Life Under Occupation: A documentation book for the larp Halat hisar has been published! Edited by me, it’s a collection of articles, photos and other stuff about the larp we did last year. Download it for free from here.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(Good Luck Charlie, season 2 episode 5 “L.A.R.P. in the Park”)
The larp episode of the American family comedy series Good Luck Charlie is one of the most miserable pieces of roleplaying television we’ve seen. Larp appears as ridiculous and stupid, but the real issue is the general conservative atmosphere. The gender roles in the family, the assumptions about the Mom, all of it seems to be from some kind of a rancid Eighties tribute.
Teddy (in the picture, left) tries to learn to play a Pokemon-stand-in to get closer to a guy she has a crush on. The guy proves to be a total dork and even talks Teddy into joining his larp group. The only upside to the whole thing are the bizarre costumes worn by the larpers.
(Huge, season 1 episode 3 “Live Action Role Play”)
Huge is an American tv series about a group of people at a camp for losing weight. In this episode, one of the characters wants to organize a larp, another hijacks it and corrupts her vision, and moderate drama ensues.
As seen in the picture above, the view of larp in this episode is not the most dignified I’ve ever seen. For some reason, the apparently adult people at the fat camp behave like twelve year olds with their temper tantrums and pouting, so the whole thing is emotionally unsettling to watch.
(Emily Owens, M.D. season 1 episode 9 “For the Love of LARP”)
One of the side-effects of our project is that we see a lot of individual episodes from tv series we’d never watch otherwise. This is true especially for inconsequential American series that don’t really make any kind of a splash here in Finland. Without our project, I wouldn’t even know that a series called Emily Owens, M.D. existed.
Emily is a blonde and bland doctor in a featureless hospital. In this episode, larpers have medical problems too. In the end we learn that they can separate reality from fiction! What a relief!
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(Shakma)
Of all the larp movies we’ve seen, Shakma has one of the simplest, yet singular concepts. A group of medical researchers and students lock themselves into a building to play a really crappy-looking larp. A raging baboon kills them one by one.
The best thing about the movie is that the baboon is played by a real baboon, called Typhoon. No special effects bullshit here! Only hardcore baboon action.
The larp seems to be a treasure hunt style thing where players communicate with the game master via walkie talkies. “I’m using one of my keys to open this door.” The game master has a primitive computer simulation of the game, connected to tracking devices each player has.
During the movie, we had a lot of speculation about how it would end. Perhaps the baboon would kill the game master and take his place. Maybe he would rescue the princess and they would live happily ever after. He could kill everyone, and the last shot would be him driving away smoking a cigar.
Unfortunately, none of these things happened in this movie.
(Gamerz)
We’ve seen a lot of movies about roleplayers or larpers, but most of them have been made in the U.S. A typical feature of these films (Unicorn City, A Game of the Year) has been a depiction of the hobby and the people in it that I can’t recognize from my personal experience.
The 2005 movie Gamerz was made in Scotland. In style it’s a European slightly comedic slice-of-life film, with little of the overly mannered structure or self-hate that characterizes bad American films of this type. Along with Zero Charisma and The Gamers 3, its one of the best movies about roleplayers out there.
The movie is about Ralph, a university student and game master who hijacks the local roleplaying club and starts to run the game himself. He falls in love with the only female player (like almost all roleplaying movies, Gamerz is routinely misogynistic). His local bully wants to join the group. Off-game bullshit creeps into the game.
I spent my high school years roleplaying intensively, and a lot of the people and situations in Gamerz are recognizable from my youth. Some of the people made me go: “I’ve played with that guy!” One of the themes is the responsibility of the game master not to use the game as a vehicle for personal power games.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t quite carry to the end. The scene where Ralph goes over to the dark side (so to speak) is too hard for a movie like this.
Despite it’s problems, Gamerz is worth watching. In the opening credits, the letter i looks like a penis. This is not an accident.
![skull3_thumb[2]](http://www.juhanapettersson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/skull3_thumb2.png)
(Skullduggery)
Skullduggery (1983) was described as Mazes & Monsters meets El Topo. This description is accurate. It feels like an Eighties moral panic movie about roleplaying games where the filmmakers have gone native in the weird and occult world of fantasy games.
The movie is about Adam, who works in a costume shop and playes in a game that looks something like early D&D or Talisman. There’s a game master and other players, one of whom does exactly the same sexist jokes as a guy in Gamerz. It was uncanny.
