I went to Gamecamp at the weekend, and had a lovely time.  I spent quite a lot of time hearing about (and playing) Nordic LARP.  I’ve been aware that Scandinavia has a fairly serious LARP culture, one that is notably different to the culture in the UK for a while now, but this was the first chance I’ve had to really discuss it with anyone who knows it, and learn about it.

In the UK (and the US, as I understand it), LARP (and roleplaying in general) is not taken terribly seriously, and that’s not a bad thing but it does mean that there isn’t a culture of study of the phenomenon from either a practical or an academic point of view, which means that running games in any form is a very much learn-by-doing exercise.  There’s no body of scholarship discussing what works and what doesn’t, and suggesting tools and devices that game participants can learn from.  That’s bugged me for a few years now.  The only advice gamerunners can get tends to be the “how to run this game” section of the various game books, and those tend to be quite highly specialised toward a specific game, and they tend to be very tabletop focused.  The UK LARP culture has almost no documentary tradition.

So I’m delighted to discover that the Nordic scene, in contrast, has a strong history of documentation, which means I’m currently immersing myself in this lot of books – a decades’s worth of LARP theory from the Knutepunkt conference.

I suspect that quite a lot of this blog, at least for the next while, is going to take the form of “I’ve been reading this bit of Nordic writing, and here’s what I think” or even just regurgitations of some of the basic concepts as I attempt to fix them in my head.  Bear with me.

There was one non-Nordic book I learned about, and the odds are I’m just late to the party on it, because it’s been out a few years: Hamlet’s Hit Points.  This is a book providing an interesting conceptual model for thinking about narrative as it applies to gaming – trying to be the gaming equivalent of Robert McKee’s Story, or similar other screenwriting texts, written by Robin D. Laws of Feng Shui/Gumshoe/other stuff fame.  Again, mostly tabletop-focused.

I’m a little hesitant to actually recommend the book, as honestly, it’s mostly a brief explanation of a model for thinking about narrative, and then a lengthy application of the model to Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca and then a few pages that basically say “try applying this to your own stuff, see if you think it helps you”. That said, it has given me a few things to think about, and it might be of interest to some.  Were it free, I would recommend it without hesitation, I’m just not sure it’s 100% worth the price tag.  But it does give me hope that things are changing in the UK/US scenes, and we might start to see a bit more writing on these topics from non-Nordic sources.

(This concludes your broadcast from the department of faint praise.)

I don’t intend to run a Nordic-style LARP.  (I should say I’m aware that this term is a gross simplification, as there are loads of different styles of LARP this could encompass, many of which are not so very dissimilar to what I’ve run in the past, but I’m using the term to indicate that part of the Nordic scene that is different, so please forgive the simplification.)  I like my LARP as a serialised form, and I like it good and pulpy – the more-or-less traditional UK (and US) style, and that’s what I’m going to run.  But I think there are lessons I can learn from the Nordic form, and I’ll come on to that in posts to come.

In closing, I commend the following to your attention: http://www.meetup.com/Nordic-Progressive-Larp-in-Britain-and-Ireland/

There are some nice-seeming people trying to get a Nordic LARP scene started in London, and of particular interest, they are running a series of interesting one-offs, more or less fortnightly for the next few months.  I’m going to try to get along to a few, and if anyone I know is are interested, I might have a go at facilitating a couple of one-offs myself in a few months time (if I can find some interested players), just to see how people feel about the experiences.