Nordic Larp

Tag: Review

  • Did We Wake?

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    Did We Wake?

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

    drrr. drrr. drrr.

    Awakening to a smartphone, dumbly vibrating.

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

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

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

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

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

    • I am exploring together with Asgeir.

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

    I let the pen drop.

    Irrevocably, the dream has gone.

    Untangling

    Is it possible to understand a larp without distance?

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

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

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

    This is what it looked like

    Københavns musikteater.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Here is one of the things that happened

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

    Excuse me! Can you help me?

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

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

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

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

    OK, I say, cautiously, stepping forward.

    Please untie me!

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

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

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

    Absolutely not! You’re attacking me!

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

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

    The dreamer, imagining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Of butterflies and REM sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    50 shades of ultraviolet

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

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

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

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

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

    Awakening

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

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

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

    I let the pen drop.

    Irrevocably, the larp has gone.

    Before We Wake

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

    Bibliography

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

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

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

    Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

  • Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

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    Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bibliography

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

    Ludography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cover image: Photo by Nick Magwood from Pixabay

  • Possible, Impossible Larp Critique

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    Possible, Impossible Larp Critique

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    Larp criticism often travels through whisper networks. After a larp event, we dissect it in private company but rarely write our thoughts – at least critically analytical ones – publicly. It has often felt like we – as a community – focus more on feedback and documentation than critical reviews, let alone critique.

    A proper critique is a well-argued analysis that assesses the larp for a wider audience than organizers and previous players. Its purpose is not to help the designers develop the larp nor to record it for future larp historians but to evaluate the larp in the context of its tradition and place it on a continuum of other larps. Critique should transcend the writer’s personal experience and give a more general assessment of the larp.

    Desirably, critique and critical reviews should not only evaluate the design but also voice questions about the message and meaning of the larp. Was there a point to this larp? Is it reasonable to think the participants got some insights out of it? For example, in his article “These but the trappings and the suits of woe” – Tragedy and Politics in Inside Hamlet” published in the book Larp Politics Syksy Räsänen relates the larp Inside Hamlet to the Shakespearean and Aristotelian notions of tragedy and concludes that it was more of a moral tale than a tragedy.

    Our larp tradition is not completely devoid of critical reviews. They appear in blog posts and documentation books. At some point, the website nordiclarp.org made an attempt to publish more critical reviews. And yet, it is hard to find reviews or critique of well-known larps such as Baphomet, House of Craving or Forbidden History which are run several times.

    Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
    Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt

    Culture of Critique

    In more than two decades of Knutepunkt culture, we have not developed similar institutions of critique as exist in the world of passive art like film, theatre, and literature. In assessing works, the larp community seems to rely on hearsay, impressions and publicity materials. Larp organizers have many tools to control the image of their work, ranging from documentation to the Week of Stories (a rule which prohibits players from publishing negative thoughts in the week after the larp). When we decide whether to sign up for a larp or not, we rarely (if ever) rely on public reviews.

    There are many reasons for the lack of a culture of critique. The community is tightly knit. Few people wish to review their friends’ work. Some might worry how writing a review might affect their position in the community or whether negative reviews could reduce their chances to get into larps. A designer might wish to give private feedback to other designers rather than criticize them publicly. It is rarely a good idea to cross the line between making and criticizing art.

    It is often pointed out that in larp every participant is a co-creator. Usually it is the players who make the larp, both in the good and in the bad. As a critic, should you evaluate your own contribution (against usual norms of criticism)? Or assess other players’ performance ?

    Most of us probably would not feel comfortable playing a larp where this was going to happen!

    However, you can argue that there is, especially in commercial larps, a clear distinction between designers/organizers and participants, and that different social contracts apply to these two groups. Moreover, the designers/organizers can be to some extent held responsible for player behavior. After all, they choose the participants and prepare them forthe desired genre and playing style.

    This approach does not remove all challenges of larp critique. Some larps are more difficult to play than others, and it often requires skill to get the most out of a larp. Our traditions are built on assumptions about for example what you can do in a larp and how to react to different cues. Do you need to explicitly say that no murders will happen if the larp is marketed as family drama at a dinner party?

    It is impossible to spell out all the implicit norms. Often we just learn them through playing.

    Thus, people with different backgrounds and player skills will write different reviews. However, this does not really differ from passive art. To write a good review, a movie critic has to understand the genre and the intellectual tradition of the film.

    Nevertheless, in larp the extent to which our own actions and attitudes determine the experience is on a different scale than in passive arts. And sometimes, you have a better larp if you turn some of your critical faculties off. On the other hand, to write a good review, you have to have them on.

    What if you were to take frequent off-game breaks to write down notes about the larp? How do you think it would affect your larp experience? Or the way you see the larp, more generally? As a larp critic, you cannot escape self-reflection. Players often steer their larp towards interesting directions. Can you always be sure whether an outcome results from the design or your own play (or both)? Should the critic pause to think about it during play? How would it affect their larp and that of others?

    Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
    Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt

    Hype

    Player expectations and pre-event hype affect larps. Too high expectations can ruin the experience if the larp fails to deliver. On the other hand, high expectations can also enhance the larp. Players will give their best performance and press themselves to see things in a positive light. Your attitude frames your experience.

    Hype and critical thinking can rarely coexist. If you are to write a review, you cannot strive to see things positively. When you decide to evaluate the experience, you might be already giving up parts of it.

    In larps, we have learned to explain away inconsistencies and to play around them. We often steer ourselves away from places where the shortcomings of the design would become too visible. But if you are to critically assess the larp, shouldn’t you take note of them? A critic has to balance between getting most out of the experience and maintaining an analytical distance.

    The same problem exists with passive art: there always is tension between analysis and sensation. However, there is a qualitative difference with larp. A critic always uses themselves as an instrument to analyze an artwork, but in a larp, the instrument becomes part of the artwork. As Jussi Ahlroth put it in an article about larp criticism he published in the book Playground Worlds, we have no other alternative than let the violinist review the concert they were playing in.

    Moreover, there is no possibility of going back to the objective reality of the larp. The borderline between the things that actually happened and memories/interpretations blurs. In contrast, with a novel, you can always turn to previous pages and read what the text literally says.

    These challenges are not a reason to give up attempts on larp critique but they are something to keep in mind. They also partly explain why criticizing larps often is a thankless process. It might also be worth mentioning that there are ways around them. You could use a pen name to avoid community issues. To rise above a subjective vantage point, you might review the larp as a team or interview other participants. Of course, this probably does not make the task more appealing as it adds to the workload.

