Covering news and events on the nordic role-playing scene
The pervasive game Sanningen om Marika is now the winner of an
international interactive Emmy award!
The joint The company P and Svt participation drama Sanningen om Marika eng. The Truth about Marika did a grand slam in Cannes and just took home an Emmy in the best interactive television service class.
Amazing is a word I would like to use to describe this recent event.
Updates with details will follow!
Freefall is a larp festival in Helsinki during the week before larp conference Solmukohta. The festival features four days (March 31 to April 3) of short and sweet larps that can be played in a day with little preparation. If you are curious about larp and want to experience nordic style larp the Freefall festival is definately the place to be. Roleplaying and art meet and techniques from many fields are used to bring out the best in short larps.
The whole programme has just been posted to the Freefall Livejournal, and includes everything from violent plastic cups, sad dates and train rides in Italy to war councils and neolithic tribes.
This has been posted as a note in the post about System Danmarc III, but deserves it’s own headline:
The organizers of System Danmarc II have posted the trailer, end film and behind the scenes documentary from System Danmarc II online. These were previously avaliable only on the game DVD.
System Danmarc II was a larp held in Denmark in 2005 about a political system where C-class citizens who could not support themselves where dumped in C-sector areas by a State system that was not fascist but still incompetent when it comes to a reasonable distribution of resources in a rich society. It was a cyberpunk larp set in a small city built from freight containers in central Copenhagen, and at the same time a very strong comment on society today.
Take a moment to have a look at this fantastic documentation.
One of the most rewarding things that can happen to a larp organizer is when your participants really believe in your project. Especially so when you’re organizing something in an unforgiving genre with a long track-record of failures and half-handed organizing, such as the Post-Apocalyptic genre. Most larps in this category, at least here in Sweden, tend to be rather cliché, with stereotypical worlds and visions, with esthetics pulled right from Mad Max and Tank Girl. Say post apocalyptic larp and people almost always think about teenagers with oversized guns, leather trenchcoats, gasmasks, spiked hair, mutants, canned foods and anarchy. It’s all very cool and movie-like, but not very creative. And when you serve clichés, it’s hard to get participants. Many PA-larps cave in and get cancelled because there is low interest among larpers for these kinds of larps.
Therefor, it’s very exciting to see the developments of our own post-apocalyptic larp Ingenmansland. During the initial planning we were pessimistic and hoped for 150 participants by May, with a theretical maximum of 220 participants. In the middle of february we had to close the door on new participants since we had allready filled our maximum of 220 participants (which grew to 240 participants counting organizers and functionaries). We have swedes, norwegians, danes and even germans coming the larp. We are now in the enviable position of having almost a hundred people who want to participate but can’t, unless we decide to open up new slots for participants (which in turn depends on our ability to provide living quarters, character coaching, props and logistics).
Why this sudden and overwhelming interest in the post apocalyptic larp genre? Without sounding cocky, I think it is because we’ve managed to get people to believe in our project in all its aspects: the fiction, the logistics of the larp, the competence of the organizers, the budget etc. And one other important factor: we’ve reached a “critical mass” of highly active, creative and skilled participants who help create our larp, both on the fictional and the logistical levels. We’re truly blessed with excellent participants.
We’ve believed in this from the start, and the recent developments prove it: people don’t want clichés. People want something different, something that, on the whole, feels realistic and believable while at the same time being escapist enough to warrant actually larping it. You don’t have to go full-out avant-garde neo-dramaturgic free-form high-level larp to attract larpers (odds are you won’t), but a simple rethink on genre-specific stereotypes might bring very rewarding results. If you believe in it, your participants will believe in it.
More information and links can be found at The company P blogpost. (update by Andie)
Last year The Company P (of Prosopopeia 2 fame) created a crossmedia event called Sanningen om Marika pervasively combining larp, internet and television drama.
The tv series was jointly produced with the Swedish Public Broadcasting Company SVT. The idea was that the tv show would be a dramatization of actual game-related events, and work as a kind of world book for the roleplaying and provide clues for all the community-based riddle solving going on in blogs, forums and irl.
Anyways, Sanningen om Marika is now nominated for an International Emmy Award for best Interactive Tv Service. All the other candidates are English language shows: Doctor Who Interactive, Emmerdale, and Spooks Interactive.
I’ve always said Nordic larp know-how is something great and unique, but recognition like this was not what I was expecting!
Interactive Emmy press release
I’m designing a larp called Katvealue to be played in the Finnish Museum of Fine Art (Ateneum) and the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art (Kiasma).
The larp is part of the project Art Museum of the Future. The research question of the larp is if larp can experiment with new ways of being in a museum and experiencing both the works and the space itself. The fiction of the larp is still top secret, but has to do with art, as well.
The game is designed by artist Oona Tikkaoja, art historian Henna Kontusalmi and myself. It is produced by us in collaboration with the national art museums.
Katvealue will be played in Ateneum on April 23rd, and then in Kiasma on May 22nd. The name of the game means either Dead Zone or Shade.
The larp “New Voices in Art” has been admitted to Nisjelandet , the art section of the music festival By:Larm taking place in Oslo 21 - 23 February. New Voices in Art will be played at Hausmansgt. 27 (enter from Torggata) from 18 - 20 on Friday the 22nd.
