp with a sharp focus on class hierarchies and gender stereotypes, which was also played as a cross-gender experience, with participants praising the insight it gave them of the opposite genders’ constraints and problematics. Finally, Harem Son Saat (Algayres, 2016b) was the first international game of the genre, using English as a main language,((Which stood for Turkish in the 1913 Ottoman background, while French was in-game a diplomatic second language.)) built around the themes of oppression, gender segregation and culture shock.

Therefore, while romanesque is solidly a French term, character-driven literary and historically inspired larps have by no means been limited to a single geographic area. The rich potential of history and its dramatisation has been widely exploited and feels still rich with great potential.

Character Design and Narrations in the Romanesque Genre

Archetypes in the Romanesque Genre

Romanesque larps are character-centred games, with a significant part of the game design being devoted to the conception of the characters, all of them organiser-created. While length and composition of characters tend to vary from one larpwright to another, a couple of techniques can be pinpointed.

The first one is what I’d like to call the smart use of archetypes. This is a very thin line to tread, as any overused archetype can become a cliché and damage the necessary suspension of disbelief. Let’s use an example. You might hear French players harp about the “switched at birth” plot, used as an ironic commentary on romanesque clichés, though, to my knowledge, it has rarely been used in the scene, except in the prohibition-game era Chicago. Illegitimate children and foundlings, however, are definitely a staple of the genre, but this is fitting to historical periods when children born out of wedlock had no status in society.

Classic or archetypal plotlines or characters can be true to period, but also resonate with an audience of participants which has usually grown up learning and enjoying these stories. It has been argued that larp itself can be viewed as an incarnation of the monomyth, each participant’s experience echoing the traditional hero’s journey. (Hook, 2010, p.34)

So how do we go about practicing the clever use of archetypes? In a romanesque setting, we consider all characters protagonists. Therefore, we’ll use archetypes to define them through several angles:

The inner nature of the character: the patriarch, the overbearing matron, the hotheaded, the cynic, the ingénue, the rebel. This is very basic and can turn cliché if the character is limited to the inner archetype.
Their contrast in relation to others (also called foil). This is particularly frequent in pairs or trios of characters, such as siblings, close friends, etc. You’ll have the optimist to the realist, the extrovert to the introvert, the by-the-rules personality against the rebellious type, etc. Foils are really useful because, through simple characterisation, they create a lot of potential for conflict between the characters.
Their position within a network of relationships and in relation to others. Each character is the participant’s protagonist, but can be another’s sibling, a third’s best friend, the romantic interest of a fourth, the antagonist to a fifth and so on.

If we just use any archetype, a character stands a sure chance to become cliché, because its archetype will be instantly identifiable, and its characterisation weak. This is where several archetypes used in conjunction with the others become useful: the character becomes more layered, therefore more human. However, the archetypes at work can still have a universal meaning to participants, which makes them particularly effective.

The Dual Approach in Character Design

Another element of character design typical to the romanesque genre is what we call the dual approach. While it is by no means limited to the romanesque, it has also become typical of some of the games. The dual approach in character design is a combination of the following elements:

The initial approach: the character’s motif or raison d’être, their reason for being present. This can be accomplished through family ties, a function or specific job, a plot-related motif. This must answer the questions: why are they here? Why should they care? Why will they stay?
The final approach: what will the character’s potential arc be? What will be their greatest moment? It can be a reveal (hence the predominance of secrets in some larps), an epiphany, a staged grand scene, a necessary evolution, but an element (or several) which will make the character’s journey (and the participant’s experience) significant and meaningful.

In a typical design, both of these approaches, as well as the archetypes at play, are handled simultaneously, as the character (and the network of characters) is constructed bit by bit. The final criteria is to analyse if the characters are playable, interesting, and enjoyable.

The objective of this type of design is to provide the participant with potential for a rich story and interactions. Some games tend to follow a more streamlined route, and have even been criticised for railroading the character’s arc too much. However, most of these games definitely have a clear narrativist approach, only limited to what is coherent with the character’s context and psyche. For some time periods in history, these elements of context and the social pressure can really be played as antagonists of their own.

Conclusion

With more than ten years of established existence and a very rich history of diverse and celebrated games, the French style romanesque scene is certainly a prime example of a national scene which strives through its own specific identity, all the while getting enriched through contact with other genres and countries.

Rêves d’Absinthe (post-game, Joram Epis).

Bibliography

Algayres, Muriel, Le GN Romanesque, Electro-GN. 2016a [date of access 29/08-2016] http://www.electro-gn.com/10332-le-gn-romanesque
Barnabé, Frédéric. De différentes approches de la conception d’un scenario [Different approaches of larp scenario building], first published 2004, to be republished 2017 https://www.electro-gn.com/10932-approches-de-la-conception-dunscenario
Choupaut, Vincent. The Frenchstyle Romanesque Larp, In Electro-larp. 2013 [date of access 29/082016] http://www.electro-larp.com/275-thefrenchstyle-romanesque-larp
Hampejs, Tomáš. Skoro Rassvet — Vodka, tears and Dostoyevsky. In The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014. Edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet, 2015.
Hook, Nathan. Larp of a Thousand Faces. In Playing Reality. Edited by Elge Larsson. Stockholm, Sweden: Interacting Arts, 2010.
Salomonsen, Xenia. The use of History in larp. In As Larp grows up—Theory and Methods in Larp. Edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Fredericksberg, Denmark: Projektgruppen KP03, 2003.
Stark, Lizzie, Larp culture in Norway, In Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Larp, 2013. [date of access 15/09-2016] http://leavingmundania.com/2013/04/25/larp-culture-in-norway/
Tirabasso, Chiara. Chiave Di Volta: The Devil is in the detail. In The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2015. Edited by Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted and Erik Sonne Georg. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet, 2016.

Personal Communication

Erlend Eidsem Hansen. Days of deeds, Nights of Myth— The Design tricks of Historic Larps in Norway. Les GNiales. Paris, France: Conference, 2014.

Ludography

Algayres, Muriel and Abbaye d’Authie. Rêves d’Absinthe [Dreams of Absinth]. Ouroux, France: Association Rôle, 2011.
Algayres, Muriel. Harem Son Saat. Château de Cernay, France: Association Rôle, 2016b. http://www.assorole.fr/haremlarp-en/
Barnabé, Frederick. L’Agonie du Poète [The Poet’s Agony]. Joyeuse Castle, France: Association Rôle, 2010. http://agoniedupoete.fr/
Bondy, Radim, Veronika Bondyová, Jan Fiala, et. al. Salon Moravia. Brno, Czech Republic, 2014. http://www.pojd.name/salon/
Boruta, Szymon, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted et. al. Fairweather Manor. Mozna, Poland: Dziobak Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken (DK) and Liveform (PL), 2015. http://www.fmlarp.com/
Capone, Andrea and Elio Bi . I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the mountain]. Villaggio delle Stelle, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015. http://www.grv.it/setteprincipati/item/424-home-ribelli.html
Haladová, Markéta, Petr Platil, Martin Buchtík, et. al. Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn]. Translated by Jeppe Bergmann Hamming, Maria Bergmann Hamming. Odense, Danmark: Association Solhverv, 2103. http://rassvet.cz/
Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. De la Bête. Valeč Castle, Czech Republic, 2013. http://www.delabete.cz
Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. Legion : Siberian Story. Hvožďany, Czech Republic: Association Rolling, 2015. http://legion.rolling.cz/
Primoot Team. Prima la Musica ou L’Opéra Terrible [Prima la Musica or the Opera Terrible]. Montbraye Castle, France: Association Urbicande Libérée, 2016.
Ruhja Team. Still Water Runs Deep. Paris, France: Association Rôle, 2014.
Tirabasso, Chiara and Daniele Cristina Villa Avogadro. Chiave di Volta [Keystone], Biella, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015 http://www.grv.it/chiave
Voje, Adrian Angelico and Anne Marie Stamnestrø et al. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without stockings]. Kleve gård, Norway: 2004. http://www.rollespill.no/rokokko/

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: L’Agonie du Poete (play, Nadine). Other photos by Joram Epis.

Published on

2017-02-19

in

Documentation

YouTube and Larp

Written by

Mo Mo O’Brien

A WARNING: This might be a bit more casual than the other essays in this book. From start to finish, my whole journey of success, I have been in way over my head. I have been surrounded by intelligent, capable people that know exactly what they are doing. If you would like to hear from them, check out literally any of the other pages. If you would like to hear my rambling about how I accidentally became a pseudo YouTube celebrity, keep reading and enjoy the ride.

My dungeons and dragons group made fun of me for going larping. I remember being so excited and talking to them all about the character I was making, and the game I had found, and how much fun I was going to have, and they went to YouTube. I began larping in an age when larp on YouTube was videos of lighting bolt packet throwers and fake looking fight scenes. They went on a marathon to show me how stupid I was going to look, and then we continued to roll dice and describe fighting magic orcs.

My name is Mo Mo O’Brien, and if there’s one thing you need to know about me it’s that I don’t care what people think, so despite the mockery from my tabletop group, I went larping anyway. It was everything I knew it would be, and so much more. I instantly knew this was going to take over my entire life. I went to more events, and uploaded more pictures to my social media, and more people started asking me questions.

I had recently started a YouTube channel, and I thought I’d answer all the questions in a video. I called the video “The Basics of larp” and it covered everything from the definition of larp, to the different genres, to what you needed to start playing. That was the video that began it all. My channel now has over 70,000 subscribers, that video now has almost 400,000 views, the comments are flooded with requests for more larp videos, and I can no longer go to any larp without at least one person coming up to me and telling me they were there because of me. My YouTube channel has even taken me to places like panelling at San Diego comic con and being in a popular candy commercial. Since then, larping YouTube channels have been exponentially growing, and are still growing. So, I thought I’d give people some tips for larp YouTube Channels!

1. Speak to Non-larpers

You don’t have to tell larpers why larp is awesome. They already know. If you see someone with a t-shirt for a band you like, you don’t walk over to them and try and convince them why that band is awesome. They’re already wearing the shirt. If a larper sees ANYTHING larp related, good chance is they’re probably going to like it regardless of content. Don’t limit your audience. Any video where I talk about larp, I always explain what it is as fast and as simply as I can within the first 20 seconds. How I describe it is “an adult game of make believe.” That seems to cover any genre of larp, no matter how experimental, and everyone can picture it since everyone knows what “make believe” is. Then I proceed to talk about it as if i’m explaining it to a group of veteran larpers, and noobies.((Slang on newbies, for beginners or people without any pre existing knowledge and experience.)) People are all secretly narcissistic and love seeing themselves in things. So, try to make videos that non-larpers could see themselves in. In every video I never assume the viewer knows what larp is, and then explain it in a way that could appeal to everyone. Larp is so broad and so many things, there is always something someone will like about it; costume designing, prop designing, writing, acting, combat. There are styles of larp that incorporate more sport, more tears, more competition, more costume showcasing, more set dressing. There’s a aspect and style of larp for everyone, so make sure everyone knows that. Which means….

2. Learn How to Tell a Larp Story

My friend Jamie who runs my main larp campaign once gave me a very long, slightly drunk, speech on how to tell a larp story to non-larpers. First of all: non-larpers do not care about mechanics, skills, or rules. Not at first anyway. When people ask “what was the last book you read?,” their first question will usually always be “What was it about?”, not whether it fit into the three act structure or took a more experimental approach. Do not tell non-larpers that you have a level four fire spell that allows you to hit a monster with 30 health for 10 flame damage. Say “I hit a monster with a fireball.” One of those stories sounds WAY more exciting than the other. Sell your larp adventures for the adventures you had, not the numbers it gave your character sheet. When you’re larping, the emotions are real, so tell the story as if you were ACTUALLY THERE because that’s what larp feels like. Not everyone likes numbers or behind the scenes information, but everyone loves a good story.

3. Sell Yourself

This is not as skeezy as it sounds. What i mean by this is just find all the best parts about yourself, and showcase them. YouTubers compared to a lot of other “celebrities” is that we are a far more personal art medium. We do “question and answers” where viewers can learn all about us, vlogs((Video blogs.)) where they can spend the day with us, and it’s a lot less “glitz and glamour” than other beings of well known status. People watch a video for the content, but they stick around and subscribe for the YouTuber. This doesn’t mean invent a new personality. This means find the parts of your personality people like, and electrify them. That goes for your characters as well.