    Is it a problem, then, that larp has no institutions of critique? Lately, there has been more and more interest in larp from inside the arts. For example, in 2016 the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm staged Gertrudes möhippa (Gertrude’s Bachelorette), a crossover between larp and theater.

    If larp is one day going to be part of the institution of art – as some of us hope and others fear – then there will be critique. Will we let people without much experience of larp write it? (A regular theater critic could never have identified the design flaws in Gertrudes möhippa that Annika Waern discussed in her review in 2016 on nordiclarp.org)

    Or are we going to show them the way by creating our own institutions?

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 124-128. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Cover image: Image by Bianca Blauth from Pixabay.

  • This Larp Sucked – and Everyone Should Get to Read About It

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    This Larp Sucked – and Everyone Should Get to Read About It

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    Writing about larps is hard. They are ephemeral co-creations that exist both in a measurable, physical reality, and in the participants’ imagination. The participants’ experiences are not just different receptions of the same work as in passive art, but they include objectively different content. Oftentimes, no one, not even the organisers, has seen the entire piece. Finally, participants process these experiences extensively, after runtime, alone and as a group, whether on the spot through debriefs and after-party discussions — leading to ”the post-game lie” (Waern 2013) or weeks later, through in-group online chats and photo uploads. 

    These challenges have been eloquently discussed by Nordic larpers for over 15 years, with people alternatively referring to public larp feedback as reviews, criticism, or critiques. However, these categories may not always translate well to certain countries (Ahlroth 2008). In a series of educational articles, North American larpers used passive art definitions to define what would be larp critique vs. criticism vs. review (Roberts & Stark 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d). A critique focuses on one particular aspect of a larp and frames it in its artistic context, and it is more aimed at scholars. Criticism would be rather aimed at providing feedback to the designers/organisers (I’ll use “organisers” for short). A review would talk more about the writer’s own global experience at the event and be aimed at potential future players. In the latest Nordic article on the topic, Kangas (2022) mentions larp critique in the title, but also extensively covers challenges of reviews, pointing out the lack of both. And yet, in spite of these well thought-through pieces, in 2024, there is still no comprehensive repository for larp feedback that would be:

    • public and easily accessible (neither requiring sign-up to a closed Facebook group or Discord, nor having to search for each individual larper’s blog)
    • in English (international larps have a global audience)
    • online (not everyone can afford to travel to Solmukohta to hear feedback in person)
    • free from organiser control.

    There are no print larp magazines with global reach, and there is not enough space in a single Knutebook per year to review a significant portion of the scene. The Nordic Larp website (nordiclarp.org) is receiving more submissions (see below), but it is still nowhere near a RottenTomatoes / GoodReads / TripAdvisor / Google Reviews of larp. The last two are indeed not art review websites: in my opinion, a larp event cannot just be a work of art, it is also a real-life physical experience, often paid for, and should also be reviewed as such. 

    If you end up being beaten by a cast member at an immersive theatre experience that advertised “no physical contact”, poisoned by a chef in a restaurant, or if your AirBnB had bed bugs, your review would probably mention it. All three can happen in a larp, and could therefore be in the scope of any public larp feedback. Most larp organisers are not paid professionals, and this should be taken into account, but neither are many AirBnB hosts. The monetary transaction to an unknown party can make larp a different activity than just “doing art with friends”.

    One of the reasons there is so little public larp feedback is that these articles may have unintendedly discouraged some players from writing any. First by emphasising intrinsic challenges overtly, second by using passive art criticism as a benchmark. For example, the requirement to put things in context of the artform bans any first time larpers from writing a critique – and might discourage them from writing a review. Even an old fart like myself cannot be bothered with carefully referencing other games in his reviews or thinking about his reader’s cultural environment, and thus the messy walls of text stay in friends-only Facebook posts. As Kangas (2022) writes, larp criticism is a “thankless process”, and the final straw is the fear of retaliation. No novelist can prevent reviewers from reading their next book once it’s published. A larp organiser can totally ban a reviewer for life.

    But why would anyone want to review larp events anyway?

    For both Ahlroth and Kangas, the main ethical conundrum around larp reviews is that, to fully experience the larp, the reviewer needs to participate, hence will be a co-creator, the “violinist reviewing the orchestra’s performance”. Kangas also discussed the effects of active decisions from one participant that may not even have been part of the larp’s initial design (e.g. steering). But both authors concluded that larp critique is really required for larp to be taken seriously as an art form.

    I do not care whether larp gets taken seriously as an art form. What I do care about is participants – they matter more than the games. Right now the discourse is controlled by only one type of participant: organisers. From pre-game online material to sign-up/casting process, to highly curated audiovisual content (sometimes posed, off-game photos, or highly edited video clips), organisers control most channels. Even talks at Solmukohta about specific larps are usually given by the organisers themselves. When players are invited to speak, they are usually sandwiched between two organiser speeches in which the organisers get to introduce and reframe the testimonies. 

    In private conversations with organisers and unrecorded Knutepunkt presentations by larp scholars, I have heard about structured before/after assessments in two famous Nordic larps that were intended to be transformative. One was found to be no more effective than a dance class, and the other one was sometimes actually detrimental to the values the larp intended to foster. The organisers just did not include this key player feedback in their post-game communication. For a scene that prides itself on transparency and free speech, there sure is a strong culture of omertà.

    But I don’t want to be trashed as an organiser!

    First, this is not about you. If you want private feedback as an organiser, read Waern’s (2017) great article on this very topic. This is about players. I have been both a player and an organiser. As a player, I have given candid feedback to larp organisers, in person, by private email, and in public blog posts. As an organiser, my larps have been both praised and trashed by their players, to my face while still at the game site, in private emails, and online. I know full well that organising larps can be extremely taxing physically, mentally, and financially. Any negative feedback about something you have invested so much of yourself in can feel extremely painful. 

    Does that mean organisers should get away with everything? With lying in their pre-game communication? With unethical behaviour during runtime? There will always be people who comment negatively on events, so it might as well be people who were actually there. Looking back at 10 years of Knutebook articles, it seems acceptable for authors to comment at length on larps that they did not attend, that were run in countries that they have never visited, and that were played in languages that they do not speak. Would we accept all three from a book or opera critic? Sometimes these authors have not even talked to any of the larp’s actual players: they based their articles only on curated audiovisual documentation and on the organisers’ word.