Adam is cursed: one of his ancestors played a game and fell victim to a sorcerer or possibly Satan. The curse manifests through Adam and the game, making him attend strange amateur theatre where immensely talentless people try do do farce and a janitor wanders around with a game of Tic-Tac-Toe on his back.
I don’t mean that negatively. That was all great stuff. For much of the running time, Skullduggery felt like something directed by Jodorowsky.
Unfortunately, by the end Jodorowsky fades away and is replaced by Dario Argento. I suppose one could charitably say that the persistent misogyny of roleplaying movies reached its logical conclusion here in the form of a killing spree.
Skullduggery follows one of the two main cliches of game movies: “The game becomes real”. However, it would be reductionist to think it was nothing more, because this time the cliche was only a starting point in a movie that became something else. By the end, it’s unclear in a metaphysical sense if Adam is still alive or acting from beyond the grave. As his last act, he reaches out to kill his game master.
Sometimes the movie was also pretty funny. There’s a hospital scene where we see the sihouette of a nurse fucking a doctor on a hospital bed. The nurse moans: “You’re the best! In this room. At this time.”
That’s a great line.
The nurse comes out from behind the curtain in her underwear. The doctor sneaks behind her back, and startles her. He’s wearing a gorilla suit.
Because this is Skullduggery.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(The contestants on King of the Nerds, season 2)
King of the Nerds is an American reality tv series in which a group of people compete on who’s the nerdiest. We watched season two because one of the contestants, Xander Jeanneret, is a larper. In the picture, he’s the guy with the red pants.
A lot of the second season is characterized by a single casting choice that makes the whole thing seem exploitative and unpleasant. I’m fine with strange people on reality tv, but this time it felt like watching someone who probably shouldn’t be on tv.
Simplistic tasks, crass sponsor visibility, terrible hosts and pointless cheesecake all carry over from the first season. There’s little to like in King of the Nerds.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
This is the music video for the song High Road, by the band Mastodon, released in 2014. Watching this after seeing so many movies about larp feels strange. It’s like the condensed essence of a certain type of American larp movie. If you want to know what many larp movies are like with the bare minimum of effort, watch this.
Non-fiction: Alia Sorensen: Southern Exposure (AuthorHouse, 2005)
Southern Exposure documents writer a year of Alia Sorensen’s working life on Antarctica in the early 2000′s. It’s not an ambitious book, and perhaps that’s its strength. Sorensen worked both a summer and a winter at McMurdo station in the kitchen.
The book’s perspective is on describing the working culture and conditions of the people who make an Antarctic station run. I’ve always liked these blue collar accounts of life on Antarctica, and there are not too many of them around. Sorensen’s lack of artifice means that you get a clear idea of how everything is.
At the end of the book, there’s a pointless and overlong account of tourist activities in New Zealand and Australia. These can safely be skipped.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
The British director Peter Watkins has made three movies that are quite interesting from a roleplaying perspective, The Battle of Culloden (1964), Gladiatorerna (1969) and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000).
(The Battle of Culloden)
The Battle of Culloden and La Commune (Paris, 1871) are interesting because of the way they were made. Both have historical subjects, and both involved large-scale recreations of the events they documented. The idea was to recreate the battle of Culloden and the Paris Commune in the style of historical re-enactment, and then do a movie about it documentary style.
The only element out of time in each movie is the camera crew, interviewing participants and shooting as events progress. From the way the interviews play out, it really looks like the people participating in the enactment are in fact larping.
Both are also good movies. The Battle of Culloden is one of the most savagely anti-war films I have ever seen, with unrelenting focus on the miseries that followed medieval warfare. La Commune (Paris, 1871) is 345 minutes long, but the duration pays off in its depiction of life in the Commune.
There’s a good documentary about the making of La Commune (Paris, 1871) called The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins.
(La Commune (Paris, 1871))
The third movie, Gladiatorerna, is a scifi mockumentary set in a fictional future where the great powers of the world have stopped waging war and have instead started organizing games in which teams of combat specialists take on each other.
The way the setup is depicted is very interesting, and there’s a lot of attention being paid to how the whole thing works. We see the game master rooms, how enviromental hazards are activated, and the decisions that go into setting up each game.
