Knutepunkt 2021 happened at the beginning of October, and some of the talks were posted to the Nordiclarp YouTube channel last week. I watched a couple of them over the weekend, and this thread is for summaries and reaction.
First up:
- This has a one-minute intro, then a bit more of extreme awkwardness, then a lot of IT problems which got in the way of the beginning of the talk, so you can skip the first 3 minutes.
- The “S” word here is “Story” - something which is apparently now a dirty word in NordicLand (which is weird, given how heavy a focus it was in a lot of early Knudebooks).
- To provoke people further, he quotes von Moltke: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces”. Which he frames in larp form as “plot never survives first contact with the players”.
- He promises a talk about “combat narratology” - how GMs introduce plot in real time in response to player actions. Unfortunately he gets distracted talking about larp psychology.
- “Plot” is what GMs do, the pre-planned parts of the larp (events, but also apparently includes world-building and metaphysics)
- “Story” is what happens during the larp. People make story from plot.
- “Narrative” is what happens after the larp, how participants describe and talk about the events afterwards.
- The distraction - on larpers being unreliable narrators due to bleed, imperfect observation, and being caught up in their own story, and then going to on talk about larp pschology and what is going on in our heads when we larp - begins here, and eats the rest of the talk. Which is a shame, because I really want to know more about combat narratology, because that’s actually useful. Our GMs do it, so insights into it could help improve practice or teach people new tricks.