    To level the playing field, player feedback should be available on a platform where it could be useful for both organisers and future players, who can then decide if they want to participate in reruns or in new events run by the same team. Consent is only truly consent when it is informed.

    Some organisers have said that if such a central repository existed, they would stop organising. I do not want anyone to quit, but the current situation of hidden backchannels to obtain candid reviews reinforces cliqueishness, in-crowd phenomena that excludes newcomers. This is far from the oft-professed Nordic goal of inclusivity and learning as a community.

    But it’s not objective!

    There are several ways to document things that actually happened. Both Waern (2013) and Kangas (2022) describe ways of taking notes during breaks in the runtime, while Axiel Cazeneuve describes how they mentally put themselves in “recording mode” during runtime and write everything down afterwards (Cazeneuve & Freudenthal 2021). But technology can also help. Tiny cameras are now affordable, and they can be used to unobtrusively photograph or film an entire short game if other participants provide informed consent.

    Years ago, I time-lapsed Le Masque de Boba Fett (Switzerland 2015, Eng. Boba Fett’s Mask), a Star Wars larp, with a tiny GoPro, from arrival on site to post game chats. The photos not only made for fun memories, but they also showed me how much I drank, and how alcohol affected my experience – positively in this case. I was also wearing a research-grade medical device that tracked my movement, blood pressure, heart rate, and sweating. This allowed me to confirm that tense scenes (even when immobile) triggered objectively measurable stress responses, but that my pre-game period was actually even more tense than runtime (B. 2016). 

    Nowadays, consumer-grade smartwatches can refine this data collection through unobtrusive experience sampling. I am not saying that all reviewers should always revisit hours of play on a screen without the magic of imagination, nor that they should wear wireless electroencephalograms. But both handwritten notes and recording devices can help verify whether fast-paced action was actually as constant as advertised – or whether most of the game actually consisted in boredom/quiet reflection?

    Even without any technology, if people leave the game before its planned end, it is an objective event that I want to hear about as a potential player of a rerun, especially if any of these were ragequits. Objectivity can also be positive: these Star Wars larp photos showed me details I had no memory of. And even if photos do not quite look like how you remember a scene, that very difference is part of the effect of the larp. What made it different from the raw visual?

    Non-anglophone examples of public larp feedback

    Before it was killed by the rise of social networks, the website Au Fil du Jeu (Eng. In the Course of the Game; Aufildujeu.ch) acted as a main portal for the French-speaking Swiss larp scene. Organisers would announce their games, and participants would often write post-game feedback under the initial post. While post-event debates sometimes got heated, they were extremely useful to me, a newcomer in the Swiss larp scene. Was it really a big deal for me that some non-player characters were unkillable, or that there wasn’t enough roasted boar for every player? Maybe not, but it allowed me to learn about the local organisers and their game styles.

    In France, the largest larp review site is L’univers du huis clos (Eng. Chamber Larp Universe), a repository of more than 170 larp scripts. People who have downloaded and played a script sometimes write public feedback in the comments section of its page. Some reviews are very short, others provide details about how actual runs went, but they remain mostly written by organisers rather than players. 

    For a more thorough journalistic review site, the French website Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp) provides both larp previews by organisers, and reviews of games by players. As many of these larps are rerun regularly, reading about how the organisers’ vision actually panned out is extremely valuable. These reviews help me assess the odds of having a satisfactory experience after taking a day off from work and 8 hours of travel to a remote game site to co-create with people I have never met.

    The Czech website Larpová Databáse (Eng. Larp Database) is a larger review repository, in which larpers can comment on games. I do not find the 1-10 rating feature informative, but the most reviewed game, De la Bête (Czech Republic 2014, Eng. Of the Beast), has 192 written comments of various lengths from individual players. Now compare this to Parliament of Shadows (Belgium 2017), a high profile international larp with so few public reviews that the most sobering one is available only in Polish and on a Polish website (Skuza, 2017).

    So, are such sites reserved to larpers from fiery Romance or Slavic debating cultures? Can people raised with protestant moderation under Jante’s law do it in English for the whole world to see?

    Elements I would appreciate in a larp review

    First of all, there is a lot of excellent advice in English out there. The recommendations that Waern (2013) provides for larp historians are also useful for reviewers:

    • PLAY!
    • Talk to both players and designers (and game masters)
    • Collect multiple views on key events
    • Collect media

    Unlike Waern, I am not looking for neutral larp history. I do want to know what you, as a player, liked, what you did not like, and why was that. I do want to hear whether the larp was run as advertised. Kangas provides additional tips and tricks, such as using a pen name or providing group feedback. Stark and Roberts proposed a structure for larp critique, but it could be useful for any larp feedback: “Theme, Setting, Tone, Pre-game activities, Structure, Techniques/Rules/Mechanics, Facilitation/GM Role, Post-larp activities”. They also advise to show compassion, assume the best and avoid snark. However, I think some snark is OK, especially if the organisers treated you badly.

    It seems like the Nordic Larp website has also noticed that meeting art critique standards may be one of the reasons they have not been receiving much reviews, and thus they decided to call this public feedback “larp documentation”, specifying:

    Does it have to be a critique/criticism/review? No. We are very happy to publish those, for sure, but what we mostly want is straightforward accounts of people’s experiences. We don’t need you to say what you thought was wrong about the larp, or to suggest how to improve it, or so analyse it within some critical framework. Just what it was like, and how it was for you, will be perfect.

    Should I write a long narrative about my character’s journey? A documentation piece is not a long account of your character’s narrative arc, but rather discussion about your overall experience and your reflections about it. Ideally, you will be able to provide some details about the basics about the larp setting, themes, and organisation, along with a brief account of your experience, and any takeaways. Bonus points if you can connect the larp to other texts, larps, or theories in the discourse, but this is not required. (Nordic Larp 2023)

    Since participants matter more than the games, I would also love to read about player well-being.

    Corporeal well-being

    A book may give you paper cuts and move you emotionally, but a larp will by definition affect your body, potentially up to bodily harm. Players’ pre-game health affects their experience and could be relevant to it. I started The Monitor Celestra (Sweden 2013) with gut issues and cut my scalp open on a doorway – literal pre-game bleed. An eye infection at Conquest of Mythodea (Germany 2004) required immediate antibiotic treatment, making me miss a full day of game. To avoid sweat dripping into my eye, I could not wear the silicone mask that fully covered my entire head and neck, and therefore had to change character, which affected my experience.

