Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  I found it easy to become Nicole, in part because her job as a fashion designer felt similar to my own by dint of its artiness. More important, I didn’t have to become an abstract character or measure myself against some prewritten sheet, didn’t have to imagine myself into a world of magic while trying to act “naturally.” When in doubt, all I had to do was to say what I really thought. In scenes focusing on Tom and Julie, I enjoyed stretching my creative writing muscles, trying to imagine ways to help raise the tension between them. As the game progressed, our characters deepened. We discovered that Tom was more famous than Julie, who felt neglected and overshadowed. He felt she didn’t understand or respect him enough. He flirted outrageously with the barmaid. By the end of the game, during a talk on their couch, Tom told Julie that he thought her view of love was immature. At the end of the game, they stayed together, but only barely so. During the play scenes, the conflict between Peter and Nicole escalated. Nicole wanted to get married, but Peter demurred, continually putting off serious discussion. Nicole felt he never made time for her, didn’t care enough to develop shared activities, and at one point, she broke up with him. During the final scene, they reconciled, as Peter proposed and she accepted, with reservation and dread.

  After the game ended, we sat in a circle for the debriefing, a common and important element of Nordic gaming. A debrief serves as the buffer between the game and the return to real life, offering players a chance to kvetch about what happened in-game and the opportunity to discuss anything that was or could have been problematic. Debriefs can help build community among the players and provide a forum for organizer feedback. In general, more intense games require longer debriefs.

  Our little debrief lasted about forty-five minutes. Ida asked me and the woman who played Julia how it felt to play the same character, and she asked the red-haired woman and the man the same thing. She asked the players of Tom and Julia what it had been like to watch the play end as it did, to know the two of them were playing that hard scene every day. Ida asked what of ourselves we put into the game. We revealed a little of our true selves as we talked. The red-haired woman said she’d been with someone who was always putting off their serious talks until later and that she’d tried to personify that through Peter. Her friend admitted that when Tom called her “immature” during their final scene, it had felt like a blow to the stomach. The turtlenecked man admitted that the game had resonated with him but didn’t elaborate—he was a game designer who believed that playing for bleed was a bad idea but had wanted to try it before he levied criticism. As for me, I had a revelation after a scene in which Nicole showed Peter some fashion drawings, to his apparent disinterest. I realized that on some level it bothers me that my husband doesn’t read my work, although we talk about it frequently. In general, I think this is a good thing, since it means his love for me isn’t contingent on whether I’m a good writer—he’ll love me even if my writing is terrible. Nevertheless, I discovered during Doubt that there’s something in me that’s a little sad that he’s not my first reader.

  With the debriefing, the game came to an official close. From start to finish, it lasted about five-and-a-half hours, and in that time I’d had to renegotiate my ideas about what larp could be.* I loved the personal nature of the storyline, which is typical of arty larp. The characters hadn’t participated in an epic campaign against evil; rather, as flawed people, they struggled against the forces of society and themselves in the pursuit of happiness. The narrow scope of the game and the bleed it intentionally produced had given me a completely different experience than Cthulhu or Knight Realms had. This wasn’t a vacation from reality; it was a journey into my own psyche. At the end of the game I felt the same pleasant quietness, the same awe that I feel after reading a work of literary fiction, a final quiet moment of meditation, one that always feels like a poignant exhale to me, a moment containing the pathos and nuance of everything that came before. The game hadn’t been playful or comic, and I wouldn’t exactly call it “fun,” but it felt meaningful and profound and stuck with me over the next few days.

