Knutepunkt 2005

[Revontuli]

The European English-language progressive roleplaying event Knutepunkt is coming once again. With perhaps more focus on roleplaying theory than any other convention in the world!

http://knutepunkt.laiv.org/html/index.asp
February 24th-27th, in Norway

Couple of hundred Nordic people, plus dozens of other Europeans, as well as people from the US, Canada, the UK, Russia and Middle East. Come one, come all!

Here's a couple of RPGnet columns by Juhana Pettersson that describe the Knutepunkts this year and the previous:
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/nogood14may04.html
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/nogood04mar03.html
(also related, a larp Juhana and I ran before last year's KP:)
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/nogood05mar04.html

And here's something I wrote about the Nordic scene in general:
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/household02jul04.html

[Ole Peder Giæver]

Knutepunkt 05

Mini-LARPS, sex role debates, war on reality and a gigantic vagina made of cloth were featured during Knutepunkt this weekend.

24-27th of February the Nordic LARP-convention was held at Viubråtan Aktivitetssenter north of Oslo, Norway. The former holiday home of the Oslo Metal and Iron Worker's Union once again resounded with revolutionary voices. Pink plastic flamingos placed in the snow saluted the roughly 200 participants as they arrived Thursday.

There were Swedish art-activists, Finnish theory-heroes, Danish reality-TV stars and a couple of MPs. There were a few Germans, a couple of Russians and one American. There was a power failure. There was a making-a-chain mail-for-your-teddy-bear-workshop, drunkenness in the tavern, theories on how to organize a LARP, seminars on group dynamics and the EUROLARP GRAND PRIX (where four Norwegians saved the national honor and won first price with the song "Tåkefronten"). The same evening the Swedish LARP "Mellan Himmel och Hav" was named as the participant's favorite. There was a hard-boiled dancing session where clothes were shed and the Rage Against the Machine-refrain "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" was shouted, at everything and everyone, until throats were sore. Almost like a summarizing statement.

Healthy and democratic
- It's exiting that there are people here who want to use LARPs for changing the world to the better, says Norwegian Member of Parliament Heikki Holmås (The Socialist Left Party).
  He hosted a talkshow Friday night, in the program event "Live on a Friday Night." Holmås is himself a role-player.
  - When I was small and played tabletop RPGs we were a marginalized little group, but here at Knutepunkt one really sees that there's a great breadth and variety within the role-playing community. People here have all kinds of different views on what LARPs should be like. That there are held debates and these different views are being discussed bears witness of a healthy, democratic process, says Holmås.

Cool cat
Another celebrity guest was the role-playing theoretician John Kim from the United States. Kim has worked on The Threefold Model (1998), which considers different motivations role-players seem to have. He also maintains a massive encyclopedia on the web, listing almost every RPG published. Kim performed at the EUROLARP GRAND PRIX dressed up as a cat, with the song "Memories" from the Lloyd Webber-musical Cats.
  - I love it here, it's all cool.
  - What is your impression of the Scandinavians?
  - They drink a lot, and they're fun. I have a certain celebrity status here, which I don't have in the US. I've written a bunch of stuff on RPGing, and people here are going like: "Oh, are you John Kim?" That rarely happens at US conventions.
  - There are less people LARPing in the US, considering the number of people who live there, and there's less energy. It's not like here at Knutepunkt with professors and reality TV-stars. LARPs in the US are similar to the Nordic ones, but they're more primitive.

Knutepunkt ended Sunday afternoon with a beautiful ceremony that included a cow built out of aluminum foil.

Discussions/feedback about Knutepunkt 2005 : http://forum.laiv.org/forumdisplay.php?f=14 (mostly in English)
The convention's webpage: http://knutepunkt.laiv.org (in English)

(This article was originally published in Norwegian at the organization Hyperion's webpage: //www.n4f.no) (in Norwegian)

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

I received my writer's copy of the KP 2005 journal, "Dissecting Larp", yesterday (I wasn't able to go to the conference itself this year) and read most of it last night.

As far as the contents go, the book seems quite solid. It opens with Eirik Fatland's excellent depiction of the Nordic scene and the elements connected to it. Most of the other articles deal with larp organizing, larp design and the use of role-playing as a medium and/or transformative tool. The approach is definitely more oriented on applied theory. Combined with the far more theoretical articles in  Beyond Role and Play it will in my opinion indeed provide loads of material for the creation of better larps.

The editorial work in the book, however, is utterly atrocious. Some material has apparently been published in pre-peer-review form, some left out, the authors of one article aren't credited for their work, etc. Worst of all, there are the editorial team's own typoes everywhere. Basically it makes a group of dedicated, academically trained game theorists look like a bunch of bumbling idiots who can't even spell correctly - we'll get blamed for the errors the editors added in our work.

After counting out all the editorial flaws (that are absolutely imperative to fix before the electronic version comes out), and my own articles (which I can't judge objectively), I can still recommend the book. There's a lot of material in it that can change the way people both see and create larps. So I strongly suggest taking a look at it now, but not truly judging the contents before a corrected version is available.

-Jiituomas

[matthijs]

Yup, atrocious is the exact word I was thinking of. Someone said something had gone wrong with the editing process, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the material hasn't been edited. There's also some layout trouble - misplaced sections, missing diagrams etc. But the font and layout are still more readable than "Beyond Role & Play".

Lots of good stuff in there, though. Much more practical and directly useful stuff than last time. And some very annoying stuff as well. One or two writers seem to have publish half-baked personal opinions as research-based arguments, which is rubbish.

(And, of course, the book disproves the claims of some Norwegian LARPers that the LARP scene has nothing to gain from interaction with the tabletop RPG scene. References to tabletop RPG theories, theorists and writings are all over the place).

[matthijs]

[Removed double post]

[Eirik Fatland]

Mathijs wrote a review (or rather overview + opinion) of the book, which can be read at rpg.net:
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11152.phtml

.e.