To expand on this idea, you should check out another YouTuber that’s NOT a larper, but pretty close: Miranda Sings. Miranda is a fictional character with a YouTube channel, created by comedian and singer Colleen Ballinger. In 2008 Colleen started uploading purposefully bad song covers to YouTube as a joke, and Miranda has gained over 7 million subscribers since. As she developed the character of “Miranda” she says she just read her YouTube comments, took note of what viewers found weird or obnoxious, and started to do it even more. Take note of what aspects of your characters and yourself your viewers like, and do it more.

4. Make It Look Nice

Sit in front of a lit window or bright light source. Make sure any fans, or air conditioners, or any other machinery making noise is turned off. Make sure your camera isn’t making you look too orange or too blue (you can change this by adjusting your lighting. Natural light gives off a blue tint, unnatural gives off an orange.) Make sure your background looks tidy and nice.

For a while, I thought none of this really mattered…until I went back and watched my old videos. All these technical things are like the bass line of a song. You don’t notice when it’s there, but OH BOY do you notice when it’s not. So make sure you’re well lit, your sound is good, and your shot is set up nice. Which also means, pay attention to your background. If you want people to pay attention to nothing but your words, consider a blank wall behind you. Talking about costuming? Maybe display some of your pieces behind you. Want people to have a glimpse of your personality? Show your whole bedroom. Let your background tell a story.

5. Get That Larp Footage

Just talking to a camera is fine, but when you cut to something else, it makes sure the audience is paying attention, because it gives them some new to look at. Also it saves you the time and effort of trying to do your awesome larp justice. You can just show your audience so they don’t have to imagine it.

One of the biggest rules in visual storytelling: show, don’t tell.

Hide your camera, stay out of game for a while, ask for filming privileges in exchange for some pictures of the event, ask the organiser if they can make the camera cannon in the game.

Even if it’s just pictures someone else took, ask them if you may use the pictures.

6. Be Picky

Larp is really hard to translate to video because, a lot of the times it’s not a spectator sport. Its meant to be experienced, not watched for entertainment. So, try and pick the footage that portrays what larp FEELS like, not looks like. Add some music or sound effects to fight scenes, so it doesn’t just sound like latex hitting latex matched with grunting. Pick those intense scenes with dramatic lighting. Remember to market to non-larpers. People don’t want to see a larp, they want to feel it. Choose the footage, and edit it accordingly, that portrays how that moment felt when you were in it.

When you larp, a lot of the emotions and adrenaline is real, but this is a little harder to translate to film. When you watch a movie, a scene could have a completely different feel or intensity based on the cinematography, the editing, the music, the lighting. Picture a shot of a few kids splashing in the water. Now picture it with happy, upbeat, ukulele music. It’s a fun day at the beach! Viewers are content, and calm, and are reminded of carefree summer days. Now, picture the exact same shot, but with the jaws theme song underneath. Not a carefree beach day anymore is it? Footage provides what the larp looks like, but what you do with it determines how your viewers feel about it.

I tried to put together all of these things into one of my videos which I called “Lock Stock & Barrel: a five minute larp.” I was dared by another YouTube channel to create a larp that would last 5 minutes, and film it. So I created a simple life or death scenario; 6 people locked in a post apocalyptic shelter that was running out of air, and the maximum inhabitant capacity would drop by 1 every 1 minute. Meaning, in order to survive, one person had to be eliminated or evacuated every minute. They were given items like: booze, poison, water, a gun, bullets, cookies, and other items designed to kill each other. There was an also an exit to the shelter with a 30% chance of survival in the wasteland. This was apparently fun for the players, and they wished it was a little longer. For the sake of a youtube video though, it was the perfect length. Because it was such a short amount of time, it was high energy, panicked, and 5 minutes of intensity. There was no time for spaced out improvised beautiful dialogue. It worked better, because it was messy and all over the place, like the real situation would have been if it was filmed for an audience. I also held it in my own home so I set up my filming lights, I got to set the scene the way I wanted, all with filming this in mind. Like it was an improvised movie.

But the biggest tip I can give, not just to larp YouTubers, but all YouTubers in general: Just do it! Don’t worry about messing up, or having the right equipment, or not being ready. We all had to start somewhere. Watch the videos you make, figure out what you liked, and what you didn’t, and adjust accordingly. Just figure it out as you go along. Fall into your place. So get going!

As an addendum to this piece, Simon Brind conducted a brief interview with Mo Mo O’Brien; edited highlights are included here:

Simon Brind: Would you tell us a little more about the design for the five minute larp? Do the people have characters? Did you pre-write them or did the players do it? Was there a set?

Mo Mo O’Brien: It was very light rules, basically if they wanted to do anything physically, they just asked out loud and I told them if it went ok. They had characters they decided on themselves. Formed their own relationships and backstories. All the knowledge they were given was they had been in this bunker for almost a year. We made up the characters on the spot in a workshop before the game. The set, was my living room, with a spotlight in the middle. You can watch the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgQFuLhe-ks

SB: Are there ways that larp could become a spectator sport? or a spectator event? Would it still be larp?

O’B: If larp was a spectator sport, it would be called improv theatre. If all the mechanics and techniques were designed to entertain an audience and not the player, it would be an episode of whose line is it anyway. Even if there was an audience to an actual larp event, by my definition, it would become improv theatre. Though I’m sure there’s 40 essays out there by people much smarter than me with different theories about it.

SB: How else could YouTube be used in larp? Could one be played out using YouTube videos and responses do you think? Or as a part of a game?

O’B: What I would love to see is YouTube being used as a tool in larp. We have all this new technology that I feel could be utilised better. I recently did a game called As we know it that took place entirely, on my own, sitting in a closet, and all the interactions were over text. It was a game about isolation and through technology, perfect isolation was able to be achieved. There’s so much people can do with video, I think it could be used in larp a lot more.

SB: Can you tell the story of a larp in video? Could the 5 minute experiment scale up to 30 minutes, 3 hours or even 3 days?

O’B: Could I tell the story of a 3 day larp in a 10 minute video? Absolutely. Especially when it comes to internet media, it is typically more likely to hold someone’s attention. It’s important to find the right balance between rambling, and cutting it short. Say what you NEED to say. Sometimes you need to cut what you WANT to say, which is the most heartbreaking thing about good editing. Take notes before you film. It helps you formulate your thoughts, keeps you from forgetting anything, and will help eliminate nonsense and rambling.

SB: Nordic larps have done a great job of documenting their games and they are producing some great promotional videos((Promotional videos for Fairweather Manor, Black Friday and the like.)) too. But what else would you like to see from game organisers? How could they improve?

O’B: Blockbuster nordic larps are EASILY the simplest kind of larp to film, because it is so close to improvised theatre. They usually have the best costumes, props, sets, and scenes since it’s more about characters, than character sheets. Since it’s typically more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of boffer larps, it’s easier to share, and easier to relate to, because you have to worry less about portraying how the experience feels, because it looks so nice from the outside. So I think what the western larp media needs, is to focus on what the western larp community HAS. Focus more on the competitive and self improving nature of western sport style larps, and learn how to translate that feeling of adrenaline and action to film.

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: The author during a video shoot. (Photo: Carol O’Brien). Other photos by Mo Mo O’brien.

Published on

2017-02-18

in

Nordic Larp

Playing the Stories of Others

Written by

Kaisa Kangas

Larps that treat social issues often aim to create empathy for real people who live in circumstances different from ours by putting us in their shoes. One example is provided by games where players from privileged backgrounds take on the roles of characters from a marginalised group, or experience situations where they are in a marginalised position.

In the Norwegian larp Europa (Fatland and Tanke et al., 2001), the Nordic countries mirrored the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Nordic players spent a week as asylum seekers in a reception centre in a fictitious Balkan country. Another Norwegian larp, Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), treats the spreading of HIV in the New York gay community in the 1980’s. Various runs of the game gave many players an idea on what it is to be HIV positive and raised consciousness about queer issues. Killed in the Name of Honor (Samad, Kharroub and Samamreh, 2013), organised by three Palestinian women, was set in a matriarchal culture where young men could face a honour killing if they didn’t adhere to the sexual mores of the community. In the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar (AbdulKarim, Arouri and Kangas et al., 2013 & 2016), we created an alternative reality where Finland lived under an apartheid regime and occupation similar to real world Palestine (see e.g. Kangas, 2014a and Pettersson, 2014a).

2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

While Killed in the Name of Honor reversed gender roles, Halat hisar turned geopolitical power relations upside down. In the game world, Northern Europe was a conflict zone full of dictatorships, and Arab countries were rich and influential. Finnish players became oppressed people living under occupation, and Palestinians portrayed privileged foreigners. Such a role reversal is in a sense a form of cultural exchange, and it makes for illuminating post-game reflections, which I will discuss in more detail later.

However, the stories we live in larp are filtered through our real-life selves. In the end, our unconscious reactions and interpretations of events are based on real-life experience. We have been socialised to certain roles and positions of which we are not even fully aware. Therefore it’s difficult to consciously set them aside.

A good example is Mad About the Boy (Edland, Raaum and Lindahl, 2010), a game designed for women. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious disease has killed all men. The characters belong to three-woman family units hoping to get selected into a government-run artificial insemination program. The applicants go through the last stage of the process at a secret forest location where three government officials, a politician, a physician, and a psychologist, observe and evaluate their behaviour.

In 2015, a Swedish team made a male version of the game, It’s a Man’s World (Gissén, 2015). It preserved most of the original scenario while switching the genders. Thus, there were, for example, artificial wombs instead of an insemination program. The game became completely different from the original. According to Sandqvist (2016), male players found the basic setting uninteresting: a situation where you are under surveillance and the only way to succeed is to be as perfect as possible. The female players of Mad About the Boy, however, found it easier to relate to such a situation because they had real-life experiences of being under pressure in a patriarchal society.

Although larp is an excellent vehicle for creating strong emotions, it cannot replicate other people’s experiences. Halat hisar doesn’t teach a Nordic person how it really feels to live under occupation. However, role reversal can shed light on unexplored aspects of ourselves, power structures and our roles in them. In this article, I discuss this based on my experience of having been one of the organisers of Halat hisar in both runs of the game.

Contextualisation

Games where people from privileged groups play those who are in a marginalised position rightfully raise concerns of being disrespectful. One concern is that such games, especially if emotionally strong, could create a false sense of sharing the experience of marginalised people. One way to avoid this is to properly contextualise the game. When the contextualisation happens in dialogue with the group whose stories are played out in the game, it can spark fruitful reflection.

The German organisation Waldritter e.V. runs refugee-themed educational larps with the aim of preventing racism and creating a culture of acceptance. The games end with a moderated discussion. A Syrian refugee took part in one game, sharing his personal story of the journey to Germany (Steinbach, 2016). In the debrief of the 2015 Denmark run of Just a Little Lovin’, HIV, AIDS, and cancer, important topics of the game, were contextualised. Each run of the game has had queer participants, and the 2015 Denmark run also had a cancer survivor.

Mohamad Rabah designed the debrief for the 2016 run of Halat hisar to include dialogue between international and Palestinian participants. First, the players went through exercises that aimed to detach them from the game experience, such as guided meditation and the like. After that, there was a facilitated discussion in small groups with a Palestinian in each group. The Finnish and international players could ask the Palestinians about their real life experiences and thus put the game events into context. We had a rule that you could ask anything but the discussion would stay in the debrief group—you would not share its contents with outsiders.

Several participants found this eye opening. A Finnish journalist who participated in the 2016 run wrote in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat:

When the game ended, there was a debriefing. As one part of it we were divided into small groups, each of which had a Palestinian player as a part of the group. We could ask them about the game and the reality of Palestine.

I was naive and thought that the game, as most fiction, was built on exaggerated real-life events.

The truth in Palestine, however, is worse than the game. In the protests at Birzeit University have seen much more than one student casualty.

The worst thing was the realisation that after the larp the Palestinian players had to return to their everyday lives, where the game and it’s happenings were a reality.

I cannot claim that I’d understand what they had to go through. But when I read the news about Palestinians suffering, the human tragedy behind them seems a bit more real.