  The rest of A Week in Denmark was a blur of parties and planned events for me, though a few moments stood out. For starters, I saw evidence that larp has crossed over to the mainstream in Denmark. Random bartenders unaffiliated with the convention knew what live role-playing was, for example. And one night, we partied at Rollespilsakademiet, the Role-playing Factory, which is, amazingly enough, a professional larp group that runs games for Denmark’s many child larpers. I went on a tour of the Copenhagen City Hall led by a local representative, a larper elected with the help of the Role-playing Factory. I also met teachers from Østerskov Efterskole, a Danish school for ninth and tenth graders that bases its lessons around role-play. Most notably, I attended the Nordic Larp Talks, a set of short, polished lectures from luminaries on the scene and modeled after the TED lecture series on innovation and technology.2

  At the nightly parties, people swapped stories about larp in different countries, talked aesthetics, and answered my many questions about the Nordic scene. Apparently, it is possible to get public funding of a few hundred euros or more for larps. I learned about techniques like “fateplay,” in which players receive slips of paper emblazoned with their character’s future, for example, “You will fall in love with a man wearing a tall hat.”3 I learned about safe words, a Nordic way of modulating psychological well-being during heavy and emotionally potent games. Players had code words they could use to regulate the intensity of scenes, to ask their scene partners to go harder, slow down, or stop entirely. I learned that “hard-core” means different things to American and Nordic larpers. Sure, any hard-core gamer stays in-character as much as possible, but this means more in the nitty-gritty world of Nordic gaming. While gung-ho American larpers might sleep outside in February, hard-core Nordic gamers go further in the service of their characters. I heard and read stories about medieval larpers hunting down, butchering, and eating real sheep and games in which players had actual sex in-character. Then, of course, there are the hyperslummers from System Danmarc (2005), a game that simulated a dystopian future slum with a highly organized caste system. The organizers built a slum out of shipping containers in the middle of Copenhagen. Some of the three-hundred-plus players chose to play hyperslummers, the lowest caste, and the game organizers brought in former drug addicts to share their experiences with them. According to organizer Peter Munthe-Kass’s account, published in Nordic Larp, a coffee-table book documenting fifteen years of Nordic games, “During the game these players slept on the street or in makeshift sheds and were beaten and humiliated by other players. Some hyperslummers were even urinated on while sleeping.”4 Now that’s hard-core.

  Between the games, the outings, and all the fascinating cocktail conversation, I barely slept during A Week in Denmark. And so when we were bussed an hour out of Copenhagen, to Helsinge, for the actual convention, I hadn’t even gotten over my jet lag and was starting to feel a bit loopy.

  * Although the arty larp scene of Knutepunkt is robust, visible, and international, it represents only a small component of the larger Nordic larp culture, which is a fragmented collection of smaller groups doing mostly medieval boffer and vampire games, though these genre games typically feature fewer rules than their American counterparts. There is no monolithic pan-Nordic scene per se; rather, there are many small, local scenes that may communicate domestically, but rarely across borders. In the past few years, some arty larp academics have claimed the name “Nordic larp” for their style of game, dubbing the genre games “mainstream larp.” For the sake of brevity, in the next two chapters, I’m using “Nordic larp” interchangeably with “artsy Knutepunkt-style larp that brings together practitioners from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.”

  * Although I considered this game a larp, primarily since it required the players to physically act out the story, in the Nordic countries jeeps are considered tabletop games, a fact of terminology that caused me several days of confus
ion.

  13

  Knudepunkt Blew My Mind

  The Knudepunkters weren’t the conventioneers I was used to. If these people spent their evenings playing D&D and watching Battlestar Galactica, like gamers in the States, then they seemingly spent their mornings reading Foucault and Chomsky before heading off to part-time bartending jobs while supported by the famous Scandinavian social safety net or to gigs in academia and the arts. They were still geeks, but geeks of a different breed—art geeks. I had never seen so many artistic haircuts gathered in one place—fantastic combinations of blue, purple, and red dye and dreadlocks peppered among heads shaved bald and long, death metal singer-style hair. The crowd dropped words like indexical and ludology into casual conversation while referencing Star Trek episodes and wore non-ironic elf ears with 1940s swing dress to costume parties.

  This scene had a visible gender-queer presence, unlike the larp scene I studied in the States, which tended to smile on bisexual women but not lesbians and certainly not on gay male larpers, who statistically must exist in greater numbers than I encountered. In contrast, Knudepunkt had a visible gay and trans population, one that didn’t seem to warrant any special comment from its peers.

