Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  Finally, the speakers explained “pervasive” games to us, games played in real world locations. For example, a scavenger hunt is a pervasive—players go out into the real world and potentially interact with people who aren’t a part of the game. Larp can be pervasive, though it often isn’t. For example, the vampire games that police detective “Brian” played in a go-go club were pervasive, as the real-world club, full of real-world non-larping people, provided the game backdrop.

  Impromptu chats in the hallways and panels filled the rest of my day, and by 5:00 PM I felt utterly exhausted from lack of sleep and lack of privacy. As a writer, I generally spend ten to twelve hours a day by myself in a coffee shop or at home, writing. Since arriving in Denmark, I hadn’t had a second to myself—I’d been sleeping in a basement room with thirty other people, or now, in a hotel room with a roommate. We took all our meals communally, and every evening called for me to put on my extrovert hat and converse with the locals.

  I’m not sure I felt this at the time, but in retrospect, I think my trip to Knudepunkt could be deemed an elaborate larp built for one, a larp conducted in public without the knowledge of those around me, a pervasive game. Like all games, it had a couple rules, ones I imposed on myself for the duration of the visit, my cardinal rules of travel (1-3) and reportage (4-6).

  Be flexible. If you think something will be OK, it probably will.

  Talk quietly. Do not add to the stereotype of loud Americans.

  Be polite. Learn how to say please, thank you, and excuse me in the local language.

  Rule of yes. Say yes as much as possible, because it leads to adventures. Like jeep parties. The corollary to this rule is that you must be a good sport. Don’t just say yes; behave as if you mean it.

  Rule of neutrality. Don’t judge people with unusual habits or opinions.

  Rule ofhumanity. Treat people as people; everyone has a story worth hearing.

  The circumstances of the game took a toll on my psyche—I was alone in a foreign land, sleep-deprived, out of my element, without a home base, and surrounded by people who were used to slipping in and out of different roles. In short, as a person I had no context for myself, no one there to remind me of who I was by treating me in a certain way.

  That Friday evening, I wanted to take a nap but was afraid to do so, lest my alarm-clock-less self fall asleep permanently. With so many events running in tandem, I feared I’d miss something—already the previous evening I’d missed the launch of Playground Magazine, a new publication on larp and gaming.7 At the same time, I required some sort of rest—my ability to think and speak diminished sharply as the day wore on. Instead of sleeping, I hit the sauna, an important part of Knudepunkt for many participants, and one that was more restful than I expected.

  After a solitary hour or two and a shower, I felt more like my old self again. I had regained the ability to form a coherent sentence, so when I ran into Ida and her boyfriend we struck up a conversation. The sauna might have restored my faculties of speech, but perhaps unfortunately, it also seemed to have removed my internal filter, so I spoke voluminously about any subject lobbed my way, including the strange things I’d noticed in Denmark. I’d never traveled abroad on my own before, and I’d kept my observations to myself over the last week, only daring to voice them in small dribbles to the three other Americans present. For example, I’d noticed that the overall level of education was higher on the arty larp scene than it was on the larp scene I’d followed in the States, due, perhaps, to the value that Nordic culture seemed to put on both education and art. I speculated that the scene’s exposure to academia was part of what made its artiness possible, if the number of people writing larp theory and dropping words like diegetic was any measure. In film theory, diegetic refers to elements within the frame of a film. When a noir hero watches a jazz band play, that music is diegetic—the audience hears it, and so do the characters in the scene. In contrast, the techno music blaring as our samurai heroine kicks some girl-gang butt is non-diegetic—the music doesn’t exist for her; it’s dubbed in by the sound designers to set a mood for the audience. After subjecting poor Ida and her boyfriend to my logorrhea for a couple hours, we retreated down to the bar, and soon it was midnight, and time for a mysterious mini-party-game I’d received an invitation for earlier in the day, part of what Stenros called Knudepunkt’s tradition of “one-hour parties, secret parties, ‘secret’ parties, and short weird theme parties.”

  Perhaps fifty or sixty people filed into one of the convention rooms, which was ringed with tables that had people—including the purple-haired Maria—standing on them, dressed in black, hands frozen in claws, fake blood dripping from the corners of their mouths. Several people passed out plastic cups of port wine, and our host announced the rules. We were allowed only three bites, “so make them count,” he said. We had until the music ended—about six minutes—to make them. We milled around the room, flirtatiously eyeing one another, pouncing to bite strangers and acquaintances on the neck, laughing and talking, until the track ended. Then it was time for an after-party. I went with the jeepers again, who continued to party like rock stars, late into the night.