Jussi Ahlroth, 2016

Another Finnish player said that Halat hisar didn’t allow her to understand how it feels to be oppressed, but it did make her realise what it means to be privileged. A Finn can choose whether to take part in the struggle against the occupation of Palestine, but a Palestinian cannot. The larp caused her to reflect on how privilege can be problematic even when combined with good intentions. She said this motivated her to use her privilege to make space for others instead of taking it for herself.

The Normal and the Abnormal

In international mainstream media, stories about Palestinians are often told from the point of view of foreign journalists or Israelis. Even when the coverage is sympathetic to Palestinians, it does not often let Palestinians narrate their own stories, portraying Palestinians only as victims, as if that was the sum of their existence.

While this can build empathy for Palestinians, it also makes Palestinians into objects instead of subjects—”others”, rather than us. We begin to expect that someone who is part of us tells the Palestinian story, as if Palestinians couldn’t do it themselves. This affects our attitudes toward Palestinians, and makes us less interested in their personal experiences. One of the goals of Halat hisar is to break this illusion by bringing Palestinians and internationals to play together. After all, in the minds of larpers, others don’t larp.

However, based on post-game reflections and feedback, Palestinian players themselves also received new insights from the game. In the role reversal of Halat hisar, Palestinians play characters from the rich and democratic Arab League (compared to the EU in the game materials)—journalists, activists, human right workers, etc. Because the game events are close to home, some Palestinian players have found it hard to stay in character (Musleh, 2015). On the other hand, portraying foreign journalists and other internationals allows them to channel their own experiences into useful game material (Pettersson 2014b, Hamouri 2015). Some Palestinian players have also seen their own situation in a new light through the game. One of them described his experience in the 2013 run:

Sometimes when you’re living in a unique situation, you stop perceiving things that are happening around you and to you as abnormal, you become part of a social blend that is neither natural nor normal. But when you step outside and watch your life as a third party, that is when you’re shocked by the reality that you have been part of most of your life.

Zeid Khalil, Life under Occupation, 2014

Oppression is not just about laws and practices nor the physical violence used to enforce them, but also about everyday social dynamics. There are the roles of the oppressed and the oppressors and—certainly in the case of Palestine—various outsider roles. In this hierarchy, those who are oppressed have less power and privileges. When you have lived your whole life in a situation of oppression, things like restrictions of movement, humiliating checkpoint searches and condescending behaviour from foreigners may feel normal.

In the game, the privileged background of Finnish players created a social environment with dynamics different from those of real-world Palestine. After all, a feeling of normalcy is hard to establish in larps, and no amount of workshopping can equal a lifetime of socialisation. To Finnish players, the game events are unexpected and shocking, and their in-game behaviour occasionally reflects this. For example, a player could be induced to radically change their character’s opinions after encountering violence by soldiers, even though it would be routine for the character. In a sense, the players react in a normal way to abnormal situations.

The fact that Finnish characters sometimes behave differently than the Palestinian players would do provides fruitful material for the post-game discussion. A Palestinian player from the 2013 run even found the experience empowering:

For example before this larp, I would have not cut any conversation or expressed any anger in my real life while discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a foreigner, even if I felt insulted. In the larp I was playing a role of a foreigner and by default I was insulting a Finnish student by trying to “own” her suffering when discussing the Finnish-Uralian conflict. The character I was talking to in that moment screamed at me and cut the conversation. In reflecting on this incident in my real life, I always have the choice to continue speaking with some annoying foreigner, but I have never chosen not to speak with them. This incident made me re-think about a space of choice in deciding with whom to discuss this PalestinianIsraeli conflict with from the people I meet in my life.

Majd Hamouri, Birth of Larp in the Arab World, 2015

To the Finnish player, this kind of appropriation wasn’t a routine part of life. She instinctively recognised its abnormality and felt entitled to stand up against it. However, it’s not unusual for internationals visiting Palestine to put themselves in the centre and concentrate on how painful it is for them to see what is happening without considering how Palestinians perceive their statements.

A Militarised Society

Like any cultural exchange, a larp where you switch places with others makes you see yourself, your own culture and your own society in a different way. To me as an organiser of Halat hisar, one of the illuminating things has been the military action in the game.

Before the game, some of the Palestinian participants were worried that the soldiers wouldn’t be portrayed realistically enough. After all, our soldier extras were Finns who don’t live every day under military occupation. Moreover, our extras had never been to Palestine to witness the behaviour of Israeli soldiers. Before the first run of Halat hisar, I was also a bit concerned about this.

However, you don’t learn to act like a soldier by watching soldiers, but through practice. In the end, portraying a soldier comes down to things like posture, movement, and certain kind of efficiency. Military training has the same basics everywhere. In Finland, there is no shortage of people who have undergone it.

Most of our soldier extras came from a group of airsoft military simulation enthusiasts. They did not have previous larp experience but all of them had completed military service, and some had been on UN peacekeeping missions. If anything, they were sometimes too professional, considering that most Israeli soldiers serving on the Occupied West Bank are teenage conscripts. We also had a few experienced larpers playing soldiers to add some of the petty oppression and humiliation emblematic of military occupation.

In both runs, the extras surprised the players by how soldier-like they were. This made me reflect on what a militarized society we Finns live in. In Finland, military service is mandatory for men, and voluntary for women.((It is possible for men to do a community service instead for reasons of conscience. However, a complete refusal will lead to a prison sentence of about six months. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to get exempt on the grounds of physical or mental health.)) As of 2013, almost 80 percent of Finnish males of at least 30 years of age had completed the military service. (Purokuru, 2013)

Palestinians, on the other hand, don’t have this systemic military training of half the population. Armed resistance to the occupation is secretive and selective in nature, not something everybody is expected to participate in. Thus, it probably doesn’t occur to the Palestinian participants that acting like a soldier comes naturally to many Finns.

This also reflects different attitudes in our societies about the idea of using violence to resist a hostile army. In Finland, it’s taken for granted that enemy soldiers crossing onto Finnish soil will be shot and killed. A person who questions this idea is not taken seriously in the political mainstream. Even when people advocate reducing military expenses or removing the mandatory service, they don’t promote non-violence in the face of an invasion.

In Palestine, the relation between violent and non-violent resistance to military occupation is a major topic of debate. For example, Mahmoud Abbas, the acting president of the Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly condemned all violent resistance, even though the armed wing of Fatah, his party, practices it. In addition, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative party, Mustafa Barghouti, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 2005 presidential election, actively promotes non-violent resistance. (Rassbach, 2012)

Moreover, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the official representative of the Palestinian people, renounced violence when signing the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, although various Palestinian groups have kept using violence. For comparison, the ANC (African National Congress) never abandoned the principle of violent resistance, not even during the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa. It is also difficult to imagine such a statement from the Finnish government. But why should arguments for non-violence be more outlandish in Finland, living in peace, than in Palestine, which is under daily attacks?

Cultural Exchange

I have previously toyed with the idea of larp as experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2014b; 2015). A game that reverses the roles of players from two different cultural or social categories can also be seen as a playful attempt to study culture. In a sense, it is a form of cultural exchange. This aspect is heightened when the game has a contextualising debrief where participants from the two groups share their experiences.

Culture is often narrowly thought of as something connected to a geographical area, as in the statement, culture is different in Palestine and Finland. Usually, language plays an important role, too; for example, English-speaking countries seem like a connected cultural area, and language minorities within a country are perceived as having their own culture. However, there are cultural spheres inside a country or a language area, and they are sometimes determined by social positions. For example, we can speak of male culture or working class culture. These cultures frequently extend over the borders of national culture and connect people more strongly than it does—we may feel that we have more in common with people who share our educational background than with people who speak the same language.

In a sense, everybody played their own culture in Halat hisar. Although the political situation of Finland was modelled on Palestine, Finns didn’t try to replicate for example, the ways family relations work in Palestine. The culture in occupied Finland was based on real life Finnish culture, and Palestinian players created the culture of the rich and democratic Arab world. And yet, there were changes. The geopolitical power relations were altered; the roles of the global north and south switched. Arab characters were privileged, and under the occupation, Finns were deprived of their basic human rights.

One interesting aspect of the game was the interaction between characters from these two worlds. It was sometimes different from real-life communication between Palestinians and foreigners. This is no surprise, since the roles were reversed, and we unconsciously react based on the socio-cultural positions that we have grown used to.

Reflecting on this after the game can make us question our social roles and positions. It raises the question of to what extent our cultural and social patterns are determined by power politics. How would they change if we were put into a more or less fortunate position in the world than the one we are in right now? Killed in the Name of Honor did the same experiment by reversing gender roles. It would also be interesting to reverse class hierarchies this way in larp.

In my Nordic Larp Talk on experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2015), I argued that larp can’t really teach us how it is to live in e.g. a hunter-gatherer society, but it can give us valuable perspectives into our own culture. Similarly, playing the stories of others doesn’t make us feel the same way they do or give us the same experiences they have had. However, together with a proper post-game contextualisation, doing so can help us understand their situation better, and build solidarity. At the same time, playing out the stories of others can reveal something about ourselves and make us see our social environments and positions in a new light.

Bibliography

Ahlroth, Jussi. Two days and one night under occupation—Halat hisar was a game about political violence. Translated by Ville-Eemeli Miettinen. Helsingin Sanomat, Aug 20, 2016 [date of access 19/09-2016] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3_PaDZnAgngCkeRqzSB3c02Ll2UQEARER9x_Kt4w7U/edit [No longer available]
[The Finnish original: date of access 09/09-2016] http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/a1471579548971
Hamouri, Majd. Experiencing life from a new angle. In Birth of Larp in the Arab World. Edited by Ane Marie Anderson, Riham Kharroub, Hilda Levin and Mohamad Rabah. Rollespilsakademiet. 2015
Kangas, Kaisa. Bringing the Occupation Home. In The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp, 2014. Edited by Jon Back. Sweden. 2014a
Kangas, Kaisa. Experimental Anthropolohy at KoiKoi, Veitsen alla, 2014b [date of access 09/09-2016] https://veitsenalla.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/experimental-anthropology-atkoikoi/
Kangas, Kaisa. Experimental Anthropology, Nordic Larp Talks. 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCj93m9u3Xs
Musleh, Loai. When I was a soldier. In Birth of Larp in the Arab World. Edited by Ane Marie Anderson, Riham Kharroub, Hilda Levin and Mohamad Rabah. Rollespilsakademiet. 2015
Pettersson, Juhana. Larp for Change. In The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp. Edited by Jon Back, Sweden: 2014a
Pettersson, Juhana. Interview: Zeid Khalil, a Palestinian participant. In Life Under Occupation: a documentation book for the larp Halat Hisar. Edited by Juhana Pettersson. Finland: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura [Society for Nordic Roleplaying] 2014b. p. 13 [date of access 09/09-2016] http://nordicrpg.fi/life_under_occupation.pdf

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: 2016 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen). Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

Published on

2017-02-17

in

Techniques

Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

Written by

Rosalind Göthberg

Food is an essential part of any culture. Taste and smell may be some of our more abstract senses but they have the power to bring us closer to memories and common experiences than many of the other senses. Anyone who pretends to be an intellectual knows about Marcel Proust and his Madeleine biscuit; how the taste of the Madeleine brought forth memories of the protagonist’s childhood with crystal clear vividity. It is our belief that food has this power. Food is very strongly culturally bound. What is deemed edible or taboo is strongly rooted in us, and often it does not matter that we intellectually know that something is safe or even tasty. If our culture has taught us that dog meat or insects are taboo we will have a very hard time bringing ourselves to try them. Simply put, food is a strong carrier of both memories and common culture.

Eating food is also often a social ritual. The time during the day when we gather together, and share our experiences with each other. In all these ways food and eating are excellent tools to carry a narrative. To enhance an experience of being in an alien or different culture, or even literally to act as plot-tools. Still it is our experience that a lot of larp designers forget about the power food can hold over the participants experience. Below, we will share our experiences as both organisers and kitchen helpers/volunteers. We hope that our experience and creativity both will bring food to the forefront when it comes to narrative tools but also inspire more larp-designers to use the kitchen staff and the food as narrative tools. If they do it is our belief that they deeply will enhance the larp experience for their participants.

