eidzem's blog

To be honest: Me, the writer of the recent blog posts
are a bit different from other things happening in Europe, too.
So have no fear.
(to the brazillian organiser, being confused about my last blog-posts)

I (and I guess many with me) have no clue of what your Brazillian larp-scene looks like.
I checked your profile and saw that you have played tabletop RPG for 15 years and larp for 10
then I do a wild guess that your larps or games possibly are more similar to
the tabletop games than some of the freeform games?
or is it the 360 degrees games that makes the confusion?
or is it my total lack of focus on the Educational Larp-trend at KP that confuses you?

anyhow that does not mean we do not have anything in common,
or that we don`t do games that very well might have a lot in common :)

to my limited knowledge a lot of people at knutepunkt have background from classic RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, Ars Magica, Paranoia, Cyberpunk
also I have been involved in different kinds of workshops for younger people, educational tours around the country and hightening awareness of decisionmaking or creativeprocesses.
its just that my focus is more onto other genrès and larpforms right now. therefore I tend to write about them.

the games people attending KP is doing right now, differs from country to country, and larpculture to larpculture.
individual to individual.
therefore also how the people relate to games and ways to reflect around them also differs in its expression.

I checked your profile and see that you are a researcher. The academic part of knutepunkt is 1 of several motives and forms of reflecting around larp at Knutepunkt.

I will give you a draft on the different forms of reflecting around larp at Knutepunkt.
(just my own informal and subjective twittering on the 6 threads mentioned in the program knot: http://www.larpconference.org/node/11)

RESEARCH
1) giving and recieving lectures and attending group-discussions and panel-discussions about making games, the culture among the people doing them,
how the games affect the world around them, and how the world around them are having impact on the games.
(cherished when you want experience of words, with "talkers")

GAMES
2) Participant observation through doing mini-larps
I experienced the way of doing games and then evaluate and reflect upon them as an effective way at Prolog09.
Also the norwegian larpculture has a strong tradition of afterlarps and writing reviews afterwards.
Might be compared to antropologist method of becoming a part of a culture called participant observation.
(cherished when you want to experience action, with "doers")

GET PHYSICAL
3) Physical Workshops - and interhuman experiments: the closest larpers get to a laboratory, I guess, is putting themselves under "the knives" of eachother
doing physical workshops and experiments, isolating certain phenomens of communication (like bodylanguage, emotional states,)
or working with relationship between players (like status/relationship/touch/contact impro/dance).
Often there are dramapedagog-people or dramaintstructors appearing at knutepunkt doing physical workshops.
This is where you probably meet people aside from being larpers might be students/professionals within drama, dance, psychology, mental healthcare etc.

Might be compared to scientist back in history doing experiments with themselves and test-persons.
(cherished when you want to experience of emotion, with "feelers")

CREATING LARPS
4) Workshops relating to the planning and execution of a game. Everything from panelforums of projectplanners exchanging experiences and know-how to
more physical testing of differing genrès and production design. Like working with scenography (building the environment), using light-effects, sound-effects
etc.. Also writing of roles, stories, designing the game, composing and balancing the storystructure.
This is where you probably meet people aside from being larpers might be professionals within film, design, art og something connecting larping to fields within these activities.

Might be compared to engineering, or schools of engineering, or filmschools, research places where people tend to build stuff, or at least execute resultoriented project. Lower focus on paperwork, higher focus on results in actual project being finished for an audience or consumergroup.

(cherished when you want to experience results, with "builders" and "leaders")

5) LARP IN THE "REAL-WORLD"
is the Research-part all over again, but this time with a focus on how production relates to the outside world, not how games relate to eachother,
- how games can be used for educational purposes or for the spreading of ideas like democracy, fundamentalism, commercial use and such.
This is where to discuss how other institutions, like government, political and religious groups, other artscenes, museums, schools etc.. make use of larps for other purposes.

(cherished when you want to experience what larp is good for, what role should we as gamers play in society, with "agitators" and "redeemers" and "activists")

6) RITUALS
How can games use elements from tradition and religion to heighten the experience. How does larp already resemble tradition and religion.
Larp as spiritual enlightenment. Or just fun. Or meditation. Larp as Relaxational technique. Some people regard larp as a tool for changing society, others for changeing yourself, the last thing is taking larp so seriously as to acknowledging its deeper impact. When body, emotion, politics, thought, groupdynamics and physical environment comes together as one. Same thing can happen with rituals.

(cherished when you want a spiritual experience like community (as in a footballsupporter crowd), dream, meditation, trance, hypnosis, transcendense), with "dreamers" and "gurus")

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the freeform part, you could check out:

http://jeepen.org/dict/#jeepform

last years book about the Jeepform (which is a variant of the freeform Genrè)
(http://www.solmukohta.org/pmwiki.php/Book/Abstracts)

The Nuts and Bolts of Jeepform
(Tobias Wrigstad)

Jeepform is a style of freeform role-playing that stresses the importance of the meta-play, transparency and tailoring the techniques to emphasise the story. It has been likened to improvisational theatre, psychodrama and performance art, and been called “what theatre might become” as well as “freeform role-playing done right.” This article is a personal introduction to jeepform, its background and how it differs from freeform, and some jeepform ideas and techniques interleaved within the rest of the text with a tiny bit of analysis sprinkled on top. In a sense, this is a partial ingredients-slip from the jeepform kool-aid bottle.