(Gladiatorerna)
The movie would be a solid basis for anything from a milsim to a fullscale larp. Its ideas develop admirably, and its interesting to see its characters both go along with the game, and rebel against it.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(Full Battle Rattle)
Full Battle Rattle is a documentary movie released in 2008 about a fake Iraqi village built in the Mojave Desert built by the U.S. Army for training purposes. Its not larp or roleplaying, but pretty close.
Amazingly, the village is populated by actual Iraqis, refugees from the country ravaged by the very same war the soldiers are training for. Insurgents and occupying soldiers are played by real soldiers.
The simulation doesn’t seem to have proper individual characters, but its social dynamics and game master techniques place it somewhere between larp and milsim.
(Community, episode 14)
The tv series Community has had two episodes in which roleplaying features prominently, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (season 2, episode 14) and Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (season 5, episode 10). They represent some of the best use of roleplaying games in a tv show I’ve seen.
Both episodes use the idea of the characters playing D&D to tell multilayered stories not about what happens in the fiction, but to the players as they play the game. The episodes grasp the metanarratives created in any act of roleplaying very well.
(The Last of Sheila)
The Last of Sheila, an American movie made in 1973, is the story of a group of Hollywood people invited to a yacht to play a game. Each of them is assigned a secret, and in each of the ports the yacht calls in, there’s a chance to find out what someone is hiding.
The basic setup of the game looks like a very rich people’s treasure hunt, and its fun to see the character running the game happy when it works and cursing when his design has issues. The game master experience is on display, even if his attitude is a little diletantish.
The movie has many ideas that have since surfaced in alternate reality games and other types of organized urban adventures. Typically for a movie like this, the game becomes real.
(The IT Crowd, season 4, episode 1)
The geek comedy IT Crowd has one episode in which tabletop roleplaying has a significant role, Jen the Fredo from the fourth season. Other stuff happens in the episode too, but one character, Moss, runs a tabletop adventure for a group of guys who are intially reluctant to play.
The fun thing about this episode is that the magic of roleplaying carries them away, and soon we see dudely business types fantasy roleplaying in all seriousness. That is the joke, of course, but it also works as a straightforward demonstration of why its fun.
(Midnight Madness)
One of the most essential alternate reality game movies (in addition to Westworld and The Last of Sheila), Midnight Madness is about an urban treasure hunt -type game called “The Great Allnighter”. People participate in teams of broad stereotypes: there’s a jock team, a nerd team, a women’s team, etc.
A lot of the stereotyping in the movie is pretty rough by today’s standards, but the movie shows the structure of a game like this very clearly. It might even be called a little pedantic in its devotion to explaining how the game works.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(Cloak & Dagger)
Cloak & Dagger is an American children’s movie released in 1984, originally as a double feature with The Last Starfighter. It’s about a boy who likes to play imaginary spy adventures that greatly resemble roleplaying games in the backroom of a game store.
As usually happens in these movies, the game soon becomes real, and the boy has to foil an attempt to bomb an airplane.
The movie is both boring and morally questionable. It seems to be about learning how to steal, run into traffic and kill people. Sometimes you just have to shoot people even if you don’t want to, because they’re evil.
The beginning of the movie is fun, with a spy clad in a grey leather jacket arriving with a parachute in the colors of the American flag. Giant dice rolls on the streets as we move from the game to the children playing.
Unfortunately, the good stuff stops after the first five minutes, never to return. Perhaps the only other good thing about the movie is the setting of the game store. It’s a nice glimpse into the period. Amazingly, they have a poster of the Atari E.T. game on a wall.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(The trailer for Zero Charisma)
Zero Charisma is an American movie released in 2013 about Scott, a thirtyish guy running a tabletop campaign and living with his grandmother. Scott is a temperamental and acerbic guy with a very clear idea of how roleplaying games should be conducted. Eventually, the difficulty of dealing with him drives away even his closest friends.
The movie is a cringe comedy built so that almost all expectations it creates remain unfulfilled. It’s also one of the very rare cases of a movie about roleplaying games that could be called good, or a real film.
The central question of the film is about how to play roleplaying games: are they supposed to be just “fun”, or should we take them more seriously? Scott wants to make games seriously, and encounters a lot of pushback doing so. Even a Gary Gygax stand-in ridicules him. Yet the filmmakers have gone Scott’s route. The movie’s aesthetic choices mirror Scott’s vision of roleplaying, and justify his point of view.
All of this culminates in a non-ending where the viewer is first teased with a triumphant revenge, and then made to watch everything fall flat. Yet life goes on.