  When I woke the next morning after a hearty two hours of sleep, I felt funny. Not funny ha-ha, more funny Kafka. I couldn’t remember who I was. Oh sure, I knew I was Lizzie Stark, writer-wife-daughter-friend-pickle enthusiast of the monochromatic fashion sense. I was Lizzie Stark, dammit, knower of song-lyrics, lit mag editor, and as my husband had titled me, “finder-of-things and ruler of Australia.” But none of these things seemed to have any meaning. Maybe these ideas I had about who I was weren’t as important as I thought they were, and maybe I didn’t need to be any of these things. But if so, how could I still be me? More than that, if these identities were something I could put on or take off at will, if all identity was fluid, how could anyone have an identity at all? My mind went around and around on these questions. I’d lost myself somehow, amid the sleeplessness and identity play of Knudepunkt. I dragged myself to lunch and back in this peculiar mental space. My internal filter was still clicked off—courteous questions from people in the hallways, like “How are things?” provoked quixotic responses I couldn’t control, like, “There are no good things or bad things, only things.” I couldn’t lie, not even for the sake of politeness, and I couldn’t muster enough personality to prefer, say, coffee to tea. I was definitely in the middle of some sort of existential quandary. At the lobby computer I read some old e-mails to help remind me of myself, and although I still felt bizarre, outside of myself and outside of everything, I attended a couple panels, most notably one on Ars Amandi, a method of simulating love and sex in which Emma Wieslander, a Swedish larper and creator of the mechanic, spoke about it and some of the larps that used it.

  Emma had a slight build, sported a frosted fauxhawk, and radiated a certain gravitas. In her essay “Rules of Engagement,” from the 2004 Knutebook Beyond Role and Play, she made the case that sex and violence both deserve their own game mechanics, because rules “are all about portraying physical situations that one doesn’t want the player to experience the same way the character does and vice versa.”8 Larpers use boffers because no one wants to be stabbed for real. During her impromptu Knudepunkt talk, she suggested that violence and sex represent the two extremes of human emotion, and that in the past, larps were more likely to tell violent stories than relationship stories, in part due to a lack of mechanics for representing romance and sex.

  In her essay, Wieslander laid out the methods that contemporary Nordic games employed to simulate romance. Some games used a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get, pronounced “wizzy wig”) method, allowing players to dry hump each other or, at the hard-core end of the spectrum, to have actual sex in-character. Players with romantically linked characters are encouraged to talk about physical limits before the game begins. The wysiwyg technique adds to the realism of the game, but it crosses a personal line for many people, particularly those involved in relationships with s
omeone else out-of-game. This method seems pretty risky to me, but then the United States has a more litigious culture than Scandinavia, and in fact, my informal poll of stateside game organizers revealed either explicit or implied “no-touching” rules, designed to prevent creeps from being creepy, across the board. In some Nordic games, players simply talk through a sex scene, deciding what happened, although this method breaks the immersion of the game by introducing chatter, and it can give players the giggles during what might otherwise be a serious moment. There are also symbolic ways of representing sex: one player gives another a shoulder massage, people feed each other fruit, or perhaps an impromptu dance scene occurs—hey, it worked for Jane Austen. And finally, there is Ars Amandi.9

  Wieslander came up with the method for the influential 2003 larp Mellan himmel och hav (Between Heaven and Sea), a game that explored gender as a social construct. Ars Amandi provides boundaries for touching and being touched in a larp. Players may use permitted body parts—hands, arms, and neck—to touch others in the permitted zones—on the arms, shoulders, or neck. Full Ars Amandi permits touch on the neck below the ears, on the upper portion of the back, around the shoulder blades, and on the upper chest, around the clavicle but above the breasts. This mechanic is highly adaptable—if full Ars Amandi seems too intimate, organizers can always restrict the region of touch to the elbows and below, or even to the hands. I briefly tried out the full version with some other noobs right after Wieslander’s talk and found it both versatile and capable of conveying emotional nuance. Players can touch each other lightly or firmly and may use rhythmic breathing to amp up or dial down the tension. They may look each other in the eyes, drastically increasing the intimacy, if desired. This technique may be used to simulate sex symbolically—two vampires feel each others’ arms and declare it represents the act of sex between their characters—or it may be used diegetically, as it was in Mellan himmel och hav, where within the game world the arms and shoulders, not the genitals, were the primary erogenous zones of the human body.

  The world of Mellan himmel och hav was inspired by the short stories of fantasy writer Ursula LeGuin and played with gender. This world did not have men and women, but morning people and evening people. Evening people wore red and yellow, concerned themselves with philosophy and decision-making, and served as the objects of sexual gaze. Morning people wore blue and green, served as the sexual initiators, and were responsible for practical arrangements and implementing the decisions of the evening people, according Stenros, who participated in the game and wrote about it in Nordic Larp. In-game, marriage was not between two people, but among four—two morning and two evening people, who mated for life. An upcoming wedding in the community provided the occasion for the game play. During pregame workshops, players helped cocreate the world and learned about feminist theory. Like Mad About the Boy, Mellan himmel och hav had political and feminist aims and explored what it would mean to destabilize prevailing views of gender and monogamy. These larps are part of a movement of political larp on the Nordic scene that includes System Danmarc (2005), the slum of future dystopian Copenhagen, which was designed to bring home a message about present-day homelessness to its players.10

  Learning about political games made me consider whether any of the larps I’d witnessed in the States had political leanings. James C. Kimball, a staunch conservative, runs Knight Realms, and although though he doesn’t seem to have intentionally endowed his game with a political agenda, the game reflects his conservatism in a roundabout way. As a for-profit game, Knight Realms relies on things returning to normal between events, so the evil players can never take over the town, for example. The players’ inability to permanently affect the world of the game in a major way fits with a conservative view of reality: that there is one natural, right, good way of being and that, inevitably, we will return to it between upsets.