The Food

We are very emotional about what we eat. This is natural since we quite literally would die if we did not eat. Getting food when we are really hungry is among the most pleasurable experiences in the world. Likewise the disappointment of realising you cannot get food when you are really hungry can be devastating. There are very clear cultural connections to food. What is supposed to taste good, and what is expensive. Even if we try to pretend that champagne and caviar are really cheap in a certain larp culture the larpers will have a hard time accepting this as truth. Likewise, presentation means a lot for the eating experience. Texture, colours, the way it is presented and plated. If you understand this you can start to really play around with the food to create the feeling you yourself envisioned as a organiser and larpwriter. We will now present some case studies of how we have used the food itself to enhance a narrative and in some instances even created narrative with it. We have made jello to make a larp about American gods feel more American and we have made hundreds of fluffy little cakes to give a mad hatter feeling to a mental ward in fable inspired fairy tale larps. Food is a way to involve another sense into a full body larp experience and we want to tell you a little about the way we have done that in the past.

Beyond the Barricades — Literally Putting the Narrative in the Food

Beyond the Barricades (Göthberg and Wei, 2015) was a larp inspired by Les Misérables, it took place during the French Revolution of 1832. The players portrayed the revolutionaries on the barricade and all either deserted the cause or died heroically in the ending scene. The wish was to create a feeling of constant pressure from the outside, both from other barricades to stay strong and from the military to give up. We also wanted to serve very simple food, something that made the characters, all from different socio-economical classes contrast each other. Some saw it as luxury dinner, other as basically inedible garbage. The meals were very simple, a french onion soup without the garnish or quite literally lentils and garlic. It was carried in beyond the barricades by the kitchen staff in buckets and served together with loafs of bread. However, in some of the breads letters from another barricade were hidden. This created hilarious discussions between the NPC players, organisers and kitchen staff regarding how to pace the NPCs dramatic curve alongside the dramatic curve served to the players in the breads, making sure that the NPC’s portraying revolutionaries from the same barricade as the letter inside the breads followed the same narrative curve as the letters we served up for lunch or dinner. It also helped giving a feeling of a meaningful surrounding outside the barricade and created some nice scenes when the bad news of the other barricade falling under the military attacks were delivered in a bread during the last day. The kitchen staff also used the food to guilt the players characters into doubting their commitment to the revolution. By blaming the revolutionaries for cutting off supply lines resulting in less profits for the poor workers that made the food for them, and the further the larp went bringing in more and more meager supplies the food became a symbol for the fruitlessness of the revolution. This was possible to do since there was extra food available in the off-game area, and we also served up a feast on the evening after the larp ended.

Made in Hessbrand — Starvation and Disgust

Made in Hessbrand (Zeta, Johnsson, Modin and Isaksson) ran in 2015 and was a part of the long going fantasy campaign, Heart of War. The setting was far away from the war in question. Deep in the countryside of Hessbrand, a country visually and culturally inspired by Ireland in the 14th century. The story was something along social revolt and miserable failure. The players portrayed Hessbrännian workers and a manufacture for buttons or supervisors from an occupation force. During the larp the players made a revolt, barricaded themselves in and finally got completely massacred by arriving soldiers. The feeling the organisers wanted to communicate was one of poverty, sickness, working too much in the factory and oppression. We tried to make that happen through the food serving, but in the same time we wanted to serve tasty food so that people could eat their full. We started of presenting ourselves and the food to the players before game start. We played disgusting and filthy characters. Everyone had probably seen me sneeze in the pots. We asked them to actively play down the food as weird looking and disgusting. The food served was “Fishys mush” which was named after the colour they had, green and yellow. They were served together with honey glazed fried cabbage, bread, hummus, and fried bacon. The compliments were tasty and therefore made it possible for players who have a hard time to stomach the mush on account of them looking almost inedible to still get a decent meal. The green mush was green lentils cooked in garlic and olive oil until it turned into a porridge and the yellow mush was simply mashed potatoes with a mushroom sauce mixed into it which gave it a greyish colour and lumpy texture.

This meant that the food was very tasty even if it looked horrible. This together with the player actively joking about how disgusting the mushes were and the kitchen staff portrayal of thieving lying entrepreneurs happy to make money out of others misery helped create a feeling of the food as a horrible thing you did not want to touch with a ten foot pole, but the only nutrition to get within walking distance. It increased the players’ feeling of being abused by a system and the feeling of poverty. In the same time the actual food was really tasty and filling.

Last Will—The taste of something different

Last Will (Stenler, Strand and Gamero 2014) was a larp set in a dystopian future when Chinese culture had grown in importance together with American. This created a vision of the future where a lot of texts were written in Chinese and Chinese culture was present in name culture and such. Last Will was a larp about modern day slavery and the loss of democratic rights, set in a dystopian future Sweden, in a gladiator stall. The players portrayed slaves of free workers (who lived under slave like conditions). They were not allowed to leave the gym where they lived on plastic mats behind plastic sheet walls. Their whole life circled around making sure the fighters were good enough to survive the gladiator-style fights. Food was served from “upstairs” quite literally as both the in-game administration and the off game organisers were sitting up the stairs from the playing area. The organisers had a clear vision of what they wanted the food to say. It was suppose to speak industry, impersonal, calculated nutrition and Asian. This was very well achieved. The food was simple lentil stews with potatoes and other root vegetables. Added in was also seaweed which gave the food an unpleasant slimy texture and a slightly Asian flavour. It was served in vacuum packed bags of plastic, the food weighed by me and the other helpers to make sure it was more or less the exact amount of an adult’s daily intake or calories, supervised by the cooking organisers. It was then frozen and thawed in water baths before served at the venue. Together with your allotted plastic bag you would get seaweed crackers and some of the characters even got “vitamins” to moderate their health. These “vitamins” and the calculated sizes of the food gave the players a feeling of being under constant supervision and moderation from the people upstairs. The Asian flavours helped create a feeling for the culture that larp was portraying and if you could not stomach the seaweed lentil stew and felt you needed something else to eat the players could go to the off game area where there was plenty of fruits, sandwiches, chocolate and hugs. This made it possible to serve food that was a bit strange in flavour because if the players could not stomach it there was a backup solution.

Tre Kronor, Lindängen and the luxury of the upper class

Just as it is hard for players to really immerse themselves in an experience of poverty and hunger if the food offered is a cornucopia of delights, playing on themes of luxury and richness will also be enhanced and helped by the right food. More than that, food can work as a nice divider between rich and poor at larps where different economic classes mingles. Tre Kronor (Linder, Wånngren and Ahlbom, 2012) was a small one night event. The setting a high status upper class freemasonry lodge’s yearly banquet. During the larp the kitchen staff were players as well, but we paid less than those playing upper class. A professional cook planned and executed lavish multiple course dinners for the upstairs crowd that the staff heated and served during the larp. The downstairs staff got simple soup and cheap alcohol. This created a nice division between player groups, a feeling of entitlement in the upper class characters and a feeling of oppression for the downstairs crowd. The kitchen, dressed up in uniform clothing helped to create an atmosphere where any wish or demand was upheld.

Another larp where the players portrayed the upper class was Lindängen Boarding School (Elofsson and Lundkvist, 2013). In this section I want to concentrate on the food and how it acted to help create a feeling of luxury for the players. Sometimes you might not have the possibility to get a real chef to make the food, but there is a lot you can do to play around with the feeling of more luxurious food for the participants even as a volunteer with no formal training. We will talk more about the different way we choose to portray Lindängen below but there is still some interesting points to be made about the food itself on the different runs. During Lindängen 1 (2013) we opted for classical dishes from Swedish schools but in a fancier setting. Green pea soup with white wine instead of the traditional brown pea soup. Salad served in pretty containers, and homemade bread (cheap and luxurious) gave a feeling of more upper class establishment. During Lindängen 2 (2014) the kitchen chose to be even more upscale, with a lot of energy going into making food from scratch which made it possible to serve food that usually is quite expensive even if it did not cost that much since it was made from cheap ingredients such as gnocchi and stuffed peppers. For Lindängen 3 (2016) the homemade croissants were a hit that gave a quite ordinary breakfast spread a more fancy tone, together with the attention to details such as cheese roses and whipped butter.

The Fluffy Muffin Plot — When you Cook up Larp Magic

Sometimes just the presence of the most mundane normal thing will create game for a large group of players. These stories are never planned but happens in the moment. Some might even argue that this is the basic strength of larp as a medium. We are as larpers hyper-aware of any possible storyline and we tend to try and make sense of the random. During Lindängen 3 this happened to great effect in the many twists and turns of “the fluffy muffin plot.” It is—as are so many of these larp stories—too long and too personal to be of a broader interest in its entirety but we will try to give you the boiled down version here, to explain how you can create play with food at larps.

One player (who portrayed a very stern and scary teacher) asks the organisers one morning for some “fluffy muffins.” He was going to make a psychological experiment. The organisers were a bit confused but asked the kitchen staff to make some fluffy muffins. The thought of a very stern and sadistic teacher playing around with six fluffy muffins generated a lot of laughter in the kitchen. The kitchen obviously made sure to have the windows open and to talk about this very loudly to spread the rumours about the fluffy muffins and their longing to spit in them. By the time the muffins reached the teacher who ordered them, the rumour that the kitchen spat in them was already in motion, and therefore by larp magic became true. The kitchen totally DID spit in them.

The psychological experiment is done and create an interesting scene for the players and that could have been the end of the fluffy muffins. However there were five muffins left so the teacher served them to the five students with the highest status in the third year. They were of course terrified to accept such gifts from their horrible teacher, but decided after much anguish that to eat them was better than to not eat them. However one of them was so curious about what these muffins actually meant that he sends a younger student to find out about the muffins (since speaking directly to the kitchen was forbidden.) The student who was sent to find out the truth misunderstands him though and just ends up ordering more muffins. Since the kitchen was well staffed it had the time to bake new fluffy muffins and serve them. Through the inner working of status fall and reputation this last serving of the fluffy muffins resulted in the fall from grace of some students, the rise of others and some scenes of oppression. All very welcome at a larp about pennalism and boarding schools.

At the same larp we also let some students make a hat out of cheese that they used to bully another student. And on earlier Lindängen frozen peas, spinach and at a memorable occasion frozen scones has soothed black eyes of students. The importance of this story is to show how much you can do with food and kitchen staff to create game and dynamic. The so called “Fluffy Muffin Plot” ended up being one of the most retold narratives in the debrief group, and would never have happened had not the organisers planned for a big enough kitchen crew that a person could be spared to make the muffins in the first place.

The Kitchen

All larps that provides food for their players needs some kind of kitchen crew. These are often volunteers, or even organisers, who have a huge responsibility to make sure everyone is fed (preferably food that is sufficient in nutrition and quantity and on time ) and who because of that often spends most of their time off game without being a real part of the larp and the story. We would like to propose different ways to use the kitchen as a play area and the kitchen crew as proper characters. People who are responsible for feeding the rest of the larp (as well as with other kinds of practical off game duties) should of course never get involved in the game to an extent where it interferes with those responsibilities but there’s still plenty of room to create characters that contributes to the setting and fills an in-game purpose without interfering with the actual cooking.

Lindängen — One Larp, Three Different Kitchens

One larp that has already been mentioned in this article is Lindängen, a larp about an upper class boarding school revolving around themes such as bullying, peer pressure, social status and the never ending upholding of a system that keeps hurting the people within it. It’s been run three times and one or both of us have been a part of the kitchen crew each time. What’s particularly interesting about this larp is that the way the kitchen was used as a play resource and the role it filled in the game varied a lot between the different runs.

For the first run, we were aiming to create a contrast between the upper class students and teachers of the school and ourselves, as well as offering a safe space for those characters (and players) who suffered the most from the bullying. The kitchen staff were portrayed as working/lower class who sold home made booze and listened to loud socialistic punk music. Being in the bottom when it came to status and influence also created the opportunity to actually question what was going on in the school. The kitchen itself became a place where all the “outsiders,” the ones who didn’t want to play along with the system and those who it affected the hardest, could come to breath or hide out for a moment. Within the kitchen walls, no one could hurt them and to it’s staff they could reveal how they really felt about the school. In the end the kitchen staff also worked as a reminder on how status is the only thing that matters within the system when their attempts to actually make a difference and create some justice miserably failed.