Incidentally, the experience of seeing this movie changes a lot based on who you are. In the beginning, it seemed like it might be another example of the rote roleplaying or larp amateur movie in the style of Unicorn City or Game of the Year. That proved to be another expectation the movie first set up and then dashed. Nowhere was the comparison to other larp and roleplaying movies more clear than in a scene where a new member of the group starts playing like an asshole. (“What the hell, I’ll just stab him and steal his stuff.”) In movies like Lloyd the Conqueror, cheating and playing badly is something the hero does to show how cool he is, but in Zero Charisma, asshole playing is asshole playing. Even if Scott reacts badly to it.
My experience was also shaped by who I am in the various roleplaying scenes I inhabit. I started to suspect I was probably the hipster dude, although I liked Scott’s uncompromising “you’re doing it wrong” attitude.
Zero Charisma has a lot going for it, but unfortunately it also repeats many of the routine tropes of this kind of moviemaking. Indeed, it felt like it could have dashed a couple more expectations than it finally did. Its portrayal of women is abominable, some of the nastier geek humor is just shopworn and tired, and it never goes beyond a self-hating conception of who a roleplayer is. Even the hipster guy, who intially seems cool about his hobby, is proven to be ashamed.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(The Eskapistit trailer.)
Eskapistit (eng. Escapists) is a Finnish short film written and directed by Niklas Lindgren, made in 2013. It’s about a guy who has to make a choice between going on a date with a girl he wants to impress and a larp, and later about concealing being a larper from the girl.
It’s a fun little movie, and I appreciate the message of larp empowerment it ended with. Yet at the same time, I have to say I’m done with geek, roleplayer and larper self-hate as a subject matter.
I and some friends have a project of trying to watch all movies, tv episodes and other stuff with moving pictures related to roleplaying games ever made. We’re pretty far along on this goal. I’ll write here about old and new things we’ve found and watched.
(You can check out the DragonStrike video on YouTube above.)
DragonStrike is a board game published by TSR in 1993. It was a sort of D&D lite, with a group of adventurers exploring a game board. The game came with a video casette explaining the ideas behind the game in the form of an adventure led by a disembodied game master. It’s quite interesting as an example of how to communicate about games of imagination in the form of a movie or a video.
The first instruction the video gives to would-be Dungeon Masters is “Ham it up”, something future generations of tv and movie game masters have taken to heart.
There was supposed to be a sequel set in the Spelljammer world called Wild Space. It was cancelled, but the trailer is here:
There’s a great article about all this on Boing Boing:
In 1993, he recalled, “I got a call from TSR, which my sister owned at that point, and they wanted to do a video — an instructional video for how to play a role playing game. Beyond that, they didn’t really have much idea.” The budget was minuscule, making both live-action and traditional animation impossible. Flint and producer Peter Silver decided to combine the two: shoot actors against a blue screen and “then strip out all the color … insert the background digitally and then put the color back in.” This sort of filmmaking was about a decade ahead of its time. “It’s what they later perfected with stuff like 300,” said Flint, referring to the Zach Snyder adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel. “Oddly enough Frank came in for the screening of it and was kind of hanging around with me when we were shooting it,” he added.
(Whale Wars)
Tv series: Whale Wars: Seasons 1 & 2 (U.S.A., 2008-2009)
Whale Wars is a documentary tv series about the campaigns the environmental organization The Sea Shepherds conducts in the Southern Ocean. They disrupt Japanese whaling operations by harassing them in various ways.
In the first two seasons, we see The Sea Shepherds use the ship Steve Irwin, a helicopter and a couple of speedboats to do things like throw stink bombs onto the decks of the whaling ships, attempt to render their propellers useless with long ropes and even board the Japanese ships and forcing the whalers to take them prisoners.
In my particular social bubble, this is the great show nobody seems to be watching, although the number of seasons, special episodes and spin-offs suggests that it has been successful. Every episode features something insanely dangerous, from almost sinking in an icefield to ramming a whaling ship thousands of miles from possible rescue. Watching the show, half the time I’m thinking: “Christ, this can’t be happening!”
We’re used to seeing this kind of exciting documentary material from morally questionable things like American wars. It feels amazing that someone has made a similar tv show, but from the viewpoint of aggressive ecological activism.
Last weekend, I was at the Nordic roleplaying and larp conference Knutpunkt in Sweden. Like always, it was a wonderful experience, showing how furiously the scene and the artform are progressing into new and exciting directions. Sometimes it feels like things are going so fast, you have to work hard just to keep up.