  The three-hundred-odd Knudepunkters were the only guests at the small, Spartan hotel hosting the convention, and fliers pasted up on doors throughout the building announced the clique-busting empty chair rule: any group sitting and talking needed to include an empty chair in their circle, signifying that anyone could come and join them.

  My Knudepunkt began in the bar. I bought myself a beer, perched on a deserted couch, and was settling in for a bout of people-watching when a large contingent of Finns, swathed in black, swooped in with their drinks and started talking to me. Among them were Maria and Juhana Pettersson. Maria had deep purple hair gathered into a ponytail, wore glasses with heavy, plastic frames, and had a slight smile perpetually hovering in the corners of her lips. Her husband, a noted larpwright, had shaved his head bald and had a face permanently set on “neutral.” They were both making my favorite fashion statement: head-to-toe black. Within minutes of our meeting, we were discussing a game Juhana had helped write and run called Portaikko (2010), which means “staircase,” in which players experienced the loneliness of an obscure sexual fetishist. The first player to swing by the art gallery where the game ran had been an eighty-year-old woman, and Juhana had had to explain her sexual attraction toward fences and walls to her. Yet, he said, the woman got it and enjoyed the game.

  Over the course of that evening I met Israelis, Italians, Frenchmen, Czechs, Brits, and Germans, all here to talk larp theory. Joined by their collective envy of the vibrant Nordic scene, they discussed their desires to create something similar at home. From the Scandinavians, I learned about some of the year’s buzziest larps, such as Delirium (2010) and Mad About the Boy (2010). The former dealt with romance in a mental institution and ran for fifty hours, plus two weekend-long pregame workshops and a day of debriefing.1 The organizers used a variety of tactics to make their players feel crazed. For example, they had players sign up for the game in male/female pairs, formed when one person invited a partner to play the game. Whoever had done the inviting was placed in the male ward of the in-game asylum while the invitee joined the female ward, regardless of player gender. The game featured non-linear time, so, for example, the ward’s patients cleaned up after a party early on in the game but played the scene of the party later in the weekend. The intense game split up some real-life couples and created new ones. Ida, my jeep GM, for example, left the game with a new boyfriend.

  Mad About the Boy was inspired by the comic Y, the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra. The game had a simple premise: all the men on earth died a few years back, and now the government was running a pilot program to artificially inseminate women with sperm from sperm banks. The game’s characters portrayed families—each composed of three women—applying to be part of this program. Halfway through the game, the last man shows up, naked and beaten, and the women have to decide what to do with him. The game ran twice, once with an all-female cast of players, except for the last man, and once with mixed-gender players all portraying women, excluding the last man.2

  Everyone seemed to be in the bar, catching up with old friends, flirting, talking about games they’d been to or games they wanted to run, bandying about terms I didn’t yet know the meaning of, like “pervasive” and “360° illusion,” and amiably arguing about terms like “character” and “immersion.” I ran into Juhana and Maria again on the stairs outside the bar, now realizing that Juhana had created a couple games I knew about from reading past Knutebooks—the books of larp theory that the convention organizers put out each year. In one of Juhana’s games, characters tried to allocate the inheritance of a dead relative, expressing their hidden emotions by breaking cheap plastic coffee cups on the ground. Another game had featured characters with terminal cancer and involved players rolling around in flour in their underwear for a couple hours.

  It was late, and then it was later. I decided to check my e-mail and go to bed, but Ida bounced up to me as I stood at the communal computer in the hotel lobby. “Want to come to an after-party?” she said.

  Ida and I and perhaps four dude jeepers crowded into a small hotel room. The jeepers could have been some emo rock band, sporting, in varying combinations, plastic glasses, graphic T-shirts, sweater vests, blazers, tousled hair, and deliberate stubble. We took turns drinking concoctions out of plastic cups and sitting on one of the room’s two double beds, and when one of them filled up with people, bouncing across to the other, as if in a game of musical beds. Apparently, Ida and two of the guys were trying out a new game someone in the room was working on, and their voices rose and fell in joy and pain as they cajoled and persuaded each other. I couldn’t understand what they were saying—it was late, and they’d lapsed into Swedish—but it sounded intense. Whoever wasn’t currently in the scene sat next to me on the bed, sarcastically describing what was happening on the other side of the room, only I wasn’t sure whether I was being told about the game or the actual relationships among the players. At that late hour, it didn’t seem to matter much. The game went in and out, and in between the scenes, we sat around and laughed. Finally, I headed to sleep.

