Knutepunkt 2013 – A subjective recap – Part 4 aka The End, Finally!

So much for keeping this to three parts… Maybe next year it’ll be shorter. Maybe. At least I’m done, and I can use my evenings for other things than typing con reports. Enjoy the grand finale.

Collaborative vs. competitive larping

A good example of taking a KP-style look at an “obvious” topic in a structured way, meaning you get both “well, duh!” moments and “mmmmh, I hadn’t considered that bit” moments. Teresa Axner’s edu-larp angle came as a bonus. Edu-larp doesn’t interest me enough to go to dedicated program items, but for me it’s part of the exotic nature of KP so I like when it invades my cozy personal selection. I enjoyed the balanced listing of advantages and drawbacks of each style, how to design for  either, and how a purely collaborative larp or purely competitive larp would probably be boring. The highlight for me was the mention of the unofficial Nordic off-game competition about who was the best actor/cried the most/fucked themselves up the most by playing closest to home. It has invaded French larp and I’m not sure that’s for the better.

How to make love the Nordic larp way

A re-run of the talk Jaakko Stenros gave as an invited speaker at Arse Electronica, a sexo-techno-bizarre convention in San Francisco. Seeing one member from a weird subculture commenting on the weirdness of another subculture is always fun. If you had been reading Playground, talking to Russians at Knutepunkt, or just following the buzz on Ars Amandi, the talk didn’t list anything you wouldn’t know (yay body painting and pencil & sharpener methods!). Note to French larpers: we need to talk more about the barbichette method so that it gets added to the official corpus (for some hot man-on-man barbichette action click here). What really hit home for me was the emotional bleed aspect rather the sexual mechanics. For example, when covering Just a little lovin’ , a larp set at time of the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s New-York City gay scene, Jaakko did mention the phallus method used to simulate sex (using a kind of wooden dildo, which he held on the side, towards the hip, as holding it in the front would have been too close to home). But he was very moved by the larp for a whole bunch of very different reasons, and emotion was palpable. This is probably the strongest lesson overall: while we create rules for representing sex for safety reasons, it’s usually the non-sexual content that hits us the hardest, with the most real life consequences.

Hip-Hop Homeopathy

My item! I explained that I love both larp and hip-hop but it was difficult to combine them. So I showcased some of my thinking and prep work for Afroasiatik, a kung-fu hip-hop larp using asian pop culture to entice larpers to join in the peace, unity, love and havin’ fun. My big question was how to get larpers to perform hip-hop acts, and I received awesome advice from the attendees. I highly recommend larp designers to use the KP crowd as a sounding board. These people have a wealth of experience, whether from larp or from other fields, and they are happy to share it. So come up with a cool title, gather them around a table, give them some (sadly, industrial) Swiss chocolate and record the awesomeness that starts flying around the room. You can download my non-self-explanatory slides here: KP2013_HipHopHomeopathy_ThomasB

Warning, if you though the Rant was offensive, some of these French rap video links may make you blush. Or laugh.

The second great safety controversy panel

A continuation of last year’s “we don’t have a clue about safety” panel. Difficult to summarize (and I had to run out for coffee and a sandwich during the break as KP fatigue was kicking), but yes, the discussion is progressing. Probably not fast enough if such debates are only yearly, but it’s better than nothing, and the panelists are still smart, to-the-point people. It was great to see people in the audience challenging words like “de-fucking”, talking about “after care” etc. My favorite part was the fact that the best documented psychological damage done by larp is actually the stress/depression/economic problems encountered by larp organizers for out of game reasons. And on a side note, having organized 360° illusion larps alone, I really, really like the idea of having an organizer only dedicated to welcoming players at the beginning of game, smiling and relaxed because they have absolutely nothing else to do in the game.

Russia Deep Culture larping, talk and demonstration

Alexey Fedoseev presented examples of “culture larps” the russian way, from pervasive larps inspired by Russian literature to this summer’s medieval crusade larp. Just like for the costume drama panel, I love learning about other people’s design goals. What they care about, what they don’t, and how they build the game to obtain the desired effect. And I guess I really like Russian accents in English too. The small game design workshop was fun, the audience split in three groups to design the larp’s Crusaders, Muslim and Byzantine cultures, based on values, stories, and even resolution systems. Thanks a lot to Maria Pettersson for her question on “OK, who will the female characters be and what will they do?”. I usually try to address this by designing genderless characters, but in this case our group had definitely started with a male-centric Crusader concept, so the reality-check was most welcome.