One of the interesting discussions that the Knutpunkt scene is having right now concerns the idea of Nordic Larp. What is Nordic Larp, how is it defined, and how it should be defined?
The idea of Nordic Larp as it’s currently understood is surprisingly recent. When I went to one of these conferences for the first time, Solmukohta in Finland in 2000, there was no “Nordic Larp”. As a Finnish larper, I was becoming aware that there were larpers in other Nordic countries too. They were doing cool things, and I wanted to meet them. It was about cultural exchange between local larp scenes.
As the years progressed and contact with the rest of the world increased, a sense of a Nordic larp community was formed. We were no longer Finns and Swedes marveling at each other, but Nordic larpers. Our national communities still had huge differences in larp philosophy and practice, but many things in common too. Creative ambition was often named as one.
This kind of thinking was solidified in 2010 through the publication of the book Nordic Larp, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. It attempted to collect together important and interesting games from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and to showcase essential examples of what had been done so far. The book’s project was to describe the Nordic scene through its games, and its conception of Nordic Larp was geographic.
That conception was soon called into question. In the book I edited for the 2012 Solmukohta conference, States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, I argued for Nordic Larp as a creative idea separate from the national scenes in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. My idea was that not all Finnish larp was Nordic Larp, and you could do Nordic Larp in Germany or the U.S. It was a creative philosophy that just happened to be born in the Nordic countries.
This idea was not without problems. There’s a rift between the Knutpunkt scene and the many national Finnish larp scenes we have, and I’m under the impression that this has happened in other Nordic countries as well. Having the concept of Nordic Larp float free of its cultural origins makes this rift worse.
Another point of criticism came from outside the Nordic countries. At this point, it was no longer about just Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway: people from many parts of the world had come to the Knutpunkt conferences. Turns out, many of these people didn’t want to use the words “Nordic Larp” to describe cool projects in their own countries. They felt that we in the Nordic countries didn’t have the right to assume ownership of the idea of creatively ambitious larp.
Thus, in many parts of the world, larp designers have created local names for their own movements. In the U.S., it’s American Freeform. Indeed, Nordic Larp doesn’t have a monopoly on creativity even in the Nordic countries. We have a strong Jeepform scene, the Fastaval tradition of scenario design, Finnish tabletop roleplaying publishing, and many other distinct philosophies of ambitious design.
The most recent definition of Nordic Larp comes from Jaakko Stenros. At the Nordic Larp Talks in Oslo in 2013, he proposed a circular definition where Nordic Larp is: “A larp that is influenced by the Nordic larp tradition and contributes to the ongoing Nordic larp discourse.”
This definition is in the same category as what I proposed in States of Play in the sense that it separates Nordic Larp from the national larp scenes in the Nordic countries. Many, maybe most, larps played in Finland do not contribute to the “ongoing Nordic larp discourse”.
In his talk, Stenros makes the point that Nordic Larp is a concept that has power. It has brand recognition, and it’s important for the identity of its practitioners. This means that there is also power in defining it.
At Knutpunkt, larp and transmedia designer Martin Ericsson proposed during the Hour of the Rant to replace Nordic Larp with the concept of Progressive Larp. The idea was that by removing the national geographical signifiers, we could have a global movement all about creativity, ambition and all the cool stuff without national and cultural borders getting in the way.
At this point, it’s necessary to make a long detour into U.S. cultural imperialism and the privileges it represents. The U.S. machine for cultural production, from Hollywood onwards, is probably the most powerful in the world. That power is sometimes characterized in U.S. politics by the term “soft power“, meaning influence that creeps without strongarm tactics or violence. Why bomb and conquer when you can just give people in other countries so many entertaining American movies that they start to identify with American interests more than their own?
The reality of how this works often boils down to capacity and quality. In Finland, the movie industry produces maybe 10-20 films a year. A budget of five million euros would be truly extravagant by our standards. Because of this, our cinemas are mostly full of American movies, expensively and expertly made.
Larp is rare in the sense that while its origins are in the U.S., it’s not dominated by U.S. product. We have a strong, local tradition of larp that looks good in global comparison.
Having your arts and entertainment dominated by U.S. movies, books and comics has some distinct negative effects. It makes the U.S. the center of the world. It makes us import controversies and discussions to Finland that actually make no sense in our context. It makes us think that American soldiers are somehow people we should emphazise with, instead of their victims who don’t have Hollywood or HBO to dramatize their stories.