  Three hours later, I dragged myself out of bed, threw on some clothing, and desperately tossed cups of coffee down the hatch. I couldn’t miss the “FirstTimers’ Guide to Knudepunkt Theory,” a session designed to help everyone understand the cocktail conversation. As our speakers flipped through their PowerPoint, we got a crash course in Knudepunkt history. I knew a little from my pre-trip research and from all the mingling I’d done during A Week in Denmark. I’d watched video of journalist and larper Johanna Koljonen in the first Nordic Larp Talks, who noted that larp arose out of tabletop games in the Nordic countries, much as it had in the United States.3 However, larp was easier to organize in Scandinavia because in Finland, Sweden, and Norway the public has the “freedom to roam” or “everyman’s right”: the right to sunbathe, picnic, swim, gather mushrooms or berries, and camp on public or private land, so long as the land isn’t permanently damaged and people stay a respectful distance away from others’ dwellings. That, combined with the lack of cultural litigiousness, made it easy to organize a larp in the woods, which contributed to the strong larp culture in Nordic countries. By 1994, summer medieval games in Scandinavia were drawing more than a thousand participants, and soon thereafter Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Hanne Grasmo, and Margrethe Raaum organized the first Knutepunkt in Norway in 1997, with the aim of building community among larp organizers across the region.

  From the panel, I learned about the intellectual development of the scene. Between 1999 and 2004, members of the community wrote a great many larp manifestos. The two most famous of these were the Dogma 99 manifesto and the Turku manifesto. The Dogma 99ers patterned their declaration on the Dogma 95 film manifesto, written by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinter
berg in 1995. The Dogma 99 manifesto envisioned larp as a transparent venture, one focused on great, self-sufficient stories. 4 Their manifesto forbids many of the features prevalent in stateside larp: secrecy, organizer interference in the game once it has started, main plots (as opposed to plots for all characters), game mechanics, larps based on tabletop games, and a number of other elements. In contrast, the Turku manifesto, a Finnish school of design, emphasized immersing in a character over a story.5 In this view, the true point of larp is to become one’s character, simulating that character’s internal thoughts and view of the world to the exclusion of all else—solving plots, creating dramatic situations that might be fun for other players, and so on.

  The speakers defined a few more helpful terms for us, including “360° illusion” or “360° ideal,” a design aesthetic focusing on set and costuming, creating the reality of the game as physically and completely as possible. Larpers into the 360° ideal care whether your underwear is period appropriate. I’d read about a couple 360° games in the recently released Nordic Larp, a book that was part of the new Nordic trend toward documenting the ethereal nature of larps. One such game, 1942—Noen ä stole pä? (Someone to Trust?), explored life under the Nazi occupation of Norway. The players had done hundreds of pages of historical reading before the game and played characters based, in many cases, on actual people who lived during that period. At pregame workshops, players had their photos taken in costume to create period-appropriate identification papers, such as passports. Characters were either members of the local community, which was divided into family units, or part of a nearby German garrison, which contained Eastern European POWs, soldiers, and members of the Red Cross. During five days of game play the characters lived a simple, everyday life. Fishermen spent their days on boats catching fish, seamstresses sewed, housewives shopped for groceries, and everyone cowered during midnight air alarms. The community viewed the Germans, and those perceived to be collaborating with them, with suspicion. The game itself wasn’t about resisting the occupation, although some characters belonged to the resistance. Rather, it was about understanding the mentality of people participating in and living under Nazi rule.6 Many Nordic larps seem to be about trying out a certain mindset or exploring an emotion rather than saving a town from orcs or finding enough loot to buy a sweet magic item.