    Quite often, organiser choices affect players’ physical well-being, so it makes sense to write about those experiences in a review. One example is hygiene: were there enough bathrooms for everyone? Could people change their sanitary products and contact lenses in the bathrooms? Also, did you get accurate information about the conditions where you would be living and playing? For example, pre-game information about De la Bête mentioned that I would sleep in a castle, but not that it would be so dusty that my black costume would become grey every day. It was honestly not a big deal, but it could be relevant for future players. When discussing health related issues, you should obviously only share what you are comfortable with, what is relevant to your experience at the game, and you should always respect the privacy of other participants.

    Emotional well-being

    In Fat Man Down (Denmark 2009), a 2-4 hour jeepform/freeform scenario originally designed for the Fastaval festival, players consent to roleplaying scenes from the life of a fat man and the people making his life miserable. Just before going in character, players are told by the organiser (without the player of the “fat man” hearing) that his use of the safeword should be ignored. Meanwhile, the player of the “fat man” is given the real safe word and will therefore get to observe the other players breaking a game rule. 

    This constitutes bait and switch as the players did not consent to participate in an experiment testing their willingness to break agreed-upon rules and to potentially abuse a co-player. In a scientific setting, this type of “forced insight” experiment, without the oversight of an external ethics committee, would get the organisers fired or disbarred. But in the Nordic larp scene, several larpers have told me: “Sure it’s a bit unethical, but it’s an innovative design! It’s great art, so it’s OK!” Parts of the Nordic freeform/larp scenes may have moved on from this “provocation first, people second” approach, but how many players have signed up for this game without even having the option to read player feedback?

    People often joke about Type II fun and extreme emotional sports, but do larpers sign up to get abused? I need to see whether limits are clearly announced on a larp’s website, but I would also like to hear whether they were actually respected. Not just by the organisers, but also by supporting casts and co-players. And if all of the above was perfectly healthy and safe, well, that’s a great thing to know for future players too!

    Financial well-being

    Since the advent of international blockbuster larps, sign-up fees have been getting closer to the median monthly income of several European countries. It would be only fair to get some accurate information about the larp before spending such an amount of money (plus costume and transportation). Furthermore, personal time investment for larps that rely heavily on co-creation by the players can mean allocating weeks into online pre-play. Before investing these resources, it would be great to be able to check whether the game is a good fit for the player, and not have to rely solely on the organiser’s website. An ageing population of players may have more money, but also less free time. Between raising children and minding their carbon footprint, a lot of people are ready to larp less – if they can larp better.

    Creative well-being

    Once all of the above have been considered, I want to hear about the game itself, but not just in a neutral, descriptive manner. Did the themes come to life as communicated? How? Did cheesy aliens with green antennae crash the Dangerous Liaisons larp that was announced as historically accurate? Did the much-touted lavish set and prop design live up to the hype? 

    If your own character’s plot was not satisfactory, what happened? Do you think it was because of your own playing, a confusing character text, or other players refusing to play to lift? Or did an interdimensional demon portal “main plot train” run over the intimate love stories that were supposed to be the core of your experience? Conversely, if you had ecstatic, life-changing scenes, how did they happen? Did they resonate with your own, pre-game interests, or did you discover an entire new side of your personality? And what about the other players? Did they seem bored or did they seem to get more out of the larp than you did? Any of this information could be useful. And the best part is that you do not have to actually include any of it for your public written feedback to be more valid and useful than the current silence.

    Just do it. Please.

    Two of the Nordic Larp website’s latest player “documentation pieces” perfectly illustrate the value of ignoring the strict requirements of artistic critique. In his “documentation” of Gothic (Denmark 2023), Juhana Pettersson (2023) discusses his past personal interest in the topic, takes a behind-the-scenes look at specific aspects of the design, and describes some key scenes and his feelings about it all. Simon Brind’s (2023) documentation of the erotic horror larp House of Craving (Denmark 2019) is self-described as “a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened”, but both pieces are really useful.

    These two are great examples of reviews/testimonies/public larp feedback, and we need more (including on the very same games, even the very same runs) to hear more perspectives. We especially need reviews by people who are less known in the Nordic larp scene and may suffer from impostor syndrome.

    If none of the advice above helps, you can always start by just writing down three things you liked, three things you didn’t, and then explain why you did or did not like them. That would already be better than the current situation. Other future participants would thank you, and again, they, like you, matter more than the games.

    References

    Ahlroth, Jussi. 2008. “Leave the Cat in the Box: Some Remarks on the Possibilities of Role-Playing Game Criticism.” In Playground Worlds, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Jyvaskyla, Finland: Ropecon ry.  

    B., Thomas. 2016. “Your Brain on Larp: Questions and Tools for Neuroludology.” Presentation at Solmukohta.

    Brind, Simon. 2023. “A Trip Beyond the House of Craving.” Nordiclarp.org, Oct 26.

    Cazeneuve, Axiel, and Michael Freudenthal. 2021. “Immersion en GN pour l’analyser ? La recherche en jeu de rôle grandeur nature (Eng. Immersion in larp to analyze it? Research in live action roleplay).” BEta Larp, October 23-24. Michael Freudenthal, Oct. 24.

    Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp). 2024. Electro-GN.com.

    Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt https://leavingmundania.com/2017/05/30/why-larp-critique-is-awesome/2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    L’univers du huis clos (Eng. Chamber Larp Universe). 2023. Murder-party.org

    Larpová Databáse (Eng. Larp Database). 2021. Larpovadatabaze.cz.

    Nordic Larp. 2023. Facebook post on Nordic Larp Page. , ref Nov 22, 2023

    Pettersson, Juhana. 2023. “The Immortal Legacy.” Nordiclarp.org, Oct 11.

    Roberts, Alex, and Lizzie Stark. 2017a. “Notes Toward Larp Critique: Exploring Critique, Criticism, and Review.” Leaving Mundania, April 19.

    Roberts, Alex, and Lizzie Stark. 2017b. “Why Larp Critique Is Awesome.” Leaving Mundania, May 30.

    Roberts, Alex, and Lizzie Stark. 2017c. “How to Write Good Larp Critique.” Leaving Mundania, July 16.

    Roberts, Alex, and Lizzie Stark. 2017d. “Practical Tips for Writing Larp Critique.” Leaving Mundania, July 31.