  Wieslander’s explanation of the way rules function in Nordic games, that they “are all about portraying physical situations that one doesn’t want the player to experience and vice versa,” also suggests how different the Nordic and American larp scenes are. Broadly speaking, Nordic games, even boffer games, introduce rules sparingly, and most have rules thin enough to carry around in one’s bra—typically no longer than a paragraph. Oftentimes, these games lack character sheets, instead offering short character histories. In contrast, American games tend to hew to the tabletop style, with hundreds of pages of rules, sometimes published over multiple books. The rules system of a game affects the experience of the players. In Nordic games with minimal rules, the players, not a randomized mechanic, decide what happens in any given scene, which encourages players to work together to create a meaningful outcome. The elaborate, numerically oriented character sheets typical of many American games emphasize leveling up to achieve the next skill advance and imply competition among PCs or with NPCs. Furthermore, elaborate rules create power gamers and rules lawyers—players who understand the numerics of the rules are likely to build powerful characters faster and more effectively—and imply the necessity of GMs, who are needed to settle the inevitable rules debates. Both methods have their advantages. The rules-light nature of Nordic games keeps the illusion of the game world intact—if Portia wants to persuade Billiam of something, she doesn’t call a skill, she talks to him. And if he wants to rob her, he must sneak into her room without being seen. It’s natural and easy to remember. The rules-heavy American sensibility, however, equalizes the players—even if I’m on crutches, my character can call a skill allowing her to be fleet-footed, the same as any track-star player could.

  After the Ars Amandi panel, the academic portion of my Knudepunkt was over, and only the party remained. I hit the sauna again, in lieu of a nap, and gussied myself up for the evening’s costume party. Tonight I’d try to play the role of myself, in the traditional stark costuming of a black dress and red lipstick. Other people were far more inventive. There was a woman with wild blond hair wearing orange eyelashes and dressed as a flame, a man in a pink cravat dressed as a bunny. I saw shirtless male angels, characters from A Clockwork Orange, people in 1950s party dresses, elves from sundry historical periods, pirates, satyrs, princesses, do-wop singers, demons, witches, and vampires. Earlier in the day, there had been a mass swing-dance lesson, and couples on the dance floor displayed what they’d learned. Everywhere I turned I saw people with their arms around one another, showing off tattoos, buying each other drinks, curling the corners of their Salvador Dali-esque moustaches, kissing each other on the lips with a friendly, easy intimacy, and most of all, talking. The next morning, I’d witness a mournful counterpoint to this in the hotel lobby, grown men and women hugging one another, weeping openly, whispering meaningful, deep words in one another’s ears, and kissing goodbye both romantically and platonically, promising to write, to Facebook, to see one another next year or next month at another gaming convention.

  Although it took me a couple weeks to stop waiting for Godot, to finish riding the existential wave that overtook me in Denmark, eventually I returned to “normal.” And yet I feel forever changed by my experience there. The Nordic scene is proof that larp can be more than escapist entertainment; as a medium it has high-art potential. If I went to Denmark unsure of whether I’d ever game again, I returned as an aspiring larp evangelist, unable to stop talking about my experience for some weeks, to my husband’s consternation. Knudepunkt evoked in me the yearning to return to that terrifying and fascinating place where there were no boundaries or rules, where there was no self, where identity itself seemed impossible. I felt as though I had peeked over the precipice of human existence, and in that one moment I was terrifyingly, truly alive.

  Epilogue

  I came into this book with a simple idea about larp, that people used it to compensate for something lacking in their everyday lives. What I discovered was a rich, complex hobby, just beginning to enter mainstream imagination in the United States. As it turns out, larp is anything but simple—oftentimes it requires t
he best efforts of numerous people laboring in concert. People larp for many different reasons. Some people want to escape from the world, while others enjoy solving puzzles, crunching numbers, experiencing extreme emotions, or dressing creatively. For some people larp is a vacation, and for others it’s a way of exploring their most secret selves. Some larps are tiny, run with as few as two or three players in their street clothes, while others are huge, requiring full sets and entertaining hundreds of participants. Larp can convey a political message, evoke strong emotions, or simply engross its participants in their shared fantasy. In short, larp is a medium, much like theater or movies or novels, and just as film has Lord of the Rings, Annie Hall, and Gettysburg, so too does larp have its Knight Realms, its Doubt, and its 1942—Noen ä stole pä?