The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp Knutpunkt 2014 Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen & Jon Back The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp Knutpunkt 2014 Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen & Jon Back The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp Official book of Knutpunkt 2014. Published in conjunction with the Knutpunkt 2014 conference Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen & Jon Back Graphic design by Mats Sjögren Published by Knutpunkt © Respective authors 2014. All rights reserved. Printed at Toptryk Grafisk, Denmark, 2014 ISBN 978-91-637-4565-2 (Print) ISBN 978-91-637-4566-9 (PDF) www.knutpunkt.org Table of Contents Acknowledgements 9 Preface 11 Nordic Larp Talks 14 Introduction to Nordic Larp 16 Transmitting a Political Vision Through Larp 17 Portraying Love and Trying New Genders 18 High Resolution Larping 19 Critical Strategies of Larp 20 On Games: Painting Life With Rules 21 Fabricating Madness 22 Can Playing Games Teach Us About War? 23 From Performing Arts to Larp 24 What does “Nordic Larp” Mean? 25 The Nordic Larp Community 26 Andie Nordgren A Community Shaped by Participation 29 Helene Willer Piironen & Kristoffer Thurøe An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture 33 Margrete Raaum Knutepunkt — A Love Story 37 5 Essays from the Nordic Larp Discourse 40 Introduction to the Essays 42 Martin Ericsson Play to Love 47 Tova Gerge Temporary Utopias 59 Johanna Koljonen Lessons from Hamlet 67 Andie Nordgren High Resolution Larping 77 Johanna Koljonen Eye-Witness to the Illusion 89 Markus Montola Social Reality in Roleplaying Games 103 Mike Pohjola Autonomous Identities 113 Ulrik Lehrskov My Name is Jimbo the Orc 127 Emma Wieslander Rules of Engagement 133 Tobias Wrigstad The Nuts and Bolts of Jeepform 139 Markus Montola The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing 153 Simo Järvelä The Golden Rule of Larp 169 Claus Raasted (editor) The Book of KAPO 177 Eirik Fatland Excavating AmerikA 181 Bjarke Pedersen & Lars Munck Walking the White Road 201 Heidi Hopeametsä 24 Hours in a Bomb Shelter 211 6 Gabriel Widing Post Panopticon 225 Johanna Koljonen The Dragon Was the Least of It 231 Tor Kjetil Edland, Trine Lise Lindahl, Margrete Raaum Mad about the Boy 251 Markus Montola & Staffan Jonsson Prosopopeia — Playing on the Edge of Reality 261 Gabriel Widing Collective Realities 273 Tova Gerge Larp and Aesthetic Responsibility 279 Eirik Fatland and Lars Wingård The Dogma 99 Manifesto 287 Mike Pohjola The Manifesto of the Turku School 295 Endmatter 304 Where to Find the Original Books 307 Biographies 309 7 8 Acknowledgements This book has been a collective effort. It stands on the shoulders of the en- tire Nordic larp community, not just those authors reprinted here. Every organizer, every player whether the veteran of a hundred characters across decades or just stepping into her first shoes, every writer who has sweated to help those lives come to life, the theorists who help us intro- spect and understand our work, and every single person, often unnamed behind the scenes, who has helped with the million practical tasks it takes to make a world real, every one of these people is a part of the making of this book. We acknowledge here the task of taking that body of work into the world, and thank all of you for creating this amazing thing we attempt to share here. We’d also like to thank some specific people whose contributions have been essential to our rather smaller effort at hand, including (in no par- ticular order) Andie Nordgren, Lizzie Stark, Juliane Mikkelsen, Claus Raasted, Mikkel Rode, Carsten Brorson Prag, Jaakko Stenros, Petter Karlsson, Elin Nilsen, and the entire organizing group for the 2014 Knut- punkt. — Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen, & Jon Back, editors. 9 10 Preface If you’re reading this from within the Nordic larp community, welcome to the less traditional and more historical of this year’s two Knutpunkt books. If you’re just joining us from outside the community, welcome to Nordic larp! For those of you who are familiar with the community, you’ll want to know that this book is a set of reprints of influential pieces from (mostly) Knutpunkt books past. Give us a few paragraphs to catch every- one else up, and we’ll continue below. If you’re wondering what’s going on here, let us explain. The Nordic larp, or live-action roleplaying (but it’s one word now) scene started back in the 80’s, but is generally considered to have started to come into its own around 1994. In larp, you usually portray a character in the same way you might in a stage play, physically acting out whatever you wish to do. Unlike a stage play, there is