I grew up with G.I. Joe and the X-Men. I’ve made a larp called The American Dream: Happiness (although I was 20 when I made it). I’m not immune to any of these effects, and maybe that’s what makes all this so melancholy for me. Like Rammstein says in a song, “We’re living in America.” I love all these things, from Game of Thrones to The Wire, but I’m very happy that larp is a field where the balance of power and cultural influence is at least somewhat more neutral.
At Knutpunkt this year, some American participants made a joke about U.S. imperialism and appropriation by calling the event “Living Games East”. Living Games is a U.S. larp conference. This joke is based on a conception of the U.S. as a hungry appropriation machine that rampages around the world, stealing ideas and rebranding them as its own.
Perhaps that’s what it looks like from inside the U.S. From the outside, the view is sadder. The U.S. media market seems closed, uninterested in anything that’s not from within. The traditional way to try to sneak in has been to try to make things look and sound as if they came from the U.S. The videogame industry does this all the time. The Finnish game Alan Wake is set in Washington State, and it’s spin-off is actually called American Nightmare. Other Finnish success stories like Angry Birds and Clash of Clans are also notable in having nothing that would reveal them as Finnish.
In movies, one example is the Resident Evil series. It’s made as an international co-production, but the idiom is as American as possible. Bizarrely, since American cultural influence is so pervasive around the world, it’s used by Europeans to sell stuff to other Europeans. A German moviegoer will be more comfortable with a Finnish fake American movie than a Finnish Finnish movie. Monitor Celestra is a larp example of how this works: to find a theme that has enough power to bring together so many players from the Nordic countries and around the world, we need to use an American tv series.
All this cultural power makes itself felt in privilege. If we want to be international, we talk English. As a Finn, if I want to access this world, I have to learn a language, but if I’m American, I don’t. As a Finn, I can’t expect anyone but other Finns to understand references to my culture. As an American, I could talk about G.I. Joe and the X-Men to my heart’s content. Often, the privilege seems to manifest in the assumption that American cultural context is global, but perhaps that’s understandable. In using American references, we make it easy for others to forget we also have our own.
Ericsson’s concept of Progressive Larp is the equivalent of Alan Wake: American Nightmare. It’s an attempt to make the movement more palatable to global audiences by scrubbing it clean of its cultural background. By accepting the privileged position of the English language and downplaying who we are, we can become one big ambitious global larp family.
The way this works is partly coded into the very word “progressive”. My first association is prog rock, an Anglo-American musical trend that came from the U.S. to Finland. Thus, when the word is used to describe what we do to people who don’t know the history, it’s easy for our heritage to be erased from the narrative and replaced with the familiar pop culture story of stuff originating from the U.S. and then consumed and processed by us here in the rest of the world.
I love seeing Americans at Knutpunkt. I love to see our ideas spread and be challenged. I love the cultural exchange that goes on, and I have yet to meet an American larper I didn’t like as a human being. But I’m happy to do Nordic Larp. Maybe this is why I liked seeing Germans and Americans protest against my concept of Nordic Larp as explained in States of Play. By creating American Freeform, American designers free us from the imperatives of a global movement. We can be Nordic again, one scene in dialogue with many other interesting scenes.
Freeze ‘Em All is a concert given by Metallica at the Argentinean Carlini base on 8.12.2013. It’s part of an attempt to make a record by playing a gig on all seven continents within a year.
I’m an Antarctic geek and I like metal, but this doesn’t do much for me. The bludgeoning Metallica sound doesn’t really seem to be in any dialogue with the Antarctic environment, and the Cocal-Cola-related branding creates distance between the viewer and the show.
Life Under Occupation is a documentation book about the larp Halat hisar. Download it for free from here.
Esikoisromaanini Sokerisamurai ilmestyi Into kustannukselta alkuvuodesta 2013! Tsekkaa kustantajan kirjasivu täällä.
Buy my roleplaying game Valley of Eternity at DriveThruRPG! Osta roolipelini Ikuisuuden laakso Fantasiapeleistä tai e-kirjana Elisalta!
Tsekkaa videopeliohjelmani Tiltin kotisivut täällä.
Päätoimittamani roolipelilehti Roolipelaajan vanhoja numeroita voi ostaa iPadille Applen AppStoresta.
All seven issues of the Nordic larp magazine Playground, on which I worked, available for free here.