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It's not strictly Knudepunkt news, but then again, it is. ;)

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I arrive in Helsinki airport thursday at 16:00. Anyone wanna share a cab some time after that to Solmukohta, feel free to contact me :-)

Luv'n'hugs from
Jannick
jannick@raunow.dk

I'm intending to fly to Denmark for fastaval then head on to Finland. I know I'm not the only one doing this.

- Can we co-ordinate our travel plans to avoid splitting the party (in every sense)?

- As I recall the fastaval bus gets back to CPH quite late normally, so it's probably better to fly on the 9/4. Does that sound sensible, or were people planning to fly that evening on 8/4?

- For those of us going to the Role-playing in Games conference in Tampere on 10-11/4 it may make more sense to fly direct to Tampere. Can anyone who knows the the danish-finnish transport networks better than I do (most of you) tell me if that is worthwhile / sensible / possible?

First off: I've registered and I'm really looking forward to Solmukohta 2012!

Is there any information about country contacts yet? I couldn't find anything about it on the website, only a reference to there being country contacts, not how to find them or actually go through with payment.

The KP community is incredibly welcoming and open. People are curious, friendly, interested. However, we've effectively insulated ourselves from the rest of the world by charging something that's payable only by the 1% - meaning, people from rich countries.

Is there any way we can make KP accessible to, at the very least, Eastern Europe? So that people from Poland or Belarus (is that Eastern Europe? - forgive my ignorance) or the Czech Republic etc. can afford to come?

Here are two suggestions for how this could work:

1. Tickets priced according to purchasing power per capita in your country. Example prices could be:
Norway 250 euro
Poland 80 euro
Ukraine 42 euro
Sweden 176 euro
Denmark 207 euro
Finland 184 euro

2. A kickstarter model. Participants pledge various amounts, contributing towards a set goal. Different pledged amounts could give participants different bonuses - real or symbolic. (Your name in the KP books as a patron, your face on a huge banner over the entrance, whatever).

Hi all,
On facebook there has in the latest days been a debate about the larp Dance Affair: In fair Verona (designed by Jesper Bruun and Tue Beck Saari). The debate has mostly been about gender and the right to play whatever no matter what your physical sex is, but there have also been a lot of other elements in it. This article is an attempt to give some perspective on some of these questions.

I played In fair Verona in Denmark in February, and it was a great game. After talking with some friends in Stockholm I thought it would be fun to take it here. I pitched the idea to Jesper and Tue – who was both very positive. I found a place, a date, did some work and we set up an event and were go.

It was only weeks later. when we released sign-up. that the debate started. Here I will address what I find are some of the most important points in it. If I left something important out, it is unintentional.

1) Implicit placing of bio-sex in different roles in the sign-up
Jesper and Tue told me they wanted to do a larp where the male roles were the leaders in the dance, and those would be played by male players, and vice versa, and that this was a part of their game design. In order to achieve this an equal number of players each sex, they should sign up in pairs of one biological woman and one biological male.
Since it is their game and their game design, and they must have a valid reason for doing it this way, I agreed with this, even though we had a discussion about it. But basically the design decisions were theirs.
Then we opened sign-up, and here we started off all wrong by not communicating that it was an important part of the story and game design to have biological males as male characters and as leaders of the dance, and the reasons for that. We just let male and female players sign up in pairs and not specifying that we expected the male player to lead, and the female player to follow.
According to my opinion it is not ok to be placed in a role in a larp unawares based on your bio-sex. But I do think it is totally fine to do a larp where the players choice of roles are limited due to their biological sex. For example in A nice Evening, that was about the patriarchal structure in the family, it was important to have a male patriarch played by a male player as the ultimate symbol for that. A female matriarch wouldn’t have communicated the political message about male dominance, and then a part of the larp would have been lost. But this restraint was clearly communicated to the players at the time, as were our reasons for having it. This wasn’t done in the case of Dance Affair, and that I’m truly sorry for. We should all have been more aware of it and communicated clearly what was the set up was for this game and the reasons for it. This we are all aware of.

