Knutepunkt was help last week in Oslo, Norway. Over the two decades since the first Knutepunkt in 1997, the event has become an institution of Nordic and international larp. To mark the anniversary, a series of keynotes was commissioned. I was one of the six speakers. In the talk I revisited the definition of Nordic larp I offered four years ago, before moving on to claim that non-player characters are inherently dehumanizing (if you are here just for the dehumanizing bit, you can skip forward halfway down the text). Here is the script.
Knutepunkt 2017 Keynote: Future
Four years ago, the last time Knutepunkt was in Norway, I gave a talk on the definition of Nordic larp. At the time, I argued that Nordic Larp cannot be defined by geography or form, but it is more useful to approach it as an art tradition and a movement comprised of larps that are created in relation to earlier larps in the tradition – and the discussion around these larps.
The definition I put forward has been criticised, but I do still stand by it. I still think that approaching Nordic larp as a movement is the best way to attempt to grasp it. Not all larp is art, nor does it need to be. Yet thinking about larp through that lens, as movements, is useful.
However, as I stated in the talk in 2013, the definition was not a universal one, but reflected that moment in time. The definition had an explicit best before date – and it has passed.
The organizers of this Knutepunkt asked me to revisit that definition in this keynote. I’m not going to do that. As with all interesting movements, things change, the discourse shifts, and meaning moves. The label “Nordic larp” is not as useful as it was four years ago.
Perhaps some of us thought that Nordic larp was finished, the final form. But of course that is not true. Just as cubism stopped being the thing to do in painting, Nordic larp is no longer a useful label. We have all kinds of interesting movements happening here in the Nordics and around the world.
Larp is a form of expression, and just as painting has had impressionism, cubism, and pointillism, larp has had things like boffer larp, Mind’s Eye Theatre, and Nordic larp. However, if an art movement lasts for more than a decade, then it very likely dead on its feet, or, you know, popular entertainment. Indeed, Nordic larp is not very exciting.
Instead, we talk about blackbox larps, and even more specifically Ninaform.
A few years ago castle larps appeared, and even that traditions has crossed oceans and evolved to the point that castles are not strictly necessary anymore.
There are things like the Southern Way, the New Italian Larp.
Just as there is New Vampire larp, or as it is pronounced in original Swedish, Ny Vampyr. Indeed, we seem to have a lot of new going around.
I’m not ready to declare Nordic larp dead. But as a label it is not particularly useful when thinking about the present, and certainly not when designing the future. However, as a term referring to a historical moment, one that has all but passed, it is practical.
I will not try to make sense of all of these new movements. It strikes me as too early to do that yet. We are in flux right now. Trying to find one umbrella under which we all fit comfortably seem even more futile at this moment. Even the umbrella of larp seems limiting.
There is a renaissance of larp going on. Interesting things are happening in relation to form and content, and especially community.
I feel that we are embarking on the second boom of manifestos. The first one started 18 years ago in the Nordics, when were just starting to realize that not everyone larped the same way – and that clearly our way was best. Now, again, people are issuing demands as to what larps should be like, although the demands are more related to community, such as calls for a better better consent culture in game mechanics, accessibility in larps, addressing broken stairs in the community, and so on. Due to the professionalization of larp we are also talking about labour and the various currencies of cred and pep as well as the cultural capitals used to pay for such things. Then there are the traditional manifesto manifestos, like the one Chaos League issued last April.
As larp is being pushed into new areas, appropriated by artists and teachers and subjected to capitalist logic, we again need to look at the form. Where is the heart of larp? We will have different answers, and this will birth different movements. This is a great time to issue demands. The wonderful thing about manifestos is that they can be idealistic and unreasonable.
I’m now going to ask you to think up one unreasonable demand, or a preposterous claim, or an idealistic dream you would like to see become a movement in larp.
Now share this idea with the person next to you.
So in the spirit of midwifeing the future, I’m going to share my claim.
Recently there was a discussion online about if larps are, by their very nature, emancipatory. Do larps always empower their participants? Do they teach you empathy, and how to see things from the other’s point of view? While I think larp has this potential, the form also has some built-in booby-traps. I explore one today. I claim that:
NPCs are dehumanizing
Having groups of beings represented as adversaries, servants, obstacles, or symbols with a set function and a fixed narrative without proper agency is dehumanizing. Non-player characters, even when inhabited by players, are less than human. They are props and toys for the player characters to do as they please.