    Skuza, Andrzej. 2017. “Relacja z LARPa Parliament of Shadows – przewaga cieni nad parlamentem (Eng. “Report from the larp Parliament of Shadows – the advantage of the shadows over the parliament”).” Graj Kolektyw, December 4.

    Waern, Annika. 2013. “How Can We Know What Actually Happened in a Larp?“ Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, April 22.

    Waern, Annika. 2019. “How to Gather Feedback from Players.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 373-388. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Ludography

    Conquest of Mythodea. 2004. Live Adventure Event GmbH, Germany.

    De la Bête. 2014. Rolling, Czech Republic.

    Fat Man Down. 2009. Frederik Berg Østergaard, Denmark.

    Gothic. 2023. Avalon Larp Studio, Denmark.

    House of Craving. 2019. Participation Design Agency, Denmark.

    Le Masque de Boba Fett. 2015. Nugerôle, Switzerland.

    Parliament of Shadows. 2017. Participation Design Agency in collaboration with Oneiros and White Wolf Entertainment, Belgium.

    The Monitor Celestra. 2013. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet, Sweden.

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

    B., Thomas. 2024. “This Larp Sucked – and Everyone Should Get to Read About It.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. Image has been cropped.

  • Review of Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences

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    Review of Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences

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    In 2006, I was 18 years old, and I organized my first larp: a three day fantasy larp set in the ongoing campaign of Gyllene Hjorten (Eng. The Golden Deer). All things considered, it went well, for the most part thanks to the players, who made sure they had fun. We did make one mistake that I still remember. We had failed to foresee that once the group of evil soldiers got their hands on the magical ring everyone was looking for, they might leave the area. This made sense for their characters to do. We, the designers, had failed to provide a reason for them to stay on site. We were lucky and this happened on the last night of the game, which meant it did not disrupt the larp too much. If Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences had been around at the time, could we have avoided this mistake?

    The Larp Design book is gorgeous, with a striking cover and clean design. It is also massive with its 428 pages. Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, it contains a collection of essays about designing Nordic-style larp. With 66 authors from 10 different countries, it is an impressive feat. The stated goal is that the essays should be practical and useful for beginners as well as experienced designers.

    The content is divided into five parts:

    1. The Foundations of Larp Design, where the basics of larp design are introduced.
    2. Designing What Happens Before Runtime, which contains advice on things such as communication before an event and how to run workshops.
    3. Designing the Runtime. This part makes up the bulk of the book and deals with a wide breadth of topics from character design to questions of signaling consent.
    4. After Runtime. This is a short section covering post-play activities and how to gather player feedback.
    5. How to Export Nordic Larp. The final part is also very short, covering Nordic larp in other larp and art traditions.

    Front cover of the Larp Design book with an artistic background

    The book starts off with an introduction to the foundations of larp design. It then goes on to outline how to design what happens before, during, and after the runtime of a larp. The final part is a discussion of how Nordic larp can interact with other larp traditions, and how to collaborate with other art forms.

    The essays range from offering concrete advice to providing perspectives to consider. An example of the former is the essay on “How to Schedule the Participants’ Time on Site” by Alma Elofsson. How long are people able to stay still and listen? About 30 minutes. How often do you need to serve coffee to Nordic players? The answer is every 3 to 4 hours. While these questions might seem trivial, when they are botched, it can drag down an otherwise excellent larp experience.

    An example of an essay exploring perspectives on a more complex issue is “Designing for Queer and Trans Players” by Eleanor Saitta and Sebastian F. K. Svegaard. Here, the authors offer up questions to consider to make your larp more inclusive to queer and trans players, rather than offering clear cut answers to those questions. For example, they explore how statements like “this larp will not feature homophobia or transphobia” can be troublesome. While signaling inclusion, it also risks erasing the erasing the identities they are meant to include. It does so by removing the structures that created those identities to begin with. These questions are complex and this essay offer a starting point for thinking about them.

    Together the two examples above show the breath of questions explored in this book. There is so much great stuff in this book that it is difficult to decide what to highlight. Nevertheless, I would like to bring up three of my personal favorites. The first is “Basic Concepts in Larp Design” by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. This is a succinct and elegant summary of the subject and its terminology. As part of the introductory chapter of the book and to the field as a whole, it is indispensable. For those that have read the existing literature surrounding Nordic larp, such as the Knutepunkt books, much of this will be familiar. However, for someone just getting acquainted with larp design, inter-immersion, steering, and herd competence, may be new concepts. Readers can see the entire glossary for the book here.

    The second one is “Functional Design” by Kaisa Kangas. This essay states that “a functional larp design is one where the players have meaningful things to do during the larp, and where those things serve a purpose in the larp as a whole” (p. 143) whereby Kangas manages to capture the crux of larp design in one sentence. How can designers make sure that the things that the characters do in the fiction are actually doable in the larp? How can they balance playability vs. plausibility? The essay explores these questions with the help of a well-selected set of examples.

    Finally, I very much enjoyed “Spatial Design for Larps” by Søren Ebbehøj, Signe Løndahl Hertel, and Jonas Trier-Knudsen. This essay opened my eyes in a new way to how the space in which a larp is set shapes play. For example, they suggest that using a smaller space will catalyze tensions and facilitate play focused on relationships and interpersonal conflict. And this comes with the added benefit of saving money on rent. What is there not to like?

    A number of practical anecdotes are mixed in with the essays. In these, larp designers tell a story and make a judgment on whether they “nailed it” or “failed it.” Most of these are absolute gold, especially the ones describing failures. For the novice, there is plenty to learn there, and I am sure there are many veteran larp designers smiling at how they themselves made the same mistakes.

    The Larp Design book in front of a bookshelf

    There are a few minor things to grumble about. There are some unfortunate typos, and I find the sans-serif font in the section introductions difficult to read. My main criticism of this book is that, at least at the time of writing, it is very difficult to get a hold of. To fulfill its full potential this book needs to reach people outside of those that attended the Knudepunkt 2019 conference. Otherwise it risks primarily preaching to the choir. The good news is that according to the editors, while the book is currently out of print, it will be made available in 2020. To be kept up to date on release information, sign up by clicking this link

    Is anything missing? To my mind, there are two things. The first one is an essay about writing larp scripts. In an age when more and more larps are run more than once, and often by different people, advice on how to efficiently document the organizing materials for a game would be useful. The second thing I miss is a discussion about running a series of connected larps. Others will certainly find other things they would have liked to see included — with that said, this book covers a lot, and leaves few stones unturned.