The kitchen in the second run was rather another tool to uphold the system than a contrast to it. Not only was the food fancier, the kitchen staff themselves had a much more polished and professional approach with more of a personal distance (at least officially) towards the students. The kitchen also played a role in the actual bullying through the use of kitchen duty as a penalty for students that misbehaved. While the kitchen in the first run was a place to hide from oppression it was now a place to be even more oppressed. In a similar way the kitchen during this run amplified the need of upholding a surface. They would be very professional towards the player until they were sent to kitchen duty when the facade would be lowered and the player now forced to mop the kitchen floor had an opportunity to hear conversations between people who came from a different social background and had a different view of the world. This suppressed form of dislike towards the school and its traditions worked well in giving the players a feeling of another world outside of the school, but a world that was judging, different and impossible to be a part of.

For the third run, the role of the kitchen was pretty much set by the players themselves. During the pre-game workshop they decided that one of the unofficial school rules would be “no personal socialising with the kitchen staff” and even though this rule wasn’t upheld at all times it contributed to an us and them-division between the kitchen and rest of the school. This was even more established through for example a scene where the career counselor used a member of the kitchen staff as an “example of bad character” before a group of students. The kitchen staff was in many ways more looked down upon than in the previous runs but still filled the purpose of being the harmless adults, the ones you can turn to when one of the games has gotten out of hand and someone is actually hurt without risking getting in trouble for it.

Coven — Increasing the Creepiness

Coven (Häggström and Falk, 2015) was a larp inspired by the show American Horror Story: Coven and centred around a small coven of witches with the task of both educating people with magical powers as well as hiding them from witch hunters. The larp started with a group of teenagers who had just learned about their powers and the whole existence of the witch community arriving to the coven, their new home. The feeling of the coven was supposed to be eerie, freakish and unpredictable for those who were new to it and one element that was used to create this was, of course, the household staff.
The household did not only provide the food but also other chores like tidying up the sleeping quarters, making beds and assisting in magical rituals. The kitchen was not only a place where the food was prepared but also the place to go to if you needed to get blood, salt or plastic covers for said rituals. The staff itself were portrayed as emotionless, ageless and it was uncertain even to ourselves if they even were human. We spent a lot of time stone faced staring out the kitchen window, sweeping the same spot of the floor over and over again, making beds extremely neatly, folding the players clothes and reorganising their personal belongings when they weren’t looking, wiping blood of the floor without showing any sort of emotion and so on. We even listened to the same song on repeat in the kitchen throughout the whole larp. For the players this created a feeling of having walked straight into a horror movie. The knowledge that the household always saw you became very powerful, and the players experienced a feeling of loss of personal space when their belongings would be reorganised as soon as they turned their head. The almost mechanical movements of the household, paired with the same song going on repeat really made you doubt if they were real people. It became very effectively a way of entering into a magical circle of belief as the characters tried to accustom themselves to a new reality where magic was real and dangerous.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Kitchen Work at Larps

We have during our unofficial career as kitchen volunteers gathered some overall valuable lessons that make life easier for everyone, participants as well as organisers, that are listed below. We hope that these tricks of the trade will help others, organisers and kitchen volunteers alike to make their work easier.

Three Things You Never Should Do

Poison your players.((We have all done it, but try your best and never do the same mistake twice. Like Siri did.)) With this we mean, do not serve food that the player in question is allergic too. Make sure to clearly mark allergy-friendly food, or serve it separately for the larper in question. Most modern settings will allow to mark the food clearly with a name sign using the player’s in game name.
Not having enough food to feed everyone. This means that during starvation larps there should be access to food off game that has not gone bad or is disgusting but good, preferably warm, food, ready to help players through a taxing time. If this is not going to be available, clearly communicate this to the players in advance and make sure there is a convenient way for them to stash off game food for themselves if they need sufficient nutrition to handle the larp.
Understaff your kitchen. It creates anguish, pain, stress and bad role-playing on behalf of the staff. Mistakes happen more easily when the kitchen staff have not had sufficient sleep. Better to have space in the budget for a person too many than to have too few in the volunteer group. That way you can have some designated to do the actual cooking, one to do last minute shopping (which will happen) and some more focused on creating the right atmosphere and role-playing if you want the kitchen to actually enhance your game.

Three Things You Should Always Do

Appreciate your kitchen staff. Do not underestimate the importance of good kitchen staff. They will be able to help you create the right ambience and make sure organisers and players are well fed. All they want is some cred and maybe some chocolate, energy drinks or other poisons of their choice. Make sure to thank them after the larp and give them a small token of appreciation and they will be happy to go the extra mile for you.
Clearly communicate to the players how much food will be served, what kind of special diet you will provide for/not provide for and so on. It’s never okay to let the players discover they won’t have enough to eat after they have paid a full participation fee and arrived to the larp (you can of course serve any food you like but tell the players about it). This means be clear if there will be dietary options available, if there will be off game food in cases where the scenario doesn’t leave room for a lot of food etc.
Work with the players special diets instead of against it. Look at the players needs before setting the menu and try to make sure as many as possible will be able to eat as many meals as possible. A lot of vegetarians? Make all food vegetarian! Gluten allergies? Serve rice instead of pasta. If you make the food vegan it will also work for lactose and milk protein allergies. This will most likely save you not only time but also money.

Conclusion

We hope this advice will be helpful in your future culinary endeavours. We truly believe food is an essential part of any larp experience. If we allow it to be. Let texture, flavours and presentation play towards the atmosphere of the larp, and make sure to staff your kitchen with enough people so that they will have time to help you create the feeling and game play that truly supports the story you want to tell.

Bon Appetite!

Ludography

Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat (run 1). Sweden: 16-20 September 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Samuel Sjöström, Hugo Sandelin, Elsa Broman and Anneli Friedner
Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 2 (run 2). Sweden: 30 April-4 May 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström, Rune Nordborg, Mojje Mårtensson, Calle Wickström
Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 3 (run 3). Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Erland Nylund, Emil Rogvall
Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Beyond the Barricades. Sweden: 4-6 June 2016. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Lukas Renklint
Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 1). Sweden: 18-20 September 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Hannah Merkelbach, Elli Garperian
Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 2). Sweden: 2-4 October 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Elvira Fallsdalen, Carl Nordblom
Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 2, Sweden: 2012. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Nicolas Lennman, Jonathan Dahlander, Severin Gottsén, Johannes Harg, Carolina Lindahl och Theo Axner
Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 3, Sweden: 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Elsa Broman, Lukas Renklingt, Nicolas Lennman, Johannes Harg, Elin Gissén, Carl Norblom, Malva Tyllström and Severin Gottsén
Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist, Erik Holst and Teresa Axner. Organise Safely. Sweden: 2015 Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Lukas Renklint
Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 1. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 2. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 1. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 2. Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
Siri Sandquist, Erland Nylund, Linnea Björklund and Thor Forsell. Dusk of Gods. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Thor Forsell
Siri Sandquist, Staffan Fladvad, Johan Nylin and Elin Gissén. It’s a Man’s World. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Fredrik Nilsson
Sofia Stenler, Annica Strand and Frida Gamero. Last Will. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by organisers and Siri Sandquist and Frida Karlsson Lindgren
Sara Zeta, Ola Johnsson, Hanna Modin and Josefine Isaksson. Made in Hessbrand. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström and Elin Holm

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: The authors posing with a batch of bread (pre-game, Siri Sandquist).

History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

Published on

2017-02-16

in

Opinion

History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

Written by

Mo Holkar

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

Why Larp with History?

Human history as a setting for larp goes back to the earliest days of the form – even to before larp was identified as a special kind of activity in its own right, in the committee games and fictionalized simulations that preceded the larp that we know today.

What makes history so appealing?

The richness, range, and depth of the real historical tapestry is such as to make it inexhaustibly appealing as a source of larp material. From Ancient Egypt (Queen of Denial, Barnard and Holkar, 2014) to medieval Britain (The Lists of Avalon, Barnard, Jones and Jones, 2011) to the Industrial Revolution (Railways and Respectability, Barnard and Dall et al., 2007) to the Korean War (M*A*S*H: Brothers in Arms, Barnard and Dall et al., 2013), there’s something for everyone. And provided you avoid exoticization and respect the people involved, the whole spectrum is available to you.
Familiarity to participants is another advantage: they may already be familiar with the chosen historical milieu, or, if not, they can easily make themselves familiar by using readily-available reference materials. Compare the difficulty of communicating familiarity with a fictional setting whose details are only available in the minds of the designers.
Historical settings lend themselves readily to parallels and lessons related to life today, for the more instructive school of larp design. For example, the 1970s Berlin of “Heroes” (Holkar, 2016) studies attitudes towards the demonized Other, and how similarities, once exposed, may resonate more strongly than differences. The distance of the setting helps to make clear the significance of the themes in our own world.
And there’s no denying the emotional power and resonance of larping historical events — perhaps those in which one’s own ancestors, or national predecessors, might have been involved.
But a larp design that draws upon history has, perhaps, first to consider the limitations and biases of our societal defaults of historical understanding and analysis.

The Problem with History

We must recognise that our knowledge of history is filtered by the (necessarily limited) information that we have about it. We may have access to written accounts from the period: but who wrote them, and why? We may have artefacts, structures, and other physical remains: but who has interpreted them to us? What assumptions did those interpreters make?

Photo of upstairs and downstairs characters in Fairweather Manor — Fairweather Manor is an example of a larp based upon historical fiction that explores the dynamics between characters of different classes and genders. Photo courtesy of Dziobak Larp Studios.

To generalise: surviving historical texts were largely written by educated and wealthy men. And these texts, and non-textual historical remains, have also until recently largely been discussed by educated and wealthy men. Even if the author of your direct source is not in that category, you have to ask: who then were that author’s sources and to what extent did they question them? So, for example, Georgette Heyer wrote a feminized take on the British Regency period((Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck (London: William Heinemann, 1935).)) in which women have a greater focus than in historical accounts of the period. But she restricted her scope to the same narrow upper section of society that had been depicted by Jane Austen; she also restricted her research largely to the use of materials left by educated and wealthy men and to the study of decor and costume, rather than establishing what might have been going on in the world outside those stately imagined drawing-rooms. Whether, as an educated and wealthy woman herself, Heyer had any interest in the lives of the poor and underprivileged of that period, we do not know, but she certainly didn’t write about them. If you draw your larp-design inspiration from historical fiction rather than directly from history, you run the risk of inadvertently being on the wrong end of a filter of this type.

Other Histories

The study of women’s history, and people’s history (ordinary people, as distinct from those in power), gives new and fascinating perspectives on familiar historical settings.

“Other” history is of its nature a kind of revisionism: it asserts that traditional historical accounts are partial and/or incomplete. Women’s history draws attention to the roles of women throughout history; it studies the lives and works of individual women, and groups of women, “of note” and otherwise; it examines the effects of historical events on women; and so on. It necessarily questions the privileged values assigned by traditional history to the lives and activities of men. It may also identify situations where women’s actual contributions have been neglected or belittled, at the time or subsequently.

In the same way, a people’s history, also known as a “history from below”, approach to historiography looks at historical events and developments from the point of view of ordinary people rather than leaders. It proactively focuses on the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and those who in general have no access to power. And it seeks to demonstrate how historical changes that we traditionally ascribe to “great men” are often more the product of inexorable social forces rising from below.

Women comforting each other in a prison larp — Female characters in Winson Green Prison, a larp about women fighting for the right to vote. Photo by Vicki Pipe for the run at The Smoke Festival 2017.

In A People’s History of the United States,((Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).)) Howard Zinn (1980) says:

The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In larp, even more than in history, positive portrayals of characters are important — because they must be playable. Endowing your female and poor characters with affordances that may not have been demonstrated in the traditional historical record is going to make them more interesting to play, as well as serving the political end of representation. For sure, larp the executioners. They’ll be interesting to play — but the victims don’t have to be just oppression-fodder.

A straightforward example of this kind of “other” history in larp is Winson Green Prison (Sandquist and Göthberg, 2016). It portrays “the women who fought for the equal right to vote, and the men who loved them” — people who at the time were weak, oppressed and despised by society, but who have been vindicated by history. Their struggles are moving and affecting, but we know that they were in the right and that their descendants will see them as heroes. This makes for a good playable mix of struggle and satisfaction.

