Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  Next, we developed the social milieu of the street through dancing. We paired up at random for dances representing positive, negative, and oppositional relationships. As we danced, we talked to our partners, sussing out the details. My positive relation was with another American, playing a watchmaker who wanted to join the Mafia. We agreed that he was my godson and that I would try to dissuade him. I had a negative relationship with an out-of-work artist, a former client of mine who had failed to marry the woman I’d set him up with, bringing my matchmaking ability and taste into question. The local Catholic priest and I had an oppositional relationship—I thought he was uptight, and he thought I promoted lasciviousness, but at the end of the day we shared a common goal: to marry off the single folk.

  With that, our pregame workshop ended, and after a raucous dinner at the community house, the base of operations for A Week in Denmark, I went to sleep in a basement room along with perhaps twenty other foreigners—Swedes, Frenchmen, Germans, Israelis, Czechs, and Finns. It was the only full night of sleep I got all week.

  The following morning, In Fair Verona reconvened for the second part of the workshop. After warming up with some tango, we made a status line with bum characters at one end and the highly educated rich at the other. You could negotiate with your neighbors to move up or down. As a businesswoman, my matchmaker fell somewhere in the middle. We danced with partners who were near to us on the status line to gain two more relationships. Finally, we divided ourselves into groups according to status. Tue and Jesper gave us masking tape and instructed us to create hangouts for our characters. A dockworker, a writer, a café owner, and I decided our haunt would be a café. Around us, we saw other rooms being made. The tony end of town held a church/school, a flower shop, and some private space, where characters could go to be alone. The other end of the room, the poorer side of town, included a speakeasy with a shady back room, an alley, and a place under a bridge, complete with a tiny masking-tape octagon that represented a fire in a trash barrel. On Tue and Jesper’s advice, we also included a sleazy motel room at that end of town. We all knew what dancing in there would mean.

  With that, my first pregame workshop ended, and we broke for lunch. The pregame workshop is a typical Nordic practice and allows the players to get comfortable with one another. Sometimes the workshops include lessons on the philosophy of the game world, including feminist philosophy or the politics of a historical era. Sometimes workshops include lessons in physical game mechanics. And GMs often use workshops to help players develop character concepts and webs of relationships. The inclusion of workshops in Nordic games represents a key difference in attitude between American and Nordic organizers. Most American larps follow a CEO-style model with someone like Knight Realms’ James C. Kimball at the helm, imagining the game universe, creating rules for it, and fleshing out its history and culture. American GMs typically present a fully formed reality with concrete, planned plot obstacles for players, whose characters generally enter the game without an elaborate network of ties to the in-game community. The players arrive ready to be entertained, ready to go on a quest, and prepared to grab some part of the main plot for themselves, prepared to steal a moment in the limelight. The Nordic style of workshopping seems socialist in comparison. Through workshopping, players help create the world of the game by forging relationships among themselves and, in Verona, quite literally by inventing the shops along the in-game street. Similarly, the responsibility for the in-game action sits more firmly on the players than it does in American larp. Nordic GMs rarely create plots for the players to pursue or solve; rather, they set up the scenario and step back—it is up to the players to create their own fun and to embark on their own emotional journeys.

  The In Fair Verona workshop accomplished several objectives: it taught us the core game mechanic, the tango; it developed relationships among us as characters and as people so no one had to feel like the new kid in the lunch room; it offered each character a possible emotional arc, a character goal to reach or reject, and in doing so, the workshop dispersed what might be thought of as the traditional larp plot (no invite-only mods here); and finally, the workshop invested us in the world we created together and set our expectations of what might happen during the game. In short, the workshop helped avoid some of the pitfalls of more conventional, stateside larp by giving us full, round characters who would arrive at the game already enmeshed in the community.

  During the lunch break we got into costume, supplementing what we’d brought with spare items from the props table. Meanwhile, Tue and Jesper set up the dance studio, covering the windows with cloth so that the room’s only light emanated from the theatrical lamps they’d set up, spotlighting certain rooms and allowing others to remain shadowed. The sleazy motel room got lit with a red light, the better to indicate its symbolic, in-game purpose.