    Larp Design sets out to be a practical book and it hits the mark. For absolute beginners, it might be a little bit too much to chew off. I imagine it would be a lot to take in for someone with no practical design experience. That said, I do think this is a book that has plenty to offer for anyone interested in larp design, from the beginner to the experienced. I sincerely hope it will be more easily available. That way, future 18 year-olds might realize how to make the evil soldiers stay on-site.

    Credits

    Editors: Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen

    Complete list of contributors

    Cover artist: Anne Serup Grove

    Country: Denmark

    Language: English

    Published: 2019

    Publisher: Landsforeningen Bifrost

    Pages: 428

    References

    Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

  • #Feminism – Reviewing the Nano-Game Anthology

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    #Feminism – Reviewing the Nano-Game Anthology

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Reviewing #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology

    Selfie

    Selfie

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

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

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

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

    My Sister Malala

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

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

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

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

    Mum, I Made This Sex Tape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Janire Roldán

    Mentioning the Unmentionables

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

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

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

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

    Glitzy Nails

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

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

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

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

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

    Flesh

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

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

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

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

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

    6066

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

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

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

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

    Conclusion

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

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

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

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

  • Fairweather Manor – The Latest Iteration of the Blockbuster Formula?

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    Fairweather Manor – The Latest Iteration of the Blockbuster Formula?

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    Fairweather Manor is a historically-inspired international larp for 140 whose first run took place in Zamek Moszna, Poland, on the 5-8th of November 2015. It was created by the Liveform/Rollespilsfabrikken team already behind the creation of College of Wizardry. As such, the format, creative team, and overall design of the larp connects Fairweather Manor to the previous games considered as following the Blockbuster Formula, while also having its own, unique identity.

    This article will therefore try to analyze how we might examine the design choices of Fairweather Manor in this light, how this larp also might differ singularly from those others, and which elements pertaining to the Brute Force design may also apply to Fairweather Manor.

    In the Grand Scheme of Things

    In the continuity of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry, Fairweather Manor utilizes the full potential of running a game in a truly breathtaking location and of using both the setting and players’ efforts to create a spectacular 360° illusion. The Castle of Moszna possesses a variety of small sets whose exploration works as a perpetual incentive and makes for the possibility of a variety of scenes. A grand staircase, the dining area opening on the Winter Garden in the Orangerie, the chapel, the grounds, and Graveyard were all spectacular settings. On the upper floors, the big suites of the Castle served as family rooms for the nobles, making them a little less accessible, but giving some players the opportunity for other grand scenes.

    The sheer size of the game — 140 players divided into three character-type groups —  and the collective efforts of the players ensured that the experience would be a descent into 1914. Players could offer activities, such as a fencing lesson, an open stage, a play rehearsal, concerts, or speeches, which would become part of the frame for the larp. You could go on a car or a coach run, and then discuss the comparative merits of the two. You would meet different people at dinner and hone your skills at small or big talk.

    The larp, like its predecessors, also benefited from the established world material factor. Historical resources on the period are numerous and, by claiming only a loose historical accuracy, the larp allowed for some flexibility on that ground. For the dramatic side, knowledge of the inspirational television series Downton Abbey was certainly an incentive for most of the players and the melodramatic aspect of the series’ narrative combined with the play-to-lose approach of the larp ensured that the play style of the participants, even when they came from a lot of different nationalities and backgrounds, would remain sensibly the same. These elements ensured that, overall, the game presented itself as a flowing, immersive experience with an extremely high production value.

    Characters at Play: The Legacy of the Brute Force Design

    However, Fairweather Manor seems to differ from the previous blockbuster models in regard to context, background, and the way it would influence the characters’ agenda. In a context such as those larps, which were inspired by Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter, the incentive comes from the universe in itself. In other terms, the context drives the plot. In Battlestar Galactica, there is a (space)ship to run for the sake of the preservation of humanity and duties to be fulfilled. In the Harry Potter-verse or any magical equivalent, the combination of school routines and a general sense of exploration, fun, and adventure is more than enough to drive any narrative. In the confines of the strict hierarchies and overall lack of universe or plot-driven incentives, however, the narratives of Fairweather Manor had to rely mostly on characters.

    Following heavily the character template established by College of Wizardry (CoW) — albeit with a little more room for pre-established character interactions —  the characters of Fairweather Manor followed the same logic, aiming at giving the players something very flexible with which to play. Characters could be changed and exchanged at will, and players had to prepare as much interactions and development by themselves as they could. However, where the location and structure of College of Wizardry makes this type of flexibility fairly easy with most characters being students in the same location, the same cannot be said of Fairweather Manor, where characters came with established gender, age groups, family ties, social functions, etc. This design was a necessity to establish the society of Fairweather Manor in a credible way, but also, combined with a rather arbitrary distribution of characters between players, it limited the liberty that some players would have to transform their character at their will. Furthermore, the characters had gone through a variety of approaches in the writing process, making them extremely diverse. Some characters were, within the confines of the CoW model, more detailed, with pre-established storylines. Some were more constrained within their social function; some would prove fairly difficult to enact. Furthermore, Fairweather Manor, while run by a substantial staff of organizers, chose to dispense entirely with NPCs. While the purpose was obviously to make the larp completely self-sufficient and self-contained, it meant that Fairweather Manor would not have the leeway that College of Wizardry would have when it came to letting players create their own storylines. As such, most of the character work had to be done upstream when it was needed, the margin for freeplay being much more reduced once onsite. Therefore, as is often the case with the huge sandbox type these games prove to be, any character would only be as good as the way each player chose to handle them and co-create their own narrative.

    When characters worked, however — and a significant number of them did — they provided the frame for a lot of deep, emotional interactions. In keeping with the social norm — and thanks to the rather clever technique of “think of the family” (an in-game expression that would also work on a meta-level to incite the player to keep secrets hidden) — most of the interactions were kept low-key, avoiding for the most part the risk of expansive melodrama or plot overload that can happen in this type of format. Lastly, we might underline the fact that two elements associated with the Brute Force design also came very much into play in that regard: secrets, and conflicting characters’ agenda.

    Fairweather Manor

    Although the approach of the larp was fairly transparent, with  all characters published in a common folder, players did not have to read them if they did not want to do so. Existing storylines often included personal or familial secrets, and pre-game preparation between players also tended to include secrets of the backstory that would come to fruition over the course of the game. A lot of players wrote letters addressed to or sent by their characters, which would be used to put their secrets in the open. Again, in keeping with the play-to-lose approach, secrets were used only as hooks for big reveals and intense conflicts. Whether this aspect makes for interesting role-play or not is of course a matter of personal preference, but seems necessary to a design such as Fairweather Manor, where (dysfunctional) family values really came out as an overarching theme.

