Leaving Mundania (33 page)

Three hours later, I dragged myself out of bed, threw on some clothing, and desperately tossed cups of coffee down the hatch. I couldn't miss the “First-Timers' Guide to Knudepunkt Theory,” a session designed to help everyone understand the cocktail conversation. As our speakers flipped through their PowerPoint, we got a crash course in Knudepunkt history. I knew a little from my pre-trip research and from all the mingling I'd done during A Week in Denmark. I'd watched video of journalist and larper Johanna Koljonen in the first Nordic Larp Talks, who noted that larp arose out of tabletop games in the Nordic countries, much as it had in the United States.
³
However, larp was easier to organize in Scandinavia because in Finland, Sweden, and Norway the public has the “freedom to roam” or “everyman's right”: the right to sunbathe, picnic, swim, gather mushrooms or berries, and camp on public or private land, so long as the land isn't permanently damaged and people stay a respectful distance away from others' dwellings. That, combined with the lack
of cultural litigiousness, made it easy to organize a larp in the woods, which contributed to the strong larp culture in Nordic countries. By 1994, summer medieval games in Scandinavia were drawing more than a thousand participants, and soon thereafter Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Hanne Grasmo, and Margrethe Raaum organized the first Knutepunkt in Norway in 1997, with the aim of building community among larp organizers across the region.

From the panel, I learned about the intellectual development of the scene. Between 1999 and 2004, members of the community wrote a great many larp manifestos. The two most famous of these were the Dogma 99 manifesto and the Turku manifesto. The Dogma 99ers patterned their declaration on the Dogma 95 film manifesto, written by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. The Dogma 99 manifesto envisioned larp as a transparent venture, one focused on great, self-sufficient stories.
⁴
Their manifesto forbids many of the features prevalent in stateside larp: secrecy, organizer interference in the game once it has started, main plots (as opposed to plots for all characters), game mechanics, larps based on tabletop games, and a number of other elements. In contrast, the Turku manifesto, a Finnish school of design, emphasized immersing in a character over a story.
⁵
In this view, the true point of larp is to become one's character, simulating that character's internal thoughts and view of the world to the exclusion of all else—solving plots, creating dramatic situations that might be fun for other players, and so on.

The speakers defined a few more helpful terms for us, including “360° illusion” or “360° ideal,” a design aesthetic focusing on set and costuming, creating the reality of the game as physically and completely as possible. Larpers into the 360° ideal care whether your underwear is period appropriate. I'd read about a couple 360° games in the recently released
Nordic Larp,
a book that was part of the new Nordic trend toward documenting the ethereal nature of larps. One such game,
1942—Noen ä stole pä?
(Someone to Trust?), explored life under the Nazi occupation of Norway. The players had done hundreds of pages of historical reading before the game and played characters based, in many cases, on actual people who lived during that period. At pregame workshops, players had their photos taken in
costume to create period-appropriate identification papers, such as passports. Characters were either members of the local community, which was divided into family units, or part of a nearby German garrison, which contained Eastern European POWs, soldiers, and members of the Red Cross. During five days of game play the characters lived a simple, everyday life. Fishermen spent their days on boats catching fish, seamstresses sewed, housewives shopped for groceries, and everyone cowered during midnight air alarms. The community viewed the Germans, and those perceived to be collaborating with them, with suspicion. The game itself wasn't about resisting the occupation, although some characters belonged to the resistance. Rather, it was about understanding the mentality of people participating in and living under Nazi rule.
⁶
Many Nordic larps seem to be about trying out a certain mindset or exploring an emotion rather than saving a town from orcs or finding enough loot to buy a sweet magic item.

Finally, the speakers explained “pervasive” games to us, games played in real world locations. For example, a scavenger hunt is a pervasive—players go out into the real world and potentially interact with people who aren't a part of the game. Larp can be pervasive, though it often isn't. For example, the vampire games that police detective “Brian” played in a go-go club were pervasive, as the real-world club, full of real-world non-larping people, provided the game backdrop.