Knutepunkt like a rockstar

No Claus Lebowski cocktail performance this time, but a naked apology for the hurt feelings that may have been caused by the Danish male thing at the Hour of the Rant.

Styx party

A fine night of revelry, chatting and connecting with people dressed in various interpretations of crossing the border between life and death. (Thanks to the mystery larper whose white makeup I borrowed by the way). There was a true KP moment as I went back to my cabin to grab a bottle. I was wearing an 18th century costume from the waist up (including an ugly-ass wig), regular pants and hiking shoes from the waist down. It was cold. I couldn’t close my ruffled shirt because my slit throat latex prosthetic was still oozing fake blood. It was night. Cars were whizzing by on the road between the party and my cabin. I had no light and was all dressed in black. I was running. In the dark. Surrounded by the Norwegian forest. A bottle of hemp-flavored absinthe in hand. And it somehow felt right.

What felt less right overall was the Nords’ relationship to alcohol. I did not encounter aggressive drunks or anything, but I felt people overall were a bit too enthusiastic about the concept of booze. Sure I enjoy drinking, both for the taste of new or complex drinks and for the disinhibition/buzz ethanol provides, but I don’t make a big deal of it. Several Nordic KP attendees on the other hand were talking about alcohol for weeks before the event, what to bring, how, for what price etc. During the event many were still excited like teenagers about their secret stash, their low-quality-but-will-get-you-drunk-fast stuff, how wasted they were going to get.  Commenting on this or that not being strong enough, and just getting overall super excited about the topic. It’s just alcohol. We’re not fifteen anymore, it’s not a controlled substance, it’s fun but honestly doesn’t make us smart or anything. What is fascinating is how the same people that can have a very mature take on larp, a very laidback, zen-like attitude towards alternative sexualities etc, suddenly become giggling teens when it comes to booze. I don’t know if it comes from a prohibition-like environment in the region, from their education, but I sometimes felt like highly civilized daytime Nords were turning into 19-year old American fratboys at night. Am still scratching my head about this.

Sunday

Sundays suck in general, last days of vacation even more so, and this one started fine but just kept going downhill. I freaked out about my boarding pass, missed the closing ceremony, and was so out of it I forgot I was flying to Zürich and not Geneva hence queued in the wrong airline. Sure, made it home safe, but not exactly mentally sound.

So, does love last three years?

Well, Knutepunkt rocked, again.

Yes, I was probably less shocked, had fewer WTF moments than at KP2011 or SK2012. A routine settling in? Am I becoming jaded? Maybe, but also my bullshit detector got better, and the items I attended delivered on what I expected, I managed to better identify my tastes and not just try to take in as much as possible all day, every day. I am turning into some sort of discerning connoisseur and this makes for a less stressful con.

What amazed me in the previous years still did this year: the unique balance between an overall crazy-summer-camp-party atmosphere and the quality of the organization. From program and book committee people to the layout of this year’s program booklet (excellent!) to the buses to the info desk to the tech people, I just felt welcomed by professionals. I know how much work a 60-person, 1-day, no housing convention can be, so I’m just floored by the amount of work put in by the organizers for a con of KP’s scale.

The international nature of the event is still as awesome as before. It’s fun to see faces from remote countries year after year, see them age, their bodies change, their games evolve. Or discover entirely new larp scenes, meeting new people. It’s still fun to hear about weird creative agendas or local physical constraints. On a nationalistic note I was really happy to see the French crew completely hyper, designing larps over breakfast with people they met the day before and even talking English to each other. I repeat. I saw French people talking English to each other in 100% French groups. Now that’s KP magic. And it’s awesome to get an audience willing to listen to both your bragging and questioning moments. Live feedback beats facebook likes and blog comments anytime.

With time the faces become less remote, and this was an entirely new dimension of KP for me. Status can be a bitch, and it’s sometimes hard to start conversations with the “key opinion leaders”, the published people, the people standing on podiums. Not that they’re standoffish or anything but not everyone is  amingling expert, and starting with “I really like what you do” feels a bit awkward. So having larped with them and being introduced by people who already know them really helps. Same goes with the parties. It’s sometimes hard to get to them when they’re hidden in a cabin somewhere, so having a guide really changes the experience. And you get a glimpse at all the behind-the-scenes drama, the gossips, the who-slept-with-who, which actually makes people more human. And human is good.

So I’m still getting thrills from attending KP. Not necessarily from pure larp shock value. But from more varied, sometimes deeper, more meaningful sources.

So yeah, I can’t wait for Knutpunkt 2014.