    Conflicting characters’ agenda were also present, a matter for which players expressed some concerns, for fear that these would hijack the sense of narrative and become a competitive gameplay. Issues pertaining to the Duke’s inheritance, matrimonial strategies, the search of patrons for the artist, the opportunities for better employment, or improving one’s situation for servants, for example, relied on characters’ agenda, and sometimes caused oppositions, but they also were played in a low-key, mostly narrative manner. Although it was not explicitly stated in such a way, most players seemed to choose that any accomplishment in that regard would come with strings attached, or at some cost, which worked well enough, as a valid take on these issues.

    The existence of social hierarchies and subgroups — family groups, artists and intellectuals, higher and lower servants — also appear as a legacy of the Brute Force design. They were used, however, less to create conflict than as a backdrop for the enacting of social conventions and constraints. These, however, could have been more forcefully enforced, especially in regard of what would be considered proper and acceptable or not, and what the cost of deviation from the norm would be. More workshops on these issues, manners, and body language might have been useful. At the in location, briefings tackled essentially the subjects of play style, location, safety, and ideologies of the time period. A slot devoted to behaviors and cultural calibration could have been helpful to some, but was probably left out by design.

    Players’ Duties and Sequencing

    Like College of Wizardry, Fairweather Manor was based on a strictly timed structure — activities and meals being used to structure the daily lives of the residents — relying on some players’ duties.

    Most were taken voluntarily: players wanting to host an activity registered to do so ahead of the larp, providing the entertainment fit for a high-end reception. Artist characters, of course, were very much encouraged to do so. This aspect, combined with a general sense of goodwill in the audience, ensured that the setting always felt active and alive.

    The main branch of the nobles — the characters who were the hosts of the reception — were hand-picked and cast way ahead of the lottery. These players did a lot of work pre-game and in-game to ensure that the reception would be running properly, and that information about timing and activities were properly delivered. How heavy a duty that was and how much the larp came to rely on these characters is hard to clearly evaluate, but it certainly should be emphasized that the structure of the larp needs this core group of characters as its foundation.

    Then, there is the matter of the servant characters. A huge amount of work has been put to make them operate as a corps, some players being directly involved in the writing of the servants’ handbook. However, if the standing ovation the servant group received at the end of the game is any indication, it is quite obvious that the servant group took upon themselves a much bigger workload than was originally announced or expected of them. In addition, the higher servants — butler, housekeeper, and their seconds — obviously held a great many organizational tasks as well. Could the communication on these aspects have been clearer? Most certainly. But this point also shows how Fairweather Manor worked in no small part through the willful commitment of the participants, and managed to stir their passions, in combination with what remains a grand production design.

    A Story about Love?

    To quote from the second teaser, “Being at Fairweather Manor, that’s love.” I would believe that; for all the complexity and issues that are always raised by the grand scope of a blockbuster larp such as this one, it managed to hold up through the love that so many of its actors put into it. This sense of affection is perceptible in the show that inspired it: Downton Abbey is, in my opinion, a nostalgic, benevolent took at a Time that Was, while overlooking its obvious limitations and gruesome inequalities. Likewise, Fairweather Manor displayed all the outdated charm of the period that was called in France La Belle Epoque the Beautiful Era — before the upheaval brought by the war transformed all of society, for better or worse. The high-grade staff production, combined with a significant volunteer work and player commitment to the larp was considerable, its undeniable success as a result, and the surest testimony of the way it succeeded in engaging its participants wholeheartedly in its construction. While being clearly connected to the blockbuster model, Fairweather Manor also managed to be quite unique in distilling elements of the Brute Force in its own narrative. Whether other larps and future runs will manage to follow and improve on the same delicate balance will surely be interesting to contemplate.

    References

    Bibliography

    Ludography

    • Fairweather Manor (2015). Agata Swistak, Agnieszka Linka Hawryluk-Boruta, Akinomaja Borysiewicz, Alexander Tukaj, Beata Ploch, Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski, Ida Pawłowicz, Janina Wicher, Krzysztof “Ciastek” Szczęch, Krzysztof “Iryt” Kraus, Maciek Nitka, Mikołaj Wicher, Nadina Wiórkiewicz, Szymon Boruta. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Moszna, Poland. http://www.fmlarp.com/

    All photos are exclusively licensed for use by John-Paul Bichard. Contact him for use of these and other photos from Fairweather Manor.

  • A Refreshing Take on Larp in Film: Review of Treasure Trapped

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    A Refreshing Take on Larp in Film: Review of Treasure Trapped

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    Treasure Trapped (2014), directed by Alex Taylor, is a documentary about larp made by the UK company Cosmic Joke. In a short article in the Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, the filmmakers describe the background of the film’s journey. The movie started as an exploration of modern day fantasy larp in the UK and its roots in the seminal 1981 larp Treasure Trap, in which players engaged in a dungeon crawl-type adventure wearing full costume in a castle. The filmmakers summarize their work as such:

    “Whilst making our documentary, Treasure Trapped, we have been trying to focus on the unexpected twists and turns in the development of larp—not least that, in the Scandinavian world, it has become a method of teaching, something completely unheard of in the UK. No matter how far our journey takes us into the intricacies and developments of modern larp, we always unearth the same core values: ideals of warmth and community spirit; jokes and eccentricities; language and rules; all of which have stayed with the hobby since a group of people set out to acquire a Victorian folly in Thatcher’s Britain and could only have dreamt of what they’d create.”((Alex Taylor and Michael Surman, “In the Beginning: Treasure Trap – Opening the Pandora’s Box of Larp,” in Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con), 55.))

    Treasure Trapped

    Expectations for the documentary have been high based on the lofty scope, especially with the inclusion of Nordic larp and edu-larp placed in conversation with more mainstream forms like fantasy boffer and post-apocalyptic genres.

    Many readers may already find Cosmic Joke’s work familiar, as they recently produced the documentation footage for the Polish-Danish Harry Potter-inspired larp College of Wizardry (2014), which transpired in a gorgeous castle in Poland. The footage went viral last year, reaching dozens of media outlets((Johannes Axner, “College of Wizardry 2014 Round-up,” Nordiclarp.org, December 9, 2014.)) and placing high-quality, immersive larp at the forefront. At the time of this review, the trailer for the College of Wizardry documentary has reached almost a million views, with the longer documentary itself at over 64,000 views.

