Über-Media and Nordic Larping

So I just finished up day one at London's 3rd annual Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Film Forum. So far the event as a whole has been great, and I have Liz Rosenthal and Tishna Molla to thank for inviting me out to take part in all the conference.

The focus of Power to the Pixel is "cross-media" film, a poorly named umbrella term for a variety of audience experiences including traditional linear film content, alternate reality games, pervasive games, trans-media, etc etc. I usually do most of my thinking about video games alone, but it's clear that with both game and film publishers looking for new ways to create end user value, a convergence between the two mediums is already taking place...whatever you want to call that new hybrid thing is up to you (I like "über-media" myself).

Due to one of the talks today I feel the need to correct, or at least to amend my previous post. In my past post The Way of the Superior Avatar I discussed some of the current 'missing links,' preventing video games from having more of a constructive impact. I joked there that the link was not live action role playing or "Larping" for short. With my limited exposure to larping, I tend to imagine it looking something like this:



Clearly a potentially engaging experience, but likely not world view shifting. Fantasy larping like this seems like it would suffer from the same shortcomings as related video games that allow the player to escape rather than engage in any sort of meaningful self discovery process.

A talk today by brutally awesome Swedish participatory media designer Martin Ericsson (pictured left) got me thinking about larping in a new light. The experiences he writes and orchestrates are serious ventures designed to be as thought provoking as they are fun. He also mentioned something about a 72 hour participatory staging of Hamlet, set in a WWII bunker, with a swingers party / hedonism overtones. As Martin said, "What happens in the bunker, stays in the bunker". Sounds interesting to me. This is what he refereed to as Nordic Larping, no "lightning bolt!" here.

What I really liked about the work that Martin is doing is that it seems to blend reality with fiction so that the boundaries between one's identity as a player can become much more complex and nuanced. One such project was entitled "The Truth about Markia," the narrative of which follows a woman's disappearance into a mysterious subculture/alternate reality.



While the story was unfolding it really was not clear to players whether it was real or not. Over the course of the experience participants wound up self-fulfilling a sort destiny, in that they eventually form the very subculture they were trying to uncover. I feel it is through the mixing of truth and fiction that meaning, and a shift in perspective can arise. Even in the final revelation: that none of the story was true, something real (the community) still remains. This is the sort of thinking that would be a welcome addition to the digital online gaming world. Why not create something real and lasting through play.

Keep an eye on Martin and his team at The Company P, no doubt with all the attention he got today they'll be branching outside Sweden's borders very soon.