I realized this last fall when I was watching the recent HBO television series WestWorld. WestWorld, if you have not watched it, is a scifi show about a future where there is a larp-like amusement park where you can go and role-playing being in an American Western. The park is populated by androids, very human-like robots, that the players, or guest as they are called, kill and have sex with.
The robots less than human, they are things. Play things.
We recognize them as NPCs.
Playing with an NPC doesn’t matter as much. If only an NPC sees you dies, do you die? If an NPC dies in a forest, does anyone care.
Obviously, when we have NPCs in our larps, they are played by people, so the limits are a bit different, but there is a continuum.
At one end, we have larps like In Residency and White Death, where each character is a player character with pretty much the same agency.
At the other end we have WestWorld, where there is a clear distinction between players and people-as-props.
In the middle, we have most larps that have some instructed characters or NPCs. Sometimes there are player characters that have some tasks they need to take care of, like larps that have hierarchies and the people on top need to do certain things. For example Mr. T in Just a Little Lovin’ and the brass in Monitor Celestra. Then there are the characters that have numerous tasks, like the professors in College of Wizardry and the Hamlet and Ophelia in Inside Hamlet. Then we have the larps that have groups of people, usually adversaries, that are more like functions than people, like the monsters in Dystopia Rising and the interrogators in Kapo.
We don’t have the same respect for NPCs as we have for the other characters. They are less than human. Sometimes we even expand this to the players of NPCs, for example when we forget to design proper deroling and aftercare to the NPC players. Indeed, we don’t think about their larp experience, some of them only exist to be killed, they are there to support your experience. This is the amusement park approach to larp. These larps are only about your experience, nor everyone’s experience. This is othering, this is akin to colonialism. This is your PC privilege.
Of course, role-play has a long and tangled history with fantasy literature and fantasy is filled with racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and dehumanizing. Role-play is often about power fantasies, getting to do the things you want to do – sometimes on the expense of others.
In this political situation where fortress Europe is leaving refugees to die, where popular fascist movements target minorities, where globalization and robotization are fuelling unemployment and the unemployed are portrayed as lazy leeches, there is a lot of dehumanization going on. I think it is important to be aware that to some extent we are reproducing these structures and ideas
And to some extent, we are aware of this. Some years ago, we used to talk about the “larp democracy” effect, where on Friday we have a feudal, hierarchical fantasy village, but by Sunday democracy has taken over and there are elections for a village council. This makes sense if every character is recognized as fully human, with full human rights. Of course, this is partly because our fictional world reflect our main world and the players’ values.
Since then we have developed a taste for dystopian larps that have terrible hierarchies.
But we have a new version of this still. I call it “werewolf pride”. If you introduce a monstrous werewolf as player characters into your larp, you are also introducing the concept of a werewolves are fully human beings. Monster characters with full agency easily trigger werewolf pride. This is basically Chekhov’s gun. Again, there is a reflection of our out-of-larp values. When we have agency, we tend towards equality and inclusion. However, this only works if everyone has full agency.
Indeed, maybe because we think of ourselves as good, inclusive people, we feel that we can do whatever we want to the NPCs. It is not for real, after all. Nevertheless, we are reproducing the idea that not everyone is fully human.
At the same time, it is true that NPCs are great tool for larp design. They enable us to concentrate the design and leave stuff out. Maybe you are not interested in setting up the orc culture. Maybe you need the captain of the ship to react in a specific way for the situation you want to explore to come about. Indeed, if we think about larps as simulation, then you must make choices. A simulation is always a reduction; it reduces fidelity. It does not, and cannot, recreate the world one for one. However, when you make these choices, the choices have intended and unintended consequences. And when you reduce someone to a prop, you rob them of their humanity.
For example, in Halat hisar the oppressors were dehumanized NPCs, but this was a conscious design choice. Yet it is also one of the things Halat hisar has mostly been criticised for.
To be clear, I am not saying that using NPCs in a larp is bad, or that designers who use NPC are somehow evil. That would be silly. The point I am trying to make is that forms and methods and models we use are not neutral. They have consequences we should be aware of, and maybe take advantage of, when we are designing.
With this example claim, NPCs are dehumanizing, I want to underline, that just as Nordic larp was not the final form, nor are we now fully evolved. I hope that we will never get there. There are still interesting questions to ponder and address in larp. And not all of those question relate to the community design, but there are still unexplored areas in the form itself.
To those of us, and think there are many of us in this room, who are excited about developing the form and and finding new areas, I say. We are not done. The future of larp looks exciting.
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