New Voices in Art is a short larp about a group of aspiring artist the night before the opening of the exhibition ‘New Voices in Art’. The participants play a version of themselves as aspiring artists. The main themes of this game are ambition, ambivalence and aloneness. The world of modern art is used as a setting to symbolize our yearning for success and fulfillment as creative individuals. Each participant is randomly given a piece of art for the duration of the game that is their work contribution to this exhibition. New Voices in Art has previously been played in Oslo and at Knudepunkt in Denmark in 2007.
One aim of Nisjelandet is to show a selection of distinct forms of cultural expressions being shared with others through the internet. New Voices in Art as well as some other games are freely available at Chambergames.
Ingenmansland is a large post apocalypse scenario in mid-sweden, outside Örebro. The location is an abandoned mine called Stråssa (some pictures here) where a group of survivors have settled in a sort of communist inspired village. Everyone is a citizen, except for the Diggers who take their rag-tag vehicles into the various danger Zones to find scrap and other valuable leftovers from civilization. At the time of writing there are 109 Citizen players and 40 diggers. You can still sign up to play a Citizen of Östbacken, as the settlement is called
Below is a game trailer in swedish. The scenario has an extensive website at ingenmansland.com with charachter profiles and an active forum. If you have never been to a larp before you can expect lots of support and good group play since every charachter has a profession and belongs to a group of fellows in that profession. The game will be played mainly in swedish. International players are welcomed but not really planned for from the start, but it is very easy to get in contact with the organizers at the game forum to work out the details of how you could fit into the game.
Russia 1964.
21 years after the defeat at the hands of the German, and the world is a bleak place. And this is exactly why it’s the setting for our pseudo-historical larp “The Motherland”, which is about 50 Russian soldiers at a secret training camp in Siberia.
It’s 100% English-language, it’s in Denmark and more info can be found at www.clausraasted.dk/motherland
System Danmarc II was a live role-playing scenario set in a perhaps not so distant future where Europe had been united into the System, a super state dividing its citizens into classes based on wealth and ability to support oneself. The System was not fascist or purposefully brutal - it wanted to help you. If you would just stop screwing up and show some good spirit.
As a C-class citizen you were not locked up, but the only place you were welcome was the c-sector where you could get a place to live, food and some money off the System welfare programme. In the C-sector there was also entertainment, a fairly free flow of drugs and not much to do but fuck up your life some more. It’s all about riot control, eh? And keeping the streets clean for the A- and B-class citizens who earned the right not to be bothered by trash like you.
The C-sector was represented by a town built from freight containers in a square in central Copenhagen, inhabited by about 300 people. A documentary with interviews with (real) Danish politicians and homeless people shown at the end of the scenario indicated that the ideology depicted in the game might not be so far from today as you might think. You can read a review and game story from System Danmarc II, and read all the rest about it at the System Danmarc II game website.
System Danmarc III aims to explore the theme of refugees and their situation. Th
e initial idea: the game will be a three day march towards a hope of security northward, but not much is known in a future Europe torn apart by economic collapse and war.
The game will take place in May 2009, a year and a half from now. Now is the time to get involved if you want to be part of making this Amnesty International, Red Cross and Danish Refugee Help supported project real.
First workshop, 26th January 2008
There will be a first workshop on the 26th of January, 2008 in Copenhagen, kicking off the project and locking in on the vision through brainstorming, talking and making plans. This is where you can make yourself a part of the production.
After this workshop, four groups will be formed to work on plans for different parts of organizing the scenario:
– Game design (stories, events, group descriptions and more)
– Scenography (living conditions, transport and more)
– PR (organising communication with player group leaders, players and press)
– Logistics (location, fundraising, budget, cooperation, partners and more)
Second workshop, 24-25 May 2008
A final workshop (24-25 may, 2008, Copenhagen) will bring together all the plans and groups to form a common understanding of how the scenario can be made. A complete project plan is put together and a year of production gets it’s kickoff.
If you are interested in participating in System Danmarc III as a player, mark May 2009 in your calendar right now. If you want to be part of making it happen, get in touch with the organizers right now!
It’s all happening at the project webpage. It’s in danish, but if you don’t speak danish you can help out anyway, just get in touch. The game itself will most probably be played in several of the nordic languages and in english when needed.
System Danmarc III
http://www.munthe-kaas.dk/systemdanmarc
<Edit Mathias Kromann Rode>
Thank you Andie for posting!
We’ve just uploaded a rip of the movies from the DVD about System Danmarc II. It’s a really god way to get to know about the project fast.
The movies can be found here; http://www.mkromann.dk/stash/sdc_dvdrip/sdc_dvdrip.html
Andie Nordgren
Sweden
Claus Raasted
Denmark
Eirik Fatland
Norway
Mike Pohjola
Finland
Gabriel Widing
Sweden
Bjarke Pedersen
Denmark
Peter Andreasen
Denmark
Mathias Kromann Rode
Denmark
Anna Westerling
Sweden
Martin Ericsson
Sweden
Axel Löfving
Sweden
Sebastian Utbult
Sweden
Staffan Jonsson
Sweden
Matthijs Holter
Norway
Håken Lid
Norway
Petter Karlsson
Sweden
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