2) Limiting players’ opportunities based on their sex
This game limits players’ opportunities to play on certain things due to their sex. If you don't want to cross-dress you as a female player can't dance a leader. In Sweden we have a long tradition that everybody should be able to play everything independent of sex, age, color, size etc, unless there is a game design that makes a point of having people of a specific sex in a specific role or some other good reason for limiting peoples’ choices for player experiences (like perhaps that the playing style is supposed to be very naturalistic and there is no time to workshop trans-gender playing so that even players who are new to cross-playing can be believable enough). In Sweden, if you don’t explain the reasons, people will naturally get provoked.
But there is nothing new with limiting players to certain player experiences due to their sex. Just a Little Lovin’ didn’t allow men to play women, Mad about the boy did an exclusive female player game etc, and they all had great purposes for it.

3) Body-larping
My experience of the Danish larp culture I know is that it has a stronger physical tradition of larping than what we have in this Stockholm scene. For example both games like Totem and Delirium work to merge the character and player (for example character hungry = player hungry) while we in Stockholm work with more with meta-techniques that rather separates player and character (for example pre-defined stories).
Since dancing is very physical, and male and female bodies have different shape and balance - this could be one of the reason for it being so evident to Jesper and Tue that it should be male/female players. This of course gets problematic to Swedes who have a more divide player/character view. It is ok not to play your own sexuality, or with a person of the sex you are not attracted to, the bodies aren’t that important and the game is just as fun – would be the Swedish view. Again it is more important that everybody can play anything from a perspective of being fair.

4) Reason
I have been talking about a reason, a point to make in the story to exclude people from certain roles. Does this larp have it and what is it in that case?
To be honest I didn’t understood it in the beginning either. I’m Swedish, why couldn’t we mix as we usually do? This is why it has taken me a while to respond to this. But as far as I understood it this is a game that handles heterosexual relationships – their pros, cons and limitations. That is being express though dancing between men and women. Due to the fact that the heterosexual norms around love and couples has a central place, the male players are to play male lead characters and female players to play female follow character, this to reflect on society and its existing gender structures.

Is this a larp that will revolutionize our view on gender-roles? No.
Is this a larp where you get to play out heterosexual love stories? Yes.
Should Jesper and Tue have been the one to communicate this? Maybe, but he comes from a larp culture where those kinds of questions aren’t usually asked.
Is the above my benevolent interpretation of their message? Yes.

When talking to Jesper and Tue I also realise a difference between us. While words like heteronormative, bio-gender and “let’s just make all characters bisexual” fly easily out of my mouth they lack that language. This doesn’t make them bad guys, just not very used to discuss gender in this way, and may be not that aware of or interested in all of these structures.

It is problematic to say you want to do a larp about love, implicitly meaning just the one type of love. Of course you are allowed to do a hetersexual-love larp, but you need to show that you are aware of having chosen to work with that norm and that that you have a reason for that. (One good reason is that those stories are a big part of the life of many players, even players who don’t call themselves straight are affected by the norm). This communication failed here. Other types of love were overlooked, just as they are often in society, and that is really bad and I understand that it is upsetting.

But I do also understand that it would be a totally different game with all characters bi, than with all characters heterosexual. We live in a world were heterosexuality is the norm, and that is of course interesting to explore – how things work within the norm? There is a difference to dance with a man or a woman since these are still different genders in our culture, anything else is so far unfortunately still utopia.
But is the above reason good enough? I don't know. But I do think it is interesting to do play on heterosexual relationships, as well as homosexual. This doesn't need to be at the same time, and larp with all stories should be told, including hetero-ones.

Jesper and Tue want to do a larp where people learn to dance tango, and they want to do it by telling love stories based on their own heterosexual experience. This could of course have been done by other ways than heterosexual love stories, but after discussing this a lot with Jesper and Tue I accept that this a part of their larp design and that is how they want it. Mixing the preferences and gender identities of the characters would change the game a lot since the players are so few. The norm becomes more strict in the game if it is total. When I played the game it made it powerful for me as a female player at one point in the game to start to lead when I was dancing with a man.

Another aspect here is that there is a queer scene in Stockholm that has looked forward to to this larp, and are now now disappointed and angry because their stories are, for unclear reasons, mostly what seems to be just ignorance, left out of the game world. I’m sure anybody could agree on participating in a hetero-love game, but then that has to be the point and not just a consequence of everybody else being over-looked.

As Bjarke said: "It is bad because it (the hetero-norm) leaves very little room for other forms of sexuality or gender. And people who don’t live as part of the hetero-norm have to fight quite hard every day to make sure there is room for them. That is why this hurts. It is not being hetero itself that is inherently bad, but the way the norm leaves no room for other configurations."