  The game’s actual rules were incredibly simple. Since these characters worked out their emotions through dance, to refuse a dance, even with someone your character hated, was forbidden. We would play out three acts, each of which lasted a preset number of songs. The GMs would light candles during the last few dances of each act to let us know the end was nigh. Sometime during the first act, we had to dance with our negative relation, a move that should catapult our characters into their predetermined crises. During the second act, we would explore our character dilemmas, and in the third act we’d drift toward our positive or negative outcomes. Anyone who felt unsure about where their character was going could request a dance with Tue. The theme of the game was love, so we should be actively seeking love, Tue and Jesper told us, and most of us should find it during the course of the game.

  Over the three acts, my matchmaker danced with almost everyone, from the writer to the funeral director to the priest to the bum. My most fun dance was with the male busybody, who wanted to make his old girlfriend (his negative relation) jealous. We danced as she followed us and glared. My character gave love advice. She persuaded the teacher to apologize to his protégé, the shoeshine girl, for striking her in anger. She tried to set up her godson with the flower seller. She told the gambler he should ask out the fast woman who hung around the bar, and the two of them married, confirming my character’s worldview.

  As the game progressed, my character became ever more convinced of her judgment and taste and thus failed to change her ways, drifting toward the negative outcome on my character sheet. Increasingly, she felt left out as the rest of the characters paired up, for who could match the matchmaker? Several times over a widow, she knew that she had missed her chance at love tonight and forever. She ended the game depressed and alone, the young, lascivious priest-in-training attempting to strong-arm her into the motel room with him.

  I can’t help but wonder if my American prejudices about larp motivated my character’s depression at the end of In Fair Verona. In general, games that explicitly model sex and love aren’t played in the states—I’ve certainly never encountered one—although US larps aren’t completely without romance. Knight Realms, for example, has a handful of coupled characters, most of them also couples in real life. FishDevil’s Deadlands campaign does model sex with an unsexy mechanic; prostitutes ask their johns over to a quiet corner and have them draw a card—the higher the card, the better the romp was. Perhaps Americans don’t play love because there aren’t a lot of representative or satisfying mechanics—such as tango—bouncing around the scene. Maybe Americans don’t play love because it seems emotionally dangerous. As Finnish game researcher Jaakko Stenros put it, love may feel more dangerous to play than violence because love is a common human emotion—few people in the developed world will ever stab something with a sword, but most of us will fall in love. Violence seems more fantastical and may therefore feel easier to leave behind at the end of a game. Furthermore, violence is a physical act, while love is an emotional one, and physical boundaries seem easier to maintain than emotional ones. Larp violence isn’t permanent. If I “die” from a boffer strike, at the end of the
game I can still ride home with the friend who struck me down. I might be mad, but it’s the emotions that persist, not the physical violence. But if I really try to fall in love with another character during game, how do I turn off that emotion, and what happens if I can’t or don’t want to? Many Nordic larpers told me stories of relationships, including marriages, that ended after intense games that had love or relationships as a through-thread. Furthermore, they seemed to view the mild post-larp crush as a natural byproduct of the game, and one that players can deal with. Perhaps since I’d come from a gaming culture bereft of love plots, I felt nervous about the unwritten rules and couldn’t locate the social boundaries when it came to playing love. I worried about conflating my emotions with my character’s, and so instead, both of us opted for emotional distance.

  Even so, I had a great time at the game. I learned a real life skill, how to tango, and even without the larp trappings that would have been fun. The Nordic way clearly had advantages—my character felt round and developed before the game started, and as a result I’d been able to really feel her feelings during the game. Even better, I didn’t have to worry about memorizing rules or looking stupid while trying to recall how a skill off my character sheet worked. As a mechanic, the inability to refuse a dance and the interaction inherent in dancing tango meant I couldn’t retreat into myself and stand uninvolved on the edges of the game. I’d really invested in my character, and when the game ended, I felt legitimately drained and depressed, emotions that dissipated in the hours afterward, as all of us returned to the community house for a traditional Danish Christmas dinner—a way of sampling Danish cuisine—with the rest of the A Week crew. After the requisite toasting ended, Tue and Jesper cued up some tango, and everyone from the game danced for another while. It felt like we could have tangoed forever.