OpeningGame
-------------------------------

At the opening night, knutepunkt needs to maximise the capacity of areas used for activities
as the plan is that everyone attending are split up in groups of 9 people + 1 GameFasciliator/GM.
Start of the evening is spent with the group playing through the game which is especially composed for this occasion.
This years specially written FestivalGame is called "The Class Journey" (actually it is called "klassresan" in Swedish, the english is made up by me.)
At the moment I do not seem to remember which of the freeformers are doing it, but I am sure the KP-gang have attended a lot of games the last
years and the guys are rumoured to be thorough and suitable. I guess they will announce themselves who is doing it soon.

The game are rumoured to be in translation and will be made avaiable for possible GameFasciliators prior to travelling to Norway,
through the net. People interested in doing some Gamecoaching and meeting new people the first day of Knutepunkt,
should contact med at

erlendeh@gmail.com

The Opening with a Ceremony/Ritual
----------------------------------------------------------
- as I have been invited to design the opening-ceremony, I will focus it as a warm up for the mini-game. -Cause I love the idea.
So the ceremony ends in everybody going to the location they are going to play the game.
I want to do the opening ritual outdoors using torches and a lot of waving with everyone included.

To suit the Opening Game, I intend to do the groupings into 20 gamegroups of 10 people as the mainfocus of the openingceremony.
Why do it easy, when we can do it complicated and mystical and hopefully experiencing something on the way, emotions/humour/whatever.

(I have this hope that people stuff their luggage some place safe before starting the ceremonial journey into Knutepunkt).

------------------------------------------------------------------

as I guess people who were in Finland last year already realized,
there will be more stuff happening the first day this year, (and this year the first day is Thursday)
as the impression is that people felt they wanted a bit more programtime than last year.
hopefully it will not press people and it will be fun starting off with a game, that will make all people have some kind
of common reference.
(so get your humble bodies over to Oslo for thursday and take a full 2 day off from work.
it sure is going to be worth it.)

Joc seems to be planning some kind of talkshow for thursday night, that would include guests, audience, food and alco.
Usually her show is good, and my guess is that the guests are as usual up to something serious as well as talking unserious.
If you to the contrary get fed up with staying together with everybody else, and wants to feel special you should have plenty of space to bring your favourite larpers to other places on the campus. Might be some first runs of mini-larps also during the evening. yeah..

-hugs
erlend

As far as I have learned there are lot of small larps happening this year.
Also there is a forest nearby, opening up for acitivities like blindfolded voyage through rural terrains and such.

Why all these games?
I think that games matters because, practice speak louder than words.
Be sure to use the aftermath of the games you take part in to exchange your critical thought on LARP.
Thats were I really understand other larpers. After actually doing a game together with them.

The programmers seem so far to keep 2 rooms for the already 15 small larps planned to be run at Knutepunkt.
There are the already mentioned colorbox as well as one room decorated like a livingroom. Perfect for sosialrealism and relationwork,
including sofa, tv, low table and the like. As a runners up there is a big tent with a fireplace inside and woodsupplies,
to play out the more fantasyoriented, or maybe raw, ethno, ritualistic stuff, if need be. (hopefully it will.)

The games seems to be significantly small ranging from 5 to 15 ppl. Be sure to check out the pre-KP enlisting possibility,
IF and WHEN it happens.

The cabins have reasonable higher standard than the ones we used 4 years ago. (thank god)
At this page there is a photo of one of the standard cabins to be used:
http://www.haraldvangen.no/leirskole_overnatting.html

-------------
hugs erlend

Btw, Mike P. :
the group I was referring to with ritualistic storytelling teqniques are these ones:
Aarni Korpela and Johanna MacDonald of Teatteri Naamio ja Höyhen - but they are not confirmed.

Just a few weeks ago I attended Emma, Kristoffer and also Martins crossover game
between the Horror TableTop Game Call of Cthulu and the Freeform/Jeepstyle.

We are doing a rerun of their Mountains of Madness at Knutepunkt, despite not all the organisers are able to come.
So this is my long twittering tribute to Martin thanking him for registering with the website and all.

Martin is one of my favourite larpwriters, with "Innan Hösten" - still at the utmost top. http://se.alexandria.dk/data?scenarie=37
Tova Gerge, the co-writer of "Innan Hösten" I have not seen for awhile. but I hope she will write more games soon.

For Martin and his like, I think the colorbox of lights and white walls should be interesting to experiment with doing mini-Larps.

hurray for Martin..
;)
hugs
erlend

Black Box, Color box, Lavvu and Mini-Larps

As a freerider of the KP-commitee this year
I manage to navigate myself into this weekends practical planning trip
to the location of this years Knutepunkt.

And hey, hoo. this is going to be bloody interesting.
I now know all about the program, the priorities of the programcommitee and
how it so nicely fits together with the overall "what matters" - slogan of this year.

If all programholders are delivering what they are promising,
this is going to be a delightful splush in the essential of our craft, our medium, our larps.

also all the mini-larp, freeforming and chambergames of the last few years are given time and space,
so it is actually possible learn through practice of actual gaming.
a practice I really enjoyed at Prolog09 in Sweden also.
Having a whole squad of freeformers going first to Fastaval in Denmark and then touring into Week-in-Norway
will give all the rest of us a possibility to grab hold of one of these people and actually finding
out the hows and whys of these people doing very short-time games and making them repeatable.

so I really would like to let out some more details and secrets,
but I will await the next newsletter of our head of information,
but hey, this is going to be really nice.

And, yes, its going to be colors, a bit of rituals and meetingplaces for odd stuff happening,
but stuff are organised for a reason.
Also the strange stuff.

But let it be known..
Do not feel safe
this years knutepunkt might also be hacked..
although open-source oriented..