Historical Responsibility in Larp

Grownups in the Gere family: Dina, Gere, Aina (Post-game, Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis) — Brudpris (2014-, Norway) is a larp that explores the dynamics of a patriarchal society. (Post-game, Photo by Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)

When looking at and working with historical events and settings via the medium of larp, designers may feel that they owe a responsibility to the people of those times to represent them fairly: to not skew or downplay the depictions of those who have been neglected or diminished by traditional historical accounts. This is not always easy, but it’s a worthwhile use of time. As well as helping to make your design more responsible and understanding, it will also help to make it more interesting and original. There have been countless historical larps in which powerful people make key decisions while lesser folk fill in the background around them; how much fresher and more entertaining would it be to find stories in which women, or ordinary common people can take focus? For example, Dulce et decorum est… (Rider Hill, 2012) depicts a noble family and their influential friends, engaging in political discussion around a dinner table in an English country house in the runup to World War II: a solid and well-proven style of larp setting. Meanwhile Love Letter (Curd, Gammans, McCormick and Perry, 2015) examines the lives of a group of ordinary English village dwellers as the same war impacts upon them — the effects on those who fight, and those who are left behind — caused by the decisions of remote politicians to whom the larp makes no direct reference. Both are successful designs in their own terms, but one is doing something much more unusual than the other.

St Croix (Stamnestrø and Voje, 2015) opens the question of how a power disparity between characters — in this case, slaves and slave-owners — can generate good play for both parties. Slaves have authority over very little, not even their own bodies: how do you empower those players in the larp? What affordances do they have available? Brudpris (Linder and Dahlberg, 2015) partly answered this question by giving its oppressed female characters an unhistorical sexual dominance, so those players were able to compensate, during sexual encounters, for lack of agency in other areas of play.

Beyond the Barricades (Wei and Göthberg, 2015) brings vividly to life the Parisian revolution of 1832. The sides are clear, but one’s relationship to the people alongside whom one stands might not be — especially when unity starts to break down. This design allows for a nuanced approach to social class, and to the development of trust.

War Birds ((Moyra Turkington, Ann Kristine Eriksen, and Kira Magrann, et al, War Birds (Toronto, Canada: Unruly Designs, 2016).)) is a collection of six freeforms and larps looking at the war experiences of women; as aviators, refugees, internees, partisans, drivers, or factory workers. It ably demonstrates the range and variety of play experience that can be generated from examining a straightforward other-historical premise.

Moyra Turkington talks, at Living Games Conference 2016, about the genesis of War Birds: following “redlinked” stories in Wikipedia to see the unwritten history of women’s wartime contributions.

The Myth of Authenticity

One argument sometimes given for the dominance of wealthy males in historical larps is that this exercise of privilege is authentic for the period being depicted, and that to show otherwise would be a falsity.

Quite apart from the question of whether the “facts” about the period upon which this view is based are correct or not — as discussed earlier, the filter over historical materials is a highly selective one — it can be argued that the whole notion of authenticity is specious. It’s impossible to larp “the 16th century” from the point of view of the 21st century; all you can ever do is larp an approach to the 16th century, which emerges from the context in which you’re designing.

Our contemporary view of the 16th century is very different from that of historians of fifty years ago; and in fifty years time it will be different again. And as an artistic creator rather than a simulator, a larp designer will draw out themes and messages that resonate particularly strongly with their own contemporary audience. Just as performances of the play Hamlet take on new directions and resonances depending on the political and social currents of the time when they’re being performed, so too do runs of the larp Inside Hamlet (Krauklis and Ericsson et al., 2000; Ericsson et al., 2015).

Deliberate inauthenticity — for example, giving women more prominent and higher-status roles — should not be seen as a betrayal of historical truth. Rather, it can allow a designer to recontextualise history more effectively for their audience. For example, Oss imellom (Hatlestrand and Edland, 2015) includes working-class homosexuals in a middle-class-based organisation that historically would have excluded them, so as better to present the variety of homosexual experience in 1950s Norway. To skew your design in this way, against the power balance of the traditional historical message, is to raise up living underprivileged people against those dead people who have been privileged by the conventional narrative.

faders for the Mixing Desk — The Mixing Desk of Larp design tool features a Loyalty to World slider, where designers can adjust according to playability vs. plausibility. Developed for the Larpwriter Summer School.

Media and Message

It may be that, actually, designing larp directly from the historical record is not your approach. Rather, you might be designing to convey the flavour of media works (books, films) set in that period. A larp set in the Old West is perhaps more likely to be responding to a particular subgenre of Western movie than to the actual history of the period. And a larp set at the 17th-century court of Louis XIV is almost certain to be drawing more heavily on the (19th-century) Musketeers novels of Alexandre Dumas than on documents of the period.

This is no bad thing — resonance with your intended players is more likely to be found within media with which they’re familiar — but it’s another filter to be aware of. Reading Dumas, one would think that all warrior men are strong and masculine, while women are weak, passive, or conniving. However, we know from the existence of historical figures such as La Maupin, Philippe of Orleans, and the Chevalier d’Eon that the 17th-century French court was a much more genderqueer world than the 19th-century novelist was happy to admit; we know that the cowboys of the real Old West were often black, and sometimes women. By looking into history as well as your entertainment-media sources, you can broaden your representation without moving too far away from the material with which your players are familiar. And you should be honest with yourself, and with your players, about whether your game is aiming primarily to be history-based or fiction-based.

Hell on Wheels promotional photo with three male and three female characters — The Czech *Hell on Wheels* is a Western genre larp adapted from the fictional television show. Photo by Potkani.

Techniques for Representation

Look beneath the surface – Seek out “other” histories as well as mainstream ones. By now, women’s and people’s history are well enough established that a wide range of historical periods have been covered by these approaches.
Look at the sources – Take in actual history, as well as media depictions of the period. You may find that the way the history has been portrayed on the page or on screen is quite different from modern historians’ understanding of it.
Ask the logical questions – If women aren’t mentioned in the orthodox account, why might that be? Where were they, and what were they doing? What place did poorer people have in the economy?
Turn the familiar face of history around – For example, war histories often focus on men who are away fighting, or on the portrayal of the victors as uncontested heroes. How about those family members who stayed at home? – what can you find out about them, that could make for interesting larp?((Heroes of the Hearth (Stiainín Jackson, in Seven Wonders (London: Pelgrane Press, 2015) is a tabletop RPG that looks at this situation.)) How about the experiences of those who were defeated?
Turn over stones – Why are some periods of history frequently visited by larp, and others neglected? Whose stories are still out there, waiting for a larp designer to pick them up and reflect them as something wonderful?
Challenge your own assumptions – However well you think you know the period, you may without realizing it be stuck in a skewed account given by a partial historian or fiction writer. Find another source, and see if it backs up or counters your belief.
Don’t be afraid of inauthenticity – If you feel you need to, you should deliberately adjust the historical “truths” to better make the range of stories that you seek. It’s larp, not re-enactment.
Check in – If you are yourself wealthy and/or educated and/or male, make sure that you’re not inadvertently carrying your own society’s tacit assumptions into the design. Involve people from other groups in your work. Build more balanced perspectives by working together.

The Ends of History

A historical setting for a larp can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a painful and betraying thing. You can make sure that you’re giving your design ideas, and the play aspirations of your larpers, the maximum opportunity to express themselves by engaging with history critically, by putting in the exploratory work around it, and by looking for stories that haven’t been told.

When it all comes together just right, you can be sure that your larp design and its enaction will earn their own places in the history of the artform. Take a look at Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), the story of an assortment of people with little in common apart from their relentless othering by the media and those in power, finding community together, turning suffering into love. Their stories are respectfully told, solidly researched, and thoroughly contextualised. A larp like this brings its history to raging, pounding life — and makes its messages speak to our hearts and to our minds.

Thanks to Liz Lovegrove and Becky Annison for their help and ideas during the writing of this article.

Ludography

Nickey Barnard, Philippa Dall, and Jerry Elsmore, et al. Railways and Respectability. Retford, UK: UK Freeforms, 2007.
Nickey Barnard, Philippa Dall, and Tony Mitton, et al. M*A*S*H: Brothers in Arms. Hoburne, UK: Consequences, 2013.
Nickey Barnard and Mo Holkar. Queen of Denial. Hoburne, UK: Consequences, 2014.
Nickey Barnard, Helen Jones, and Martin Jones. The Lists of Avalon. Hoburne, UK: Consequences, 2011.
Natalie Curd, Roger Gammans and Elyssia McCormick, et al. Love Letter. Hoburne, UK: Consequences, 2015.
Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo. Just a Little Lovin’. Norway: Lunde Leirsted, Norway, 2011.
Martin Ericsson, Bjarke Pedersen and Johanna Koljonen. Inside Hamlet. Helsingør, Denmark: Odyssé, 2015.
Jeanita Hatlestrand and Tor Kjetil Edland. Oss imellom. Oslo, Norway, 2015.
Mo Holkar. “Heroes”. Hobro, Denmark: Fastaval, 2016.
Daniel Krauklis, Martin Ericsson and Holger Jacobsson, et al. Hamlet Inifrån. Sweden: Interaktiva Uppsättningar and Riksteatern, 2000.
Anna-Karin Linder and Carolina Dahlberg. Brudpris. Norway: Tor Kjetil Edland and Trine Lise Lindahl, 2015.
Alison Rider Hill. Dulce et decorum est… Hoburne, UK: Consequences, 2012.
Siri Sandquist and Rosalind Göthberg. Winson Green Prison. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm Scenario Festival, 2016.
Anne Marie Stamnestrø and Adrian Angelico Voje. St Croix. Noresund, Norway, 2015.
Eva Wei and Rosalind Göthberg. Beyond the Barricades. Sweden, 2015.

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: Characters in the 2015 run of Just a little Lovin’, celebrating their otherness (photo by Arvid Björklund).

Published on

2017-02-15

in

Theory

Moment-based Story Design

Written by

Ian Thomas

I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: ‘Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theater happy.’ I think she was right. And if you’re lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.

William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade>, 1983

War Stories

Why are we in this business of creating stories for people to play? What do we, as creators, get out of the experience of running games? Why do we do it? I get a kick out of knowing that the players have gone through intense emotional experiences. How do I know whether we’ve achieved that? I use a simple measure. I listen to what I call war stories.((My brother, who works in TV and film, reminds me that these are known in TV as “water cooler moments” i.e. where, in the workplace, people will cluster around a water cooler discussing last night’s episode.))

It’s something that’s obvious in hindsight. Every time you get a bunch of larpers together to socialise, out come the war stories; tales of things that happened at events to them, or to their friends, or at another event that they heard about once. “That bit when the demon appeared …” “And then, my God, I was running from that thing, I’ve never been so scared …” “The look on her face when she realised the truth!”

Most of those stories have been provoked by moments of intense experience, of intense emotion: fear, shock, hilarity, love, freezing cold weather, sleep deprivation, utter disbelief. These people have been put through the mill, and these stories are the resulting moments that stood out to them, memories that will live on in their heads forever, stories they want to share. And so they share them. Many become iconic, and are passed on second or third hand.

This isn’t solely restricted to larp, of course—it’s the sort of conversation that happens when film-lovers get together to discuss “the bit where Hulk punched Thor!” or “when Bruce Willis realises the truth!” These stories bind people together in pubs, or on forums, or at book clubs. A need to share the things that really affected them, that etched those experiences into their minds.

It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to the realisation that such froth((Used in UK larp circles to mean excessive outpourings of excited conversation about an event you’ve played, an event you’re going to, a game system, or really anything about larp at all. An umbrella is advised.)) is my primary measure of a successful game. But in starting to analyse the phenomenon, I realise that it’s how our team at Crooked House((A long-running UK larp organisation that runs high-budget one-off events with lots of special effects.)) has always approached shaping stories. We write larps by coming up with moments that we hope the players will talk about afterwards, and we’ve been doing that for years. It’s something we evolved entirely accidentally, with no in-depth analysis of what we were doing.

Background

Historically, the core of our team has been very focused on set-piece moments. This is because we have people who work in set design, stunts, pyrotechnics and props for films; we do our best to make best use of those talents. The art & stunt department always have gags they want to try, no matter the genre.