As I understand from Tue they don’t feel they can do an all bi-character player larp. That would bring with it new challenges and they are not up for that. However Tue says:
"We have often said that we want to spread the idea of combining dance and Larping in this way, and we stand by that. We don't care who creates a bisexual or gay version of In fair Verona. We would be more than willing to help them build it. But we would be he wrong persons to do it. They could probably use the exact same methods and plots and everything, but the communication and vision needs to be handled by somebody who knows what they are talking about. "

I would be up for helping any one who would produce it. While In fair Verona is set in a kind of 1930's New York a reflects the hetro-society there, another interesting idea would be for example do an dance larp at a an all female cheerleading camp in the 1960ies (think Dirty Dancing) with all female players (male sex player would be excluded). Just an idea.

If I were to announce this game in Stockholm again I would be very clear with that this is a game that handles heteronormative relationships – their pros, cons and limitations – expressed though dancing. And that the power structure between men and women in society today would be expressed through men leading and women following. Or something. Otherwise we are just unaware and preservers of old gender structures, which is what people a protesting against since they (rightly) don't like them.

5) Signing up in pairs
Since it was established that it was important to the game design to have an equal amount of men and woman players we needed to ensure that. The easiest way to do that was to promote the people that signed up together with a partner, thus helping us to get equal numbers between the two different sexes. The other option would have been that we opened 15 spots for women and 15 spots for men and let the players fill them up, and then risk that we would be lacking people of one of the sexes, needing to say no to some who had signed up. That second option would most likely lead to me sitting and phoning my male friends trying talk them into attending the larp, and hence we thought it would be nice to ask our players to help us with convincing their male friends of going instead.

I do not think these quotas of players would have been so provoking if the purpose of the game was clear. A soldier larp that demanded all battle-pairs to consist of a female and a male would probably be cheered on for making sure all the guys that usually plays soldiers would also bring a girl into a game like that. (Of course there are female soldiers as well but the most common thing is still a male domination in soldier-roles, hence the generalisation).

But now, with an unclear purpose that a lot of people didn’t agree with, and 40 women interested in the game on Facebook, some of whom wouldn’t be able to fit into the game (see point two about everybody could play everything and be able to attend) this got provoking. Why should we hunt down male players when there were so many females that are just as good? And if you did not want women to play men, why not allow them to play same-sex couples? Again it falls back to the unclear purpose.

But the sign-up is something that I can consider changing, even though that means I will probably have to be the one to try to find players of the scarce sex. This in order so no one would feel excluded, because that was never an intention. But even so it would still be a hetero-love game.

6) Back to the Game
I played In fair Verona in February and loved it. My story was basically that my character had a problem - she worked to much, a problem I can relate to. As a result of this her boyfriend brooke up with her. But she soon feel crazy in love with a hot priest-student, and allowed her self to live. They had a short fling and he then he dumped her, and she closed herself and worked a lot again. Then her ex saw her, and she saw him, maybe for the first time, and they made up and got a happy end. She was home.
This what was the story was about for me. This is not a gender revolutionary larp, but I do like it and I do think it deserves to be played. It has a lot of interesting elements - you learn to dance tango, and then tell great stories with it, extremely fast. It is a collective process where you create both characters, relationships and a story for the game in the workshops. You do this through a lot of dancing, and a lot of working with your body - hence there will be some bleed. It is also a "tejp-lajv" - where you create the street with tape a la Dogville-technique which works very well.
Maybe one don't have to agree with all the things the designers does, but can participate and take the raisins from the cookie? One of my purpose to invite them here was that I love the Danish larp-scene, and I'm there a lot, and they have some different ideas about design than we do that I thought be interesting to import, and to see what happens. My hope was to bring the two scenes would get closer to each other, overcoming prejudices. I don't know if this debate will turn out to be a big epic fail on that, or on in the end we will create a better understanding between between at least some parts of the two scenes? At least I think it was an important debate to take.
Hope this has given some perspective on were the differences are. I do not hope we put the gender debate to bed, because it is interesting, and as seen above displays important differences, but hopefully we can put the debate about the larp to bed, letting it be as it was designed a larp about tangodancing and heteronormative love.

All the best,
Anna Westerling