FRED is ours!

We just won the award for best Edularp 2010 for “The Living Dead” Thanks a lot!

Financial crisis hit the larp sector

“Copper is not made of copper anymore” insider Andrė W. was quoted today at Mittelpunkt.

Week-In Leaks Uncovered

Today we will be witness to scandalous scenes in the Neptunbad

More of MittelPunkt tomorrow, when we’ll be playing an Mini-Edularp (or is it Edu-Minilarp?) on HIV Awareness.

Bad pun

I’m a big fan of puns. Unfortunately the ones I come up are sometimes very bad. So here’s today’s bad pun: expect some Week-In-Leaks. *cough* Heading off to Cologne now to get some Kölsch and meet with MittelPunkt participants. Yeehaaaw! Or Alaaf as the natives say.

Mittel.Punkt – 5 years after

When we started MittelPunkt in 2006 it was just an experiment. Some people already wanted to get something like Knutepunkt started for some time and together we just pulled it off. Though the number of participants will seemingly be getting more and more over the years, we weren’t that many (as far as I remember, around 25 people). There was a total 14 program items – including the (at that point already traditional) medieval dance workshop.

But never the less, the concept worked and especially the “word-of-mouth” marketing – since MittelPunkt happened the day before the increasingly boring Mittellande meeting and in the same venue, people really had something to talk about. The all-favorite cocktail bar probably helped and Taisias “LARP in Russia” lecture did its part as well. Steel swords, you must be kidding???

We got the assignment to make it bigger the next year and at the same time as the yearly meeting. For the first time in years the number of attendees went up again.

So now it’s 5 years later and MP is still there. Bigger, better, more fun? You decide.

Eläytyminen or the Art of Escapism

Recently I’ve been re-reading – or sometimes reading for the first time – articles in the Knutepunkt books. There really is a wealth of knowledge, Larp history and opinions in there. In Germany we never really had an “age of manifestos” and somehow I got a bit jealous. People who know me know that I like provocation; it’s part of my communication tools. Like blasting the contrast on a screen or TV to the max setting – it’s not prettier, but you certainly get a, well, more contrasted picture. I enjoyed reading on Dogma 99 and Interaction (Gade, 2003), but the Turku manifesto and it’s Vow of Chastity (Pohjola 2003) is where the real fun starts for me.

Pojohlas writing style is provocative in the best possible manner. By reading the foreword, manifesto and comments on the Turku school you get a glimpse of what was going on in the Nordic countries in those years. People probably had very lively, erm, discussions.

For example:

“Eläytyjist (finnish: immersionist) role-playing is the best currently existing method for creating experiences and emotions, and allow you to see things from a truly personal point of view.”

Wow. What he’s basically saying is that immersion IS roleplaying. That is chuzpe. Though, in a certain sense, I do agree: To me immersion is at least the essence of roleplay.

Another thing I found “hidden” a bit deeper in the text is the following sentence:

“Although this, like television, is often used as a substitute for life or to allow some people to have any feelings at all, it can be much more.”

It’s a really interesting point he makes. Although he’s actually watering down the argument that “immersion is best”, but it explains something that bothered me for some time. If immersion is the highest possible form of roleplaying, the essence of roleplaying so to speak, how can it be that it’s just another form of escapism?

Isn’t that something bad, lower-classish, non-elitist, unstylish? Well, to me, it is – and at the same time it’s not.

It’s just like any other media – newspapers, websites, books, movies, music, tv or radio programs. There’s good and bad, intellectually challenging, lower-class entertainment, artsy-fartsy, cheap, glamorous, whatever. LARP is the canvas, immersion is the colors, you’re painter, model and spectator at the same time.

Paint me some porn, please.