And we’ve always tackled games as an exercise in genre. When we ran a gore-based horror event, we did our best to push the boundaries of taste and decency and to cover a whole range of tropes that players would recognise, but would have never encountered before in larp. Similarly, on running a pulp action-adventure, we made certain to pack it full of red lines drawn across maps, tombs half-buried in sand, ridiculous accents, and traps involving lots of creepy-crawlies.

We write and run one-off events. We knew our pulp adventure was probably going to be the last one we’d ever run, so we packed it full of as much pulp as we could find, as we wouldn’t get another chance.

The Writing Process

So we get together with a rough idea of theme and setting, and a long list of experiences we’d like the players to have. These could be set piece stunts, gags, or special effects; atmospherics where we generate a certain mood; small interpersonal moments; several hours of continuous unrelenting horror. They could be ideas for rules. They could also be material for pre-event, to set the scene. At this point many of the ideas will be only partially formed. For example, our list might include “have to deal with a confined space,” “there should be a moment where all the lights go out,” “a scene where the antagonist lays bare every character’s deepest secret” or “we could do that trick with a Ouija board and magnets.”

Then, through brainstorming sessions, we identify a few key moments and solidify them, making them the tentpoles of our game timeline.

With our tent-pole moments in place, the shape of our event starts to emerge, as do the themes, and the story itself. This is the stage at which we may reject ideas from our list outright, as we find they don’t suit the story or the theme or the mood. Eventually we’ll have a firmed up set of key experiences and a rough idea of when they might happen.

If we were creating a story for a book or a film — and we’ve used this system for that — then the story would be essentially linear. One key moment would play out after another, and the viewer would have no options to change that, no choices to make. Our tent-pole moments would always happen in the same order.

With larp, we could run our games in that way, but there’s a danger of “railroading” the players—making them feel as if their actions have no effect on the story, as if it’s being told to them rather than as if they’re part of creating it.

Our games are somewhere between linear and totally free. We are certain of several fixed moments that will happen no matter what, and we know roughly when they’ll happen, but we leave a lot of space for flexibility with other moments and the order in which they might play out. This is critical not only for the dramatic flow of the story—for example, during these few hours the players shouldn’t be overly stressed or challenged, but right here we need a climax— but is also critical for the art department, so they know in what order they need to get sets built or rebuilt and stunts and effects rigged. We have a rough idea of the window of time in which a particular moment can be experienced.

Note that there’s no guarantee a moment will happen. We give the players the opportunity to take part in a particular scene, gag or event at specific points. All we’re doing is providing opportunity. Those opportunities may not be taken in the way we expect, or may not be taken at all. And, honestly, we cheat. In some cases we make the players believe they’ve made their own timeline choices, but we’ve secretly railroaded them. I give an example of that later on in this article.

We’ll do several brainstorming passes filling in the blanks. Normally I go away and write a treatment of the flow of the game as if it were a story, because this irons out inconsistencies and brings up all sorts of issues we haven’t thought of—it also shoots down ideas that we thought seemed amazing at 3am.

And then we’ll simply repeat, talking through the game again and again, picking apart each moment and polishing it until—hopefully—it shines, making sure the story is consistent, making sure our supporting cast fit in where they should, and layering theme and mood into everything we can. When we’re done, some of the things we’ve come up with will be concrete set-piece-like moments. Others will be ongoing opportunities for players to generate moments themselves. Both are equally important, and I’ll give examples of the design of each.

A Moment Design Example: The Jump

A 'moment' from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas).

It’s 3am. You haven’t slept for two days now. There are strange things happening in this mansion. You’re upstairs in your bedroom, in bed with your partner, but the lights are on; you’re both too scared to turn them off.

There’s something about this room. When you came in, you noticed the wedding pictures of the young couple, and the photos of their baby daughter. You know it’s a daughter, because the crib is still here, beside the bed; the name Gwendolyn hangs on a wooden plaque at the end of it. You turned the photos face down, because you realised who they were; the young couple who died here years ago. You’ve read the newspaper reports, and heard the family stories. You’ve found letters: receipts, bills, final demands.

And you’ve heard things. A baby crying, although you couldn’t find the source. A man and a woman arguing, muffled, through the wall; something about money. And, twice now, a gunshot, somewhere outside through the corridor. You’ve never found where it came from… although there was blood on the bathroom floor.

And now, tonight, you hear the gunshot again. And the baby starts crying outside your door. A girl screams. And the door flies open. There stands the young mother, dressed in black, the baby bundled under her arm. She’s in tears, makeup running. In her right hand she brandishes a revolver. She runs into your room and turns around, frantically warning away her pursuers. Except there aren’t any pursuers; the doorway is empty—but she can clearly see them. She runs to the window, still waving the gun; opens the window; and throws the baby out.

At this point, you, the player—because you are a player, and this is a moment in a live-action game that you’ve been taking part in for the last few days, having taken on the role of a 1950s character— might realise something. If you’ve got enough detachment from the terror of the moment, if you can draw yourself back, you can think “Ah. I get it. I understand what’s going on. The baby’s clearly not real. it’s all fine. It’s just a play, a scene, a trick. I don’t need to panic.”

At which point the young woman jumps out of the window.

When you’ve recovered yourself enough to get to the window and look out, there’s nothing below; no baby, no woman, nothing at all.

We started this one with a simple request from our stunt team. “We want someone to jump out of a first floor window and disappear. And we don’t want the players to know how we did it.”

This was for our event God Rest Ye Merry (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2015), a Christmas ghost story set in the 1950s. The house, a rambling old mansion set on Dartmoor, was perfect for our needs, and on our site visit we scoped out the perfect window.

So, from a writing perspective, we knew that our stuntwoman Kiera Gould would be the one who jumped. And it made perfect sense that, for a ghost story, the disappearance would be due to ghostly goings-on. It follows, then, that this must have been how someone died. And that the players would see this as if it were a vision—it would be a haunting. To make it extra-scary, we would have them seeing it late at night.

The first concern came from the stunt team. The window Kiera would be jumping from was a bedroom window, and we expected two players to be in bed asleep. What was to stop the players leaping out of bed and interrupting the stunt, ruining the gag? We came to the conclusion that we’d put a barrier between the bed and the window, and settled on a baby’s crib, since there was one in a nearby room. We would fix it to the floor.

This immediately led to story. The woman who had died had a baby. So who was she, and what happened to the baby?

Someone came up with the genius idea that Kiera should come in, distraught, with the baby under her arm—a dummy, obviously—and should throw the baby out of the window first. Not only would it add to the horror, it would mean there would be a moment where the players thought that the baby-throwing was the whole gag, and, internally, they’d relax—just as Kiera jumped.

“Wait,” said the stunt team. “If there’s a baby involved now, they’ll work extra-hard to interrupt the stunt. Can we introduce some other barrier?”

So—why was the girl distraught? Well, we decided, she’d just shot her husband, and now, filled with regret, was going to commit suicide. So we would give her a revolver. The scene would start out in the corridor, with the sound of a revolver firing and a scream. Now, as the girl ran into the room, she would be brandishing the revolver, “accidentally” waving it towards the players—who she, being a ghost, couldn’t see. This acts as a psychological barrier to anyone wanting to get involved; a gun being waved in their face.

An interesting facet of our barriers—the crib and the gun and, in fact, the mood we’ve engendered up to this point— is that we’ve almost certainly shut down the player’s desire or ability to stop the girl jumping but, crucially, they think it’s their own choice. They will think they’re unable to act through their own fear, rather than through our railroading or design.

So there was the basis of the stunt. On top of that, we built up and layered story—the room was filled with mementos from the young couple’s marriage; elsewhere in the house you could find evidence of the husband’s debts and excessive gambling habit; newspaper clippings reported their deaths; family stories told of the tragedy; a wooden plaque on the crib named the baby Gwendolyn. And sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could hear a couple arguing, muffled, through the wall.

From a very basic moment idea, we now had a chunk of story, a very visceral moment, that was wound into the fabric of the house and the event and which fitted our themes. We knew roughly when it would happen—around 3am Saturday night.

Oh yes. The girl vanished completely, as did the baby, when you looked out the window. Despite the long drop below. How did we do that? We’ll leave that to your imagination.

A Moment Design Example: Pulp Languages

Now something from the other end of the spectrum—a rule specifically introduced to allow the players to spontaneously generate their own memorable moments.

For our 1930s pulp action adventure Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2006), we’d decided that multiple languages would be a fun feature of the game, as we had an international cast of characters. However, very few of the players involved spoke multiple languages. How could we deal with this?

Well, we could adopt ridiculous accents. So if you spoke, say, with a French accent, it would be assumed you were speaking French. But if we did this, it meant that we wouldn’t be fitting into the pulp stereotype; in pulp, Germans need to sound stereotypically German, Americans need to sound stereotypically American and so on when speaking English.

So we dreamed up a very simple system. Any sentence that was supposed to represent French would be prefixed with the keywords “Zut alors!” Any sentence that was supposed to represent German would be prefixed with “Achtung!” “Effendi!” for Arabic. And so on. Terribly stereotypical, but pulp is stereotypical, and we were erring on the side of comedy.

Adding to that, we came up with a very simple system of written languages. Anything in red would be Arabic; green would be German; blue French and so forth.

This was introduced as a rule to our players. The key reason for including this was very simple—to allow them to create moments where the players OOC entirely understood what was going on, but, for comedy purposes, their characters would not. I call this sort of technique Seeding Opportunity—providing fertile ground for moments to happen in.

This would only work in this style of game. For a deeply serious game based on secrets and lies, the OOC/IC divide simply wouldn’t work. But for our purposes, it worked brilliantly.

Here I’ll cite an anecdote from one of our cast, Harry Harrold:

So when my bazaar salesman started a line with “Effendi”—the English-speaking customer couldn’t understand a word, but the spy who was posing as a translator could, and the conversation went something like:

Customer: How much is this statuette? It looks jolly ancient

Spy: Effendi: How much for this?

My salesman: Effendi: I don’t know, my uncle’s mother in law’s family makes them by the dozen, how much will the idiot pay? Tell him it’s tenth dynasty … I’ll cut you in.

Spy: He says it’s very valuable. Tenth dynasty.

Customer: I say, marvellous …

You see where it’s going. The customer’s player knowing exactly what I was saying, and the simple delight of three people performing their little hearts out to an audience of—oh, I dunno, maybe half a dozen at the time? It carried on for a while in the same vein. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.

Harry Harrold, The Hole in My Tooth, 2016

Pay close attention to that last line. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.” We’ve achieved our outcome—the desire to create a war story that players would tell and retell.

So, with our Jump stunt, we were introducing a specific moment. With this language rule, we were introducing the possibility for the players to create their own moments.((Okay, okay. Some moments we helped them create. For example, the minefield with a large sign—in greenreading “Achtung! Mines!” Which came into its own when it was crossed by a small group of players who could read it perfectly well, but none of their characters knew German…)) We’ve found the mix of these techniques extremely successful.

Other Media

I’ve talked solely about larp here. But since we started working this way, I’ve applied these techniques successfully to writing films, books, and in particular to computer games. Each medium has its own rules and styles, and by doing this you don’t need to eschew standard dramatic structure—but, in the same way as with larp, thinking about what your audience will take away is a great starting point for building your story.

Conclusion

It’s my contention—and experience—that if you work this way, if you concentrate on the highs and lows, on provoking war stories, you’ll have a memorable game.

It almost doesn’t matter what goes between those moments, so long as it makes some sort of sense. Honestly. I know that sounds crazy, but most people have terribly fuzzy memories and the bits they didn’t enjoy or found bland fade away, leaving the bits that excited them.

Sure, the quality of your whole piece will be vastly improved by good joining-of-thedots, but to turn it on its head, if you don’t have those memorable moments, you have nothing. I’ve lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen or books I’ve read that I can’t recall anything about a couple of months later. But people in pubs still talk about the time we had a WW1 tank, ten years later.((We didn’t. It was two sides of a tank faked up out of plywood + paint with a couple of pilots inside and some carefully positioned pyrotechnics, so that when a puff of smoke came out of the barrel, a piece of the ground exploded. But we still hear about “that game where they had a real tank.”))