  One Danish scenester I interviewed called Nordic arty games “an extreme social sport,” and the day after the tango larp, Valentine’s Day, I got a sense of what he meant. In honor of the love-based holiday, the A Week folks organized a host of love games for us, and I played in one, a freeform game called Doubt.

  Defining the word freeform (or indeed many terms used on the Nordic scene) is a little like starting a land war in Asia: you’re destined to fail. For starters, there’s a translation problem—the Knudepunkters are collectively translating terms with local sensibilities from four languages into their common language, English. The terms might translate into the same English word—“immersion,” “character,” “larp”—but carry different local nuance. According to Stenros, the Knudepunkters spent the first few years of conventions attempting to figure out these differences in language. Knudepunkters also take an unholy joy in debating technical terms, and larpwrights frequently create games intended to push the boundaries of any definition that’s been agreed upon. On top of this, Nordic larpers come from a culture that disdains rule books and character sheets, along with their clear parameters. After a week of asking scenesters to explain it to me, as near as I can figure, freeform is a large, catch-all term that denotes games with both larp and tabletop aspects. Finnish larpwright Juhana Pettersson told me to imagine a continuum with elaborate, fully immersive, high-production medieval games at one end of the spectrum and traditional D&D at the other end. Freeform would be the stuff in the middle, he said, games that combine some larp techniques—like acting out the stuff your character does—with some tabletop techniques—like fast-forwarding through the boring two-mile hike your character takes to get to the dungeon.

  The freeform game I was about to play, Doubt (2007), belonged to a particular school of freeform gaming—it was a jeepform game.2 The jeepers (catchphrase: “We go by jeep.”) formed in Sweden in 2001 in reaction to the perceived staleness of the freeform scene. They have a website, www.jeepen.org, that lists the artistic tenets they endeavor to follow, along with PDFs of some of their games and bios of the inducted jeepers. Jeepform games tend to be small—usually for three to five players. Sometimes there is a game master, and sometimes not. Typically the games have few rules and realistic premises. As jeeper Frederik Berg Østergaard explained, the jeepers believe that “the drama in everyday life is equally as interesting as playing vampires on spaceships. I mean, I know how to play out a relationship drama or the sad clown in a circus but not so much about playing a three-thousand-year-old vampire on Titus.” Jeepform games also make frequent use of “meta-techniques,” game elements that deliberately break the flow or reality of the narrative in order to advance or deepen the story. The meta-technique of monologuing, for example, allows GMs to stop time inside the game so that a character may talk about his or her feelings. Jeepform games often allow multiple players to portray the same character as a way of heightening tension and enhancing the emotional meaning of the game. Although Fredrik Axelzon and Tobias Wrigstad wrote Doubt, neither of them would be GMing the game, which is typical of jeepform games and other short games on the scene.

  I embarked on my jeepform adventure along with four other people in a small, white room outfitted with some basic furniture—a coffee table, a worktable, several upright chairs, and a couple beanbag chairs. Our GM, a slight Swedish woman named Ida Nilsson, had unusual hair: the left half of her head was shaved close to the scalp, but on the right side her honey-brown hair fell almost to her chin. She had thin, pixie-like facial features perpetually set in a serious and intense expression. My three fellow players included a pair of female friends in their twenties, one with cropped red hair and a hoop nose ring who looked as though she belonged in art school. The other woman wore a large bohemian scarf around her throat and had a smile that was both easy and nervous. A tall, theatrical man in a dark turtleneck completed our quartet.

  Ida explained the premise of Doubt to us. The game dealt with relationships and temptation through two main characters, Tom and Julie, successful actors who were currently performing a play about Peter, a stockbroker, and Nicole, a successful fashion designer. Over the course of the game, we would play scenes in real life—between Tom and Julie—and scenes from the play—between Peter and Nicole. In real life and in the play, members of both couples would be romantically tempted.

