Larp

This is the second post about PanoptiCorp. The first was about personal experiences, so it actually makes more sense to read this first to get some context for the first one. PanoptiCorp was a larp about a dystopian marketing company with all the worst parts of capitalism. Everything and everyone was on the line of not being good enough, everyone’s performance was constantly evaluated and the company ran under a spirit of constant competition. Deadlines were usually very soon and the office worked more or less around the clock. ...

Warning: this is long, rambly, and has no context. I will write a part 2 with more context, when I’ve had some time to process what I experienced. My flight left Denmark before I had time for a proper debrief, so this is also me pouring out my thoughts on my character. I noticed afterwards how much I could’ve used the debrief: the game was very present in my mind afterwards. Note on the person used in this text: I deliberately create a difference between myself and my character by referring to him in third person, as per debrief-instructions given after the game. ...

I ran a simple jeepform scenario based on Reservoir Dogs a few years ago. I recently became interested in larp again, partly because of Monitor Celestra. Inspired by my experiences in Celestra, I started rewriting the jeepform scenario again. I still don’t have a proper name for the scenario: I called it Reservoir Hounds the last time I ran it, but that sounds a bit too much like copyright infringement, so I need to come up with a better title. ...

I acted in Juhana Petterson’s participatory art installation, Portaikko, last weekend at Imatra Human Culture art-festival. It was exciting, since I haven’t done anything like it before, but still familiar enough from previous larp-experience. The amount of participants wasn’t spectacular, but easily enough to feel like a success.

Reservoir Hounds was a success, at least with some criteria (and some post-game lie). The game ran for less than an hour, but that wasn’t surprising as I was quite sure we wouldn’t hit the two-hour time limit we had. The concept of the game was simple: Reservoir Dogs turned into jeepform (if you haven’t seen it: a bunch of gangsters arguing why a robbery went bad, and who’s to blame). We had some simple mechanics for determining when the game ended, and a rule about determining what had happened during the actual robbery part. Basically anything that the players said had happened during the robbery had happened, unless someone disagreed. The rule was: anything the players say is true is true - unless they are lying. There was no objective truth, as everything was up to debate. ...

A discussion I had with some local rpg-players got me thinking about the history of rpg-theory in Finland. The best known of theories was the one based on the text known as the Turku School Manifesto (it was displayed online not long ago, but I can’t seem to find it anymore). It meant that for a long time, role-play - and especially larp - was viewed through these concepts. For those that don’t know, Turku School ideas were based on the idea of immersion, or the player “becoming” more or less, the character. That idea has been elaborated and criticized since, but for (roughly) a decade, it was the way theory worked (in Finland), at least in practice if not in all discourses of theorists. ...