[MARCH] Nordic LARP by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Motola

[Liz England]

The reading for March is.... Nordic LARP by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola.

"Live action role-playing has developed into a unique and powerful form of expression in the Nordic countries. Nordic style larps range from entertaining flights of fancy to the exploration of the intimate, the collective, and the political. This unique tradition combines influences from theatre and performance art with gamer cultures, in order to push the boundaries of role-playing. 

 

Recently the Nordic larp tradition has gained attention internationally. This book presents a cross-section of this vibrant culture through 30 outstanding larps, through stories told by designers, players and researchers, with over 250 photographs. In addition the book contains essays explaining the history and rhetorics of Nordic larp, and contextualizing it in relation to theatre, art and games."

https://nordiclarp.wordpress.com/

The book is completely free digitally - finding a print copy might be difficult (impossible?). You can follow the URL above to get to the free version

It's a total of 300 pages but heavy with photos. It's split into 30 'chapters', each one covering a different LARP, plus some intro/conclusion pages. I expect it will be very different stylistically from last month's reading.

For new members, feel free to post your thoughts when you're done, or wait for me to open up discussion towards the end of the month.

[Alexander Yakovlev]

Goes very well with „Nordic-Russian Larp Dialog” (2015).

[Nick Lalone]

I might also suggest: States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World

https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/a/a0/2012-States.of.play.pdf

Specifically Lizzie Stark's chapter: "We Hold These Rules to Be Self Evident"

I feel that it is maybe one of the best readings on this particular concept and often assign it to my students as a, "I'm graduating, what's something to think about" piece. 

Quoted here: 

"In this article, I will argue that elaborate rules systems enforce the fundamental American value of equality of opportunity, and that such numerical systems, which imply the necessity of ”leveling up”, recapitulate the American rags-to-riches myth. Similarly, the inexorable path from noob to level 50 mage of awesome in traditional boffer larp echoes the ideal immigrant’s path toward the American dream of riches and upward mobility; both the immigrant and the noob enter the shores of a brave new world with little in the way of assets, but through hard work or roleplay, gain power and influence."

Nick LaLone
Penn State University

Information Science and Technology
ist.psu.edu

www.nicklalone.com

www.beforegamedesign.com

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:51 AM, Alexander Yakovlev <kel...@oreolek.ru> wrote:

Goes very well with „Nordic-Russian Larp Dialog” (2015).

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[Liz England]

Finished with this last night. Here's my initial thoughts:

This is one of my favorite "non-design" readings so far. It just had a lot of cool things to think about, and I thought the structure was great for quick reading. It didn't dwell too long on any given LARP - it had just the right amount of info for most of them (I would've liked a bit more on a few of them that seemed complicated). Each LARP was interesting in its own right, and there was so much variety I was always curious about the next one. Overall - not knowing the topic beforehand, I felt it was a great introduction and brief survey of the field.

A few of them - like the decommissioned submarine where players roleplayed it as a starship! - really tickled my brain. That's one I would've loved to participate in, but even more I'd love the challenge of designing for it.

I don't really know much about LARPing in general, so I would've liked a companion piece that just explained how they worked. Instead I pieced together a lot from commentary on the various LARPs. For example, the focus on character workshops, the lack of formal mechanics (in favor of dramatic ones? not sure the best term), and the huge role that writers had for many of the LARPs. I still don't entirely know what sets the Nordic LARP scene up separately from other ones like North America - I assume the NA scene is derived from tabletop games, less focus on empathy roleplay and more on win/lose gaming. Since I have a huge interest in narrative-focused games, the LARPs themselves didn't really challenge too many previous conceptions I had about what games are/can be - but the character and drama-driven settings did give me a lot of food for thought on more ways to approach narrative structures in videogames.

I also feel like I need a companion piece to help square away a lot of questions I had about ethics and responsibilities as designers (and, to an extent, players). A lot of situations they put people in had some element of danger - whether it was psychological (like the four-gendered utopia setting, where all the players broke up with their SO's afterwards) or physical (the 1k person LARP that lasted a week). They mentioned things like dealing with consent, the importance of debriefings after LARPs, some methods developed to deal with intimacy LARPing, rules about pervasive games where the boundary between real world and game world was deliberately blurred, etc. I felt like there was a lot more information hiding under the surface, not directly addressed by the book but leaving me lacking some important context for the LARPs.

The Nordic LARP wiki links to a bunch of books with free downloads - https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Category:Books. I'm going to try to fit in "States of Play" (mentioned above by Nick, thanks!) and "Playground Worlds" sometime this year to help round out my knowledge, and will check out the book on Russian LARP mentioned above too!

[Jens Bahr]

I got about halfway through this before deciding to move on to the next book. 

Even though I live pretty close to where some of these LARPs were held, I had not heard of these games before. So it was fascinating to hear about this world of hardcore roleplaying events (I doubt that's a fitting description). Hearing about the first few LARPs was very interesting for me and, like you also say Liz, I would've loved to participate in some of them. The dedication and creativity are astounding, and the meta-game that seems to have developed around them shows that these games, seemingly improvised while being played, do follow some (unspoken?) rules in addition to the game mechanics. 

When I read about the rune they put on every object that does not belong to the game I kind of realized that this is the reverse of what's happening in some other games, where we mark the elements that currently belong to the game. For example, IIRC in Assassin's Creed all the characters belonging to a combat situation (the current mini-game, so to say) are marked with a symbol above their head. In adventure games, the objects I can interact with oftentimes are brighter than others or lighten up on mouseover. In LARPs, I can play with everything but the marked objects - in video games, I can only play with the marked objects. This feels very restricting but also surfaces some ideas for coming game jams, where one could create a game where you should only interact with the objects that are not highlighted.

Telling me I can interact with everything around me but that one box is off limits will let me want to play with the forbidden box more than anything else.

Apart from that, the very brief overview of the LARPs quickly lost its touch for me. I'd rather have read one very detailed description of a LARP than a short overview of many. So for the last half of the book, I only very briefly familiarized myself with the main concepts and settings, looked at the pictures and moved on.

This was my first book in this game design book club, and I am excited to see what Jesper Juul has to say this month :-)