Impromptu chats in the hallways and panels filled the rest of my day, and by 5:00
PM
I felt utterly exhausted from lack of sleep and lack of privacy. As a writer, I generally spend ten to twelve hours a day by myself in a coffee shop or at home, writing. Since arriving in Denmark, I hadn't had a second to myself—I'd been sleeping in a basement room with thirty other people, or now, in a hotel room with a roommate. We took all our meals communally, and every evening called for me to put on my extrovert hat and converse with the locals.

I'm not sure I felt this at the time, but in retrospect, I think my trip to Knudepunkt could be deemed an elaborate larp built for one, a larp conducted in public without the knowledge of those around me, a pervasive game. Like all games, it had a couple rules, ones I imposed on myself for the duration of the visit, my cardinal rules of travel (1-3) and reportage (4-6).

1. Be flexible.
   If you think something will be OK, it probably will.
   
2. Talk quietly.
   Do not add to the stereotype of loud Americans.
   
3. Be polite.
   Learn how to say
   please, thank you,
   and
   excuse me
   in the local language.
   
4. Rule of yes.
   Say yes as much as possible, because it leads to adventures. Like jeep parties. The corollary to this rule is that you must be a good sport. Don't just say yes; behave as if you mean it.
   
5. Rule of neutrality.
   Don't judge people with unusual habits or opinions.
   
6. Rule ofhumanity.
   Treat people as people; everyone has a story worth hearing.
   

The circumstances of the game took a toll on my psyche—I was alone in a foreign land, sleep-deprived, out of my element, without a home base, and surrounded by people who were used to slipping in and out of different roles. In short, as a person I had no context for myself, no one there to remind me of who I was by treating me in a certain way.

That Friday evening, I wanted to take a nap but was afraid to do so, lest my alarm-clock-less self fall asleep permanently. With so many events running in tandem, I feared I'd miss something—already the previous evening I'd missed the launch of
Playground Magazine,
a new publication on larp and gaming.
⁷
At the same time, I required some sort of rest—my ability to think and speak diminished sharply as the day wore on. Instead of sleeping, I hit the sauna, an important part of Knudepunkt for many participants, and one that was more restful than I expected.

After a solitary hour or two and a shower, I felt more like my old self again. I had regained the ability to form a coherent sentence, so when I ran into Ida and her boyfriend we struck up a conversation. The sauna might have restored my faculties of speech, but perhaps unfortunately, it also seemed to have removed my internal filter, so I spoke voluminously about any subject lobbed my way, including the strange things I'd noticed in Denmark. I'd never traveled abroad on
my own before, and I'd kept my observations to myself over the last week, only daring to voice them in small dribbles to the three other Americans present. For example, I'd noticed that the overall level of education was higher on the arty larp scene than it was on the larp scene I'd followed in the States, due, perhaps, to the value that Nordic culture seemed to put on both education and art. I speculated that the scene's exposure to academia was part of what made its artiness possible, if the number of people writing larp theory and dropping words like
diegetic
was any measure. In film theory,
diegetic
refers to elements within the frame of a film. When a noir hero watches a jazz band play, that music is diegetic—the audience hears it, and so do the characters in the scene. In contrast, the techno music blaring as our samurai heroine kicks some girl-gang butt is non-diegetic—the music doesn't exist for her; it's dubbed in by the sound designers to set a mood for the audience. After subjecting poor Ida and her boyfriend to my logorrhea for a couple hours, we retreated down to the bar, and soon it was midnight, and time for a mysterious mini-party-game I'd received an invitation for earlier in the day, part of what Stenros called Knudepunkt's tradition of “one-hour parties, secret parties, ‘secret' parties, and short weird theme parties.”

Perhaps fifty or sixty people filed into one of the convention rooms, which was ringed with tables that had people—including the purple-haired Maria—standing on them, dressed in black, hands frozen in claws, fake blood dripping from the corners of their mouths. Several people passed out plastic cups of port wine, and our host announced the rules. We were allowed only three bites, “so make them count,” he said. We had until the music ended—about six minutes—to make them. We milled around the room, flirtatiously eyeing one another, pouncing to bite strangers and acquaintances on the neck, laughing and talking, until the track ended. Then it was time for an after-party. I went with the jeepers again, who continued to party like rock stars, late into the night.