no script and no audience, just the setting, props, and a few details everyone has agreed on — names, relationships, and the like. Together, you and the other players explore the story you choose to tell together. Unlike more traditional “tabletop” roleplaying, you act out your role physically, doing whatever your character would do, with appropriate substitutes like latex foam boffer swords for real weap- ons so no one gets physically hurt. Since 1994, the community has moved from being centered around fan- tasy and vampire games to addressing a wide variety of subject matter in almost every genre imaginable, from hard SF through film noir mystery, romance, what one would call modern literary fiction (were it written), and beyond. Our games have come alive as a truly collective art form, one that lets us share experiences and explore lives far beyond our own while introspecting on our deepest desires and most well-established so- cial scripts. The Nordic larp community differs from larp culture in other places. It spends more time telling stories that emphasize naturalistic emotion, it emphasizes collective, rather than competitive storytelling, and it takes its stories fairly seriously much of the time — far too seriously if you ask some other folks who larp in the Nordic countries. And yes, that’s right, there are other kinds of larps played in Scandinavia; the Nordic larp com- 11 munity is a specific and by now reasonably well-defined subset. If you’re curious about where the boundaries are, Jaakko Stenros’s Nordic Larp Talk, What does “Nordic Larp” Mean, linked in a following section, will be happy to give you one perspective. Every year since 1996, the community has organized a conference called, variously, Knutpunkt, Knudepunkt, Knutepunkt, or Solmukohta, when it’s held in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, or Finland, respectively — the name means something close to “Nodal Point”. Here, we come together for a few days to talk about larps past, to analyze how our medium works, to share techniques for writing and playing games, to play, to plan future games, and, along the way, to meet old friends and make new ones. It’s a community that’s both tight-knit and very welcoming, and if you haven’t been, we encourage you to attend. Every year at Knutpunkt, starting in 2001, one or more books has been published; we’re up to eighteen now, or twenty after this year, plus sever- al volumes published outside the conference structure and various zines, magazines, and pamphlets. At this point, this represents a mountain of material for someone new to the scene to catch up on, and the dis- course of Nordic larp is bound up in all of these essays and the games they discuss. The goal of this book is to make it easier for people to get up to speed within the Nordic larp discourse, whether or not they’ve ever played a larp, Nordic or otherwise. If you’re new to Nordic larp entirely, we recommend starting with the video section that follows immediately after this preface and watching some of the short talks linked to there. This will give you a feel of the scope and depth of the scene more readily than just diving into the es- says will, and makes for, we think, the easiest introduction. Following these pieces are three essays commissioned specifically for this book. If you’re coming from outside the Nordic larp community (and especially if you’re coming from outside Scandinavia and you’re on your way to your first Knutpunkt or Nordic larp), we strongly recommend reading these pieces — they should help you orient yourself and better understand the community you’re going to become part of. If you’re already familiar with the Nordic community, you’re more than welcome to read them too, of course — just know that they’re almost certainly going to mostly be re- view for you. After those three pieces come the reprinted texts themselves. If you’re already part of the Nordic community and you just want to brush up on your theory and history, we’ll see you at the Introduction to the Essays. 12 13 Nordic Larp Talks 14 Every year, starting in 2010, the Nordic larp community has gathered the night before Knutpunkt starts for an evening of short, entertaining lectures about projects and ideas from the tradition of Nordic larp. These talks are an ideal introduction to the community for outsiders, and we’ve provided summaries of a selection of them here. If you’re new to Nordic larp and you haven’t seen them before, we strongly encourage you to read the summaries below and then go watch the talks before going on to the essays. The QR code next to each still leads to the Nordic Larp Wiki page for that talk, and we’ve included both the wiki and Youtube addresses (as a backup) if you’d rather type them in.