Bibliography

Goldman, William, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Warner Books. 1983

Ludography

Harry Harrold, The Hole In My Tooth. LarpX. 07/05-2016 https://larpx.com/2016/05/07/ the-hole-in-my-tooth/
Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas et al. God Rest Ye Merry. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2015
Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas, Thomas, Brewis and Macmillan; Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2006

This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

Cover photo: The setting for the stunt “The Jump”, from God Rest Ye Merry (pre-game, Rachel Thomas).

Once Upon a Nordic Larp… – The Knutepunkt 2017 Book

Published on

2017-02-13

in

Documentation

Once Upon a Nordic Larp… – The Knutepunkt 2017 Book

Written by

Johannes Axner

The official book for Knutepunkt 2017 is called Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories and it’s out now!

It promises to be a very interesting read weighing in at an impressive 404 pages. Here’s how the editors introduce it:

Being a complex grimoire of received wisdom, forbidden wisdom, and questionable wisdom; techniques (both meta- and otherwise); lies, damn lies, and associated ephemera. It was written by an eclectic mix of wonderful people from across the globe and

edited by

Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

You can download and read the rest of the book over at the Nordic Larp Wiki:
https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Nordic_Larp…_Twenty_Years_of_Playing_Stories

Published on

2016-07-02

in

Events

Knutepunkt 2017 – Call for Papers

Written by

Johannes Axner

Knutepunkt 2017 Call for Papers. The next Knutepunkt conference will be held in Norway and now the organizers are asking for papers for next years books.

Knutebook 2017: “20 years of telling stories”
Once Upon a Time …

Twenty years is a very long time. Long enough for legends to be created. Stories are told and retold and grow with each telling. The very act of telling a story goes in and out of fashion. Some believe that it has no place in larp, others that the whole point of larp is to make every single character the protagonist. This year we would like to sit down in a comfortable chair and have a word with ourselves about stories.

Concept:
The 2017 Knutepunkt book will look primarily at stories in larp. We’d like to interrogate the process of writing larps. We’d like to understand whether narrative is a dirty word. We want to investigate how larp storytelling can be translated into a political act. We want to look at how we tell stories in larp, how we write them, play them, steer them, shape them and report them. And we want to know what we might do with all of this in the future.

The book will contain three sections:

Yesterday – larps that have been run and techniques we have used in the past; looking back over 20 years of KP and 30+ years of larp
Today – analysis of contemporary methods, cutting edge meta-techniques, really awesome games
Tomorrow – possible futures, new ideas, wild-eyed dreaming
We are looking for a multitude of texts for the different sections, both theoretical and practical, opinion pieces with rebuttals, even tidbits, anecdotes and small verses connected to character stories.

You do not have to be an academic, a writer nor an experienced larper to contribute. We encourage everyone who has an idea to contact us; we would love to hear from you.

How to contribute:
We want to make sure we get a good balance of content and articles, so the first thing we need from you is a description of your idea (or an abstract). Send us your idea in 150-300 words with a pitch of what you would like to write.

The full articles should be between 1,000 – 5,000 words. Feel free to add illustrations, photos and the like. Bring what you have to the table and we’ll help with editing and to fit it into the book.

Timeline:

2016-07-15 Deadline for pitches

2016-07-31 Accepted pitches will be assigned an editor

2016-09-01 First Draft

2016-11-01 Final draft

2016-12-01 Book goes to print

Interested?
Get in touch! We will discuss your idea and help develop it if we can. Start writing. The sooner we have a pitch from you, the sooner we can fit it into the narrative.

Know anyone who should be writing?
Feel free to share this call with your friends. Maybe you have a great idea for an article but you aren’t the person to write it? Get in touch with us, we may be able to help!

Contact
Any and all questions, ideas and pitches can be directed to knutebook@gmail.com.

Best regards from the KP book team

Linn Carin Andreassen

You can read more on the Knutepunkt 2017 website:
https://knutepunkt.org/call-for-papers/

Published on

2016-03-13

in

Documentation

Solmukohta 2016 – Summary

Written by

Johannes Axner

The Finnish edition of the Nordic larp conference Knutepunkt, Solmukohta 2016, is now over. This post will be continuously updated with links to articles, reports, photo albums, videos, slides, books and other relevant documentation.

If you have any content you want published but lack a place to host it we will gladly host it here at Nordiclarp.org, please contact us on: contribute@nordiclarp.org

Last update: 2016-04-12, 09:30 CET

While not specifically written for Solmukohta 2016, Elin Nilsen’s guide to handling the post Solmukohta blues is quite relevant for participants:

A Beginner’s Guide to Handling the Knudeblues: An Inside Perspective

The Solmukohta 2016 Books

Slides

Edu-Larp: A Literature Review – Sarah Lynne Bowman

Photos

End of the Line (Official World of Darkness Vampire larp played during A Week in Finland) by Tuomas Puikkonen
Solmukohta 2016 by Ella
Solmukohta 2016 by Tuomas Puikkonen

Ship Ahoy! Mark your calendar for Solmukohta 2016!

Published on

2015-08-04

in

Events, Nordic Larp

Ship Ahoy! Mark your calendar for Solmukohta 2016!

Written by

Petter Karlsson

On Wednesday the 9th to Monday the 14th of March 2016 it’s once again time for the international roleplaying conference Solmukohta. The conference often known as Knutepunkt is this year in Finland and therefore goes by it’s Finnish name Solmukohta for 2016.

This Solmukohta will be truly Baltic as the location is a Tallink Silja cruise ship. It takes off from Helsinki in Finland on Wednesday afternoon the 9th of March and the hosts the last night of A Week in Finland. The “A Week” tradition has for many years been a nice way to extend your conference experience and often gives a nice peek into the local role-playing scene of the hosting country.

The actual conference starts on Thursday afternoon as the cruise ship sails from Stockholm and ends on Sunday afternoon in Helsinki.

The name Solmukohta is Finnish and means “a meeting point”. In Norway the event is called Knutepunkt, in Sweden Knutpunkt and in Denmark Knudepunkt. This meeting point – melting pot for ideas and inspiration – was first organized in 1997. It has been playing a vital role in establishing the Nordic roleplaying identity and in establishing the concept of “Nordic larp” as an unique approach to live action roleplaying.
From the Solmukohta website

You can also read more about the previous Knutepunkt-conferences at the Nordic Larp Wiki.

We had a chance to speak a bit with Massi Hannula Thorhauge who is of the two main organizers of Solmukohta 2016.

Massi presenting at the Nordic Larp Talks 2015 in Copenhagen Photo: Mathias Kure

Hey Massi! Could you present team behind next years Solmukohta?

As it’s the Finnish Solmukohta, we go with a small team again. We aim to transparency and internationality, which I personally think is shown in the choices of the organizers.

As a main organizer couple me and Mikko Pervilä have a vast experience in Nordic and international convention organizing. Mikko was the main organizer of Solmukohta 2004, and takes the main responsibility of all the technical matters of the convention with the title Technical director. I, go by the title Artistic Director and take the main responsibility of the communication and content of the event. We let our team to drive with their great ideas and organizational skills and help to keep the package intact.

Program team in 2016 are two experienced larp designers and organizers Hannu Niemi and Olli Lönnberg. They have already put the wheels turning, and set the call for program due October 2015. You might have seen them in KPs before, Hannu playing his guitar in the parties and Olli taking notes in every possible program item he just could partake.

Solmu-Economy is in hands of the most experienced convention economist in Denmark, possible the Nordics, but as I am bit bias to brag about my husband’s skills, I would just say, that you cannot get better person for this job. David Thorhauge has experience since the mid 90’s on organizing roleplaying conventions from Fastaval to Knudepunkts in Denmark.

Information at the venue, or Finnformation, KP/SK goers already met in Denmark 2015. Maiju Ruusunen has long time experience in working Ropecon TSInfo and Solmukohta infos. If you’ve met her, you know, she won’t rest before she has solved your problem. Maiju is joined by Zacharias Holmberg, the head of the board of Fenno-Swedish roleplaying association Eloria and larp designer from the Swedish speaking part of Finland. Zacharia’s calm voice and attitude makes problems vanish, and his vast language skills within the Nordics makes him the perfect partner for Maiju in the Finnformation. We hope to fill out the Info desks with finlandsvenska larpers to make them more visible in the Nordic scene.

What would be Solmukohta without A Week in Finland? This time it has been given into hands of our Portuguese addition, José Jacomé, or as we call him “the guy who gets sh*it done”. Last summer he took groups of Nordic larpers around Portugal and you might know him from his Zombie Walk events in Helsinki. He knows what you want to do in Helsinki, even the things that we Finns would not think about. With his large network José is going to create a fantastic week of venues, events and parties, I have no doubt.

And we of course have Solum-books! This year two, which seems to become the standard. The editors team is three great Finnish academics and role-players Mika Loponen, Jukka Särkijärvi and Kaisa Kangas. Mika is Solmukohta veteran, and organized events such as Ropecon and Finncon as the main organizer or as a part of the main organizer team. He knows what’s going on in the scene. Jukka, or you might now him as NiTe, is known from his internationally famous roleplaying blog “Worlds in a Handful of Dice”, where he keeps us all updated on what’s happening in the roleplaying scene world wide. Kaisa was designing the political larp Halat hisar in 2013 in Finland, and her takes on Nordic laps she visit all around the Nordic countries are widely read. The Call for Articles will come out in September 2015, and you can read more about the book themes on our website.

See the faces of the team and contact details herehe full team on the website.

Do have any general themes or aims with conference?

The theme for the 2016 Solmukohta is “Reality check”. This is the 20th Solmukohta/KP and we want to stop, take a deep breath and see what we have created. Where has this small gathering of same minded people taken us in less than 20 years? And we want to look into the future, and think where is this, culture and community we have created, taking us.

We have grown up. We don’t run around schools in elf ears and cloaks made of shiny spandex (though, that’s fun occasionally too). We want quality and drive ourselves towards even grander achievements. This is why we, the team, want to organize Solmukohta as professionally as we can. We want the Nordic Larp scene to concentrate exchanging ideas, creating together and networking without practical worries.

There will be some nostalgia, some traditional SK/KP program, socializing, parties, meet-up and so on. The program will explore all the mentioned above and beyond.

And finally the give question… Why on a boat?

Why not? I mean, we have been as scene talking about Solmukohta on a boat for more than a decade now. If I am not wrong, someone even looked into it at some point. And to be honest, as a conference venue, it is great, and for networking and socializing the spaces and venues are excellent. It will be bit different, but in my honest opinion more “traditional” Solmukohta than we saw in Denmark 2015.

Also, I get to wear a cool captain’s hat, which is a reason by itself.

Thank you Massi, we are looking forward to March!

Don't miss out on scenic views like this one! — Don’t miss out on scenic views like this one!

Want more info about Solmukohta 2016?

Contact the organizers at info@solmukohta.org

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Solmukohta website: solmukohta.org
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Tag: Knutepunkt

What Is the French Style Romanesque Genre?

An Overview of the Genre

The Historically Inspired Larp in France and in Europe

Character Design and Narrations in the Romanesque Genre

Archetypes in the Romanesque Genre

The Dual Approach in Character Design

Conclusion

Bibliography

Personal Communication

Ludography

1. Speak to Non-larpers

2. Learn How to Tell a Larp Story

3. Sell Yourself

4. Make It Look Nice

5. Get That Larp Footage

6. Be Picky

Contextualisation

The Normal and the Abnormal

A Militarised Society

Cultural Exchange

Bibliography

The Food

Beyond the Barricades — Literally Putting the Narrative in the Food

Made in Hessbrand — Starvation and Disgust

Last Will—The taste of something different

Tre Kronor, Lindängen and the luxury of the upper class

The Fluffy Muffin Plot — When you Cook up Larp Magic

The Kitchen

Lindängen — One Larp, Three Different Kitchens

Coven — Increasing the Creepiness

The Do’s and Don’ts of Kitchen Work at Larps

Three Things You Never Should Do

Three Things You Should Always Do

Conclusion

Ludography

Why Larp with History?

The Problem with History

Other Histories

Historical Responsibility in Larp

The Myth of Authenticity

Media and Message

Techniques for Representation

The Ends of History

Ludography

War Stories

Background

The Writing Process

A Moment Design Example: The Jump

A Moment Design Example: Pulp Languages

Other Media

Conclusion

Bibliography

Ludography

The Solmukohta 2016 Books

Slides

Photos

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