Leaving Mundania (34 page)

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.

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 the 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?

Larp in the United States is beginning to diversify. Edu-larp, short for educational larp, is a hot topic on the Nordic scene right now and has started to crop up in the United States in the form of literary summer camps for kids. A July 16, 2010,
New York Times
article by Sharon Otterman looked at Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp run in Decatur, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Brooklyn, New York. The sold-out camp, based on Rick Riordan's best-selling
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
book series, arms kids with foam swords, teaches them about Greek mythology, and encourages them to keep reading.

The theater scene may also improve larp's crossover appeal; several plays that break the fourth wall, offering dispersed action, and in some cases, multiple narratives have cropped up recently in New York City under the guise of participatory theater. Most notably, there is
Sleep No More,
an amazing theatrical installation put on by the British-based company Punchdrunk in New York City, where I saw it in early 2011. The wildly popular show, which also ran in Brookline, Massachusetts, had its New York run extended at least three times and garnered rave reviews from the
New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vice,
and many other publications. Audience members were decked out in white masks and unleashed into a six-story set to explore their surroundings and silently follow the actors and scenes of their choice for a couple hours. The production riffed on
Macbeth
and felt like a larp for voyeurs, since for the most part, the masked audience watched the unfolding, wordless scenes without interfering—the audience, though players in some important sense, couldn't affect the course of events. And like a larp the action was dispersed, with different scenes occurring at the same time. I missed, for example, the witches' rave that one of my friends loved, because I wasn't in the right place at the right time.

Arty larp is also making forays into the US scene. On the West Coast, larpers have begun gathering each year at Wyrd Con, a
Knutepunkt-like convention that offers both games and talks on larp theory, while on the East Coast, Intercons, conventions focused on small prewritten larps, continue to thrive. I suspect that if the US arty larp scene grows, it will legitimize larp as an art form, give it some cultural capital, and in doing so, diminish the social stigma around all forms of the hobby. After all, the idea of game design as an art is beginning to gain mainstream traction—in May 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts expanded its guidelines, making digital games eligible for funding, in essence, legitimizing them as an art form.
¹
More strangely, it appears that the US government has already funded larp … in Norway. According to Ole Peder Giæsver of
Playground Magazine,
the US embassy in Oslo gave a local larp group nearly $5,500 for the Cold War larp A Doomsday Eve.
²
Perhaps, like their Nordic fellow-hobbyists, US larpers will someday be able to apply to their own government for grant money.

As for me, I learned a great many things about myself through larp in the course of reporting this book. I'm a self-conscious, nosy, organized, vain, unspontaneous sort of person who loves words, art, and performance. As a player, I prefer role-play and plot discovery to hack-n-slash. While I quite enjoyed my long stint in an escapist campaign game, I think that my natural proclivities lean more toward the Nordic-style games; I felt less self-conscious imagining myself into emotional dramas than I did imagining myself into some magical fantasy world. Plus, I suck at remembering rules.

Most importantly, during this book I learned to embrace my own weird. With so many exotic costumes and haircuts on display, with so much nerdy talk about the subtleties of Dungeons & Dragons rules or the ins and outs of
Doctor Who
plots, I felt no need to hide the fixations that make me unique, from pickles to
Xena
to Dorothy Parker.

Will I keep larping? Maybe. Putting on or playing in a larp takes up a stupid amount of time and energy, although with the right playmates, it can be exhilarating. Despite my walk on the larpy side, I have other deep commitments, like, say, a drive to write books, that might prevent the return of Portia, Ophelia, or Madame Blavatsky. And yet, the game is hard to relinquish. Portia wants to get her new altar, Madame Blavatsky requires reanimation, and I can almost see
myself rolling around in six inches of flour while discussing the terminal ovarian cancer that will kill me next month, working out conflicts in 1980s NYC through break dancing (or in contemporary NYC through krumping), or enmeshed in some sort of future gender dystopia in which gangs of women roam the streets. New York-based artist Brody Condon already ran an artsy game in 2010 called Level Five in two US-based art galleries in conjunction with Danish and Swedish larpwrights.
³
If only someone would invite me to a nearby game like that. American larpers: could you get on that, please?