    Previous to this footage, mainstream audiences were likely only familiar with the infamous “Lightning Bolt!” video (2005), in which an American boffer larper throws lightning bolt packets at a foe, which became a viral sensation and a rallying point for the mocking of larpers. The movie Role Models (2008) was one of the only other mainstream representations of larp, which emphasized boffer combat and the social ineptitude of the players engaged in the activity. Even before these representations, role-playing games have faced extreme stigma and moral panic since their inception in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with parents terrified that their children would engage in occult activities or “lose touch with reality.”((Lizzie Stark, Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-playing Games (Chicago: Chicago Review Press). You can read Lizzie’s review of Treasure Trapped here.))

    While the College of Wizardry videos may not reassure parents on either of these points, the high production values of the larp in the video footage ignited the excitement of Harry Potter fans around the world who have always dreamed of having the opportunity to attend a school like Hogwarts. More importantly, perhaps, the footage made mainstream viewers more aware of the term “larp” and its potential as an art form. As Claus Raasted, one of the College of Wizardry organizers, explains in an article about a Nordic larp documentary featured on the Discovery Channel, “I don’t think we benefit from having ‘Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!’ as one of our strongest media representations. If we don’t do something to change it, we’ll never move past that image.”((Claus Raasted, “Taking Nordic Larp to Discovery Channel,” in Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con), 65.))

    Due to the early hype around the film, even before this newer footage went live, many of us waited in anxious anticipation for the release of Treasure Trapped. Never sure if journalistic representations will mock or otherwise misunderstand larp, the production of a new documentary tends to arouse emotions of both excitement and apprehension for researchers and practitioners. Fortunately, Treasure Trapped does not disappoint, offering a series of examples of high production quality larps interspersed with excellent interviews from experts like UK scholar Laura Mitchell and several larpers in the UK, Scandinavia, and Germany. Many of the interviewees are familiar faces in the Nordic larp scene, such as Cecilia Dolk, Mads Lunau, Eirik Fatland, Claus Raasted, Astrid S. Andersen, and Jamie MacDonald, among many others.

    The movie starts with the filmmakers seeking out their first larp experience by shooting the last session of a 6-year run of Maelstrom in the UK, a larp run by the company Profound Decisions. Maelstrom is notable for featuring elaborate props and costumes, as well as a large player base. They then travel to other local larps, including the post-apocalyptic themed Wasteland. While we do see the filmmakers’ confused reactions to these initial experiences and hear the confusion common to outsiders trying to understand larp, their attitudes are more curious than scornful. Eventually, they dip their toes into larping themselves, taking up foam swords at a boffer practice.

    Interested in seeking out other forms of larp, the filmmakers journey to Sweden, where they film the first run of Monitor Celestra (2013), the Battlestar Galactica-inspired larp that took place on a real historical warship. The filmmakers explain Nordic larp in broad strokes, then offer detailed footage of the Danish rerun of PanoptiCorp (2013) and the Danish all-larp boarding school Østerskov Efterskole. The filmmakers had released these vignettes previously on YouTube; I found watching them edited together in their entirety quite special, especially when streamlined with more traditional styles of larp to demonstrate the wide spectrum of the form.

    Overall, the film does an excellent job of presenting larp at its best, emphasizing high production values, its educational potential, strong community bonds, and the potential for psychological transformation. The footage is visually gorgeous and carefully spliced with thoughtful interviews from a nice variety of sources, such as experts on larp and students at the school. Particularly touching are the interviews with original Treasure Trap attendees speaking about how much the larp changed their lives and their nostalgic yearning for that past experience. I was especially pleased to see workshopping and debriefing shown in the film in the Nordic section, including scenes with Norwegian larp designer Eirik Fatland leading players through rituals to start and end the PanoptiCorp larp.

    Despite the excellence of the content, notable inclusions to the documentary would have enhanced the finished product. I would have liked to have seen the high quality British theatre-style games, such as the Regency larps that take place in nineteenth century period costumes and locations. Brief footage of mainstream fantasy larps in Sweden or Denmark would have provided a larger picture, as Nordic larp is but a small subset of overall larps in those regions. Ideally, the film also would have touched upon the freeform scene and filmed at Fastaval or the Stockholm Scenario Festival, although admittedly freeform is less visually stimulating than full-costume larps.

    Portrait PosterThe film would also benefit from a brief explanation about larp around the world. Though Grand Expedition founder Rick Wynne discusses the worldwide scope a bit, a sense of the history of larp in other locations from a scholarly perspective would add to the utility of the film as an introduction point for uninitiated viewers. Alternately, the filmmakers could explain that their scope is limited to the UK and Scandinavia and is not representative of all larp. These are minor critiques, however, and did not detract from my enjoyment of the film.

    In summary, I highly recommend Treasure Trapped as an excellent larp documentary. The inclusion of various styles — from fantasy boffer to educational to Nordic larp — gives a much broader view than other documentaries to date. The interviews are thoughtful and deep, while cute animated graphics and editorial comments by the filmmakers add a bit of levity to the piece. From a big picture perspective, the documentary provides a refreshing counterpoint to many of the notably shallow representations of larp in past films.

    From what I understand, aside from film festivals, the documentary is currently only available if groups set up a special screening through Tugg, though the film should see wider availability at the end of 2015. I definitely suggest setting up a screening if your local community can draw enough people to buy tickets, as the visual imagery and sound quality is worth seeing on the big screen.

  • Book Review: Larps from the Factory

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    Book Review: Larps from the Factory

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    Danish larper and larp designer Oliver Nøglebæk has written a review of the larp script collection book Larps from the Factory.

    Here is an excerpt from the review:

    I know how much work the creators put into making this book and it shows. It is well written and consistent, which is extra impressive considering the huge number of people who actually wrote the larps in the book. It is also lovely to see a book that both celebrates a strong tradition of larpwriting and provides new opportunities to rerun the games or take them apart for use in new projects. It is definitely at in the top of my list of “most useful books on larp.” And together with the Nordic Larp book for the pretty pictures of big larps, I think we’re very well covered when it comes to approachable reading material to introduce the scope of norp to outsiders.

    Read the complete review on his blog:
    http://norper.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/review-larps-from-the-factory/