  Ida explained that this game was meant to induce bleed. “Bleed” is a technical term used on the Nordic scene to describe what happens when a player’s emotions and a character’s emotions get mixed up. If I show up at Knight Realms feeling angry and Portia picks a fight with someone, that is “bleedin,” since my personal emotions are affecting my character actions. Conversely, if someone insults the Travance Chronicle and I feel mad after the game is over, that is “bleed-out,” since Portia’s emotions are leaving the game and staying with me in real life. Most larps, intentionally or not, involve some level of bleed, but certain jeepform games, such as Doubt, actively play off these feelings. Related to bleed is the idea of playing “close to home,” one of the jeep ideals. To play close to home means to put yourself and your real emotions on the line during a game to induce maximum bleed. Doubt intentionally features paper-thin characters—if all a player knows about Tom is that he’s an actor, then during the game he or she will have to improvise a fleshed-out character, ideally one drawn from real life. The idea is that when players put their own emotions on the line, the game has the potential to lead to self-discovery and catharsis.

  Doubt has a highly structured format divided into a number of scenes set in real life and in the play. The larpwrights laid out a long list of scenes in the game materials, a few from real life—for example, Tom and Julie returning home after having a great show—and then a bunch from the play, for example, the time when Peter watches Nicole’s fashion show with Maud, her assistant. Together, the five of us were supposed to splice eight additional scenes from real life into the set list. In order to create the new scenes, we matched up people and places from prewritten lists. The people included generic figures such as the ex, the barmaid, and the double-date couple, while the places included locations such as at the song coach’s, the rest
aurant, and the wonderful apartment. A half hour later, we had our scenes set and spliced.

  Ida also explained that we would be using monologues. If she pointed at one of us and said, “Monologue,” we would give a soliloquy on our character’s feelings at that moment in time, though in-game no one else would hear it. Monologues had the capacity to create a positive sort of meta-gaming; if one character expressed feelings about her infertility during a monologue, for example, other players could then use that knowledge to help raise a scene’s emotional stakes later by, for example, bringing up children in conversation.

  The rules of the game, outside of its structure, were simple. Tom and Julie could only be tempted by members of the opposite sex, and at most, only one of them could succumb. One-night stands were not permitted—there needed to be at least a two-scene buildup before succumbing to temptation. We could only use people and places from the lists to create our new scenes. Time must proceed in a linear fashion—no flashbacks. Finally, we could go to Paris once. Whatever happened in Paris did not affect the game permanently—if Julie and Tom broke up in Paris, for example, they would be together in the next scene.

  We talked about how much physical contact each of us were comfortable with and sang “head and shoulders, knees and toes” to warm up. Ida paired up the woman with the scarf and the man in one improvised scene and the red-haired woman and I in another scene and then cast us. The man and smiling woman would play Tom and Julie, while the redhead and I would play Peter and Nicole, respectively. We all stood in a circle and gave a short personal monologue on the meaning of love and relationships. With the pregame activities complete, we were ready to begin.

  Ida served as the director of our impromptu play. She announced the setting and characters in each scene while the four of us arranged the room’s furniture to set the stage. To represent Tom and Julie’s apartment, for example, we put two chairs next to each other, mimicking a couch, with the coffee table in front. During scenes that involved Tom and/or Julie, the redheaded woman and I played any other necessary parts—the double date couple, the barmaid, Tom’s parents. During Peter and Nicole’s scenes, the other players returned the favor. Sometimes, Ida egged us on, whispering incitements in our ears, telling us to hold our scene partners to the wall, to really try to seduce them, to ignore their weak excuses. Sometimes, if we weren’t ratcheting up the tension, she’d ask us to go back a few lines and begin again. Most of all, she listened for the rhythms of the scenes, saying “cut” to end them on lines of emotion. She also cut scenes in which we began to ham it up. For example, when Tom asked me, his father’s new trophy wife, where I was from, I paused dramatically and then said, “Belgium.” We dissolved into giggles. Ida cut the scene, and we moved on. As the game progressed, Ida delivered a few monologues drawn from her own life on the nature of love, jealousy, and flirtation.