When I woke the next morning after a hearty two hours of sleep, I felt funny. Not funny ha-ha, more funny Kafka. I couldn't remember who I was. Oh sure, I knew I was Lizzie Stark, writer-wife-daughter-friend-pickle enthusiast of the monochromatic fashion sense. I was
Lizzie Stark, dammit, knower of song-lyrics, lit mag editor, and as my husband had titled me, “finder-of-things and ruler of Australia.” But none of these things seemed to have any meaning. Maybe these ideas I had about who I was weren't as important as I thought they were, and maybe I didn't need to be any of these things. But if so, how could I still be me? More than that, if these identities were something I could put on or take off at will, if all identity was fluid, how could anyone have an identity at all? My mind went around and around on these questions. I'd lost myself somehow, amid the sleeplessness and identity play of Knudepunkt. I dragged myself to lunch and back in this peculiar mental space. My internal filter was still clicked off—courteous questions from people in the hallways, like “How are things?” provoked quixotic responses I couldn't control, like, “There are no good things or bad things, only things.” I couldn't lie, not even for the sake of politeness, and I couldn't muster enough personality to prefer, say, coffee to tea. I was definitely in the middle of some sort of existential quandary. At the lobby computer I read some old e-mails to help remind me of myself, and although I still felt bizarre, outside of myself and outside of everything, I attended a couple panels, most notably one on
Ars Amandi,
a method of simulating love and sex in which Emma Wieslander, a Swedish larper and creator of the mechanic, spoke about it and some of the larps that used it.

Emma had a slight build, sported a frosted fauxhawk, and radiated a certain gravitas. In her essay “Rules of Engagement,” from the 2004 Knutebook
Beyond Role and Play,
she made the case that sex and violence both deserve their own game mechanics, because rules “are all about portraying physical situations that one doesn't want the player to experience the same way the character does and vice versa.”
⁸
Larpers use boffers because no one wants to be stabbed for real. During her impromptu Knudepunkt talk, she suggested that violence and sex represent the two extremes of human emotion, and that in the past, larps were more likely to tell violent stories than relationship stories, in part due to a lack of mechanics for representing romance and sex.

In her essay, Wieslander laid out the methods that contemporary Nordic games employed to simulate romance. Some games used a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get, pronounced “wizzy wig”)
method, allowing players to dry hump each other or, at the hard-core end of the spectrum, to have actual sex in-character. Players with romantically linked characters are encouraged to talk about physical limits before the game begins. The wysiwyg technique adds to the realism of the game, but it crosses a personal line for many people, particularly those involved in relationships with someone else out-of-game. This method seems pretty risky to me, but then the United States has a more litigious culture than Scandinavia, and in fact, my informal poll of stateside game organizers revealed either explicit or implied “no-touching” rules, designed to prevent creeps from being creepy, across the board. In some Nordic games, players simply talk through a sex scene, deciding what happened, although this method breaks the immersion of the game by introducing chatter, and it can give players the giggles during what might otherwise be a serious moment. There are also symbolic ways of representing sex: one player gives another a shoulder massage, people feed each other fruit, or perhaps an impromptu dance scene occurs—hey, it worked for Jane Austen. And finally, there is
Ars Amandi.
⁹

Wieslander came up with the method for the influential 2003 larp
Mellan himmel och hav
(Between Heaven and Sea), a game that explored gender as a social construct.
Ars Amandi
provides boundaries for touching and being touched in a larp. Players may use permitted body parts—hands, arms, and neck—to touch others in the permitted zones—on the arms, shoulders, or neck. Full
Ars Amandi
permits touch on the neck below the ears, on the upper portion of the back, around the shoulder blades, and on the upper chest, around the clavicle but above the breasts. This mechanic is highly adaptable—if full
Ars Amandi
seems too intimate, organizers can always restrict the region of touch to the elbows and below, or even to the hands. I briefly tried out the full version with some other noobs right after Wieslander's talk and found it both versatile and capable of conveying emotional nuance. Players can touch each other lightly or firmly and may use rhythmic breathing to amp up or dial down the tension. They may look each other in the eyes, drastically increasing the intimacy, if desired. This technique may be used to simulate sex symbolically—two vampires feel each others' arms and declare it represents the act of sex between
their characters—or it may be used diegetically, as it was in
Mellan himmel och hav,
where within the game world the arms and shoulders, not the genitals, were the primary erogenous zones of the human body.