Amount of larps, larpers, roleplaying events in Finland in general has been slowly decreasing for some years now. I’ve edited the Ropecon PR materials, we’re not anymore an event for almost 4000 visitors. In fact, I’ve edited materials twice, as we’re not anymore an event for surely over 3500 visitors. Over 3000 is still great, but decreasing the amount of participants every year is slightly alarming.
Many people have stated their own opinions why this is happening in the scene and more likely what we should do to stop it. And I’m not talking only about Ropecon visitors, if we’d want more of them, we’d simply make our program more anime/manga friendly. But what we really need, is more roleplayers, both larpers and tabletoppers, not participants on that one event.
I think one of the simplest ways to better the scene is to stop the accusation, whose fault is it. It’s not because of humor larps, boring court larps, furry larps or invite-only larps. In fact the accusing is one of the biggest problems. Because if you keep telling what one does is bad, she more likely won’t start doing games you like, but instead stop doing anything. I, for one, can either do humor larps and serious roleplaying conventions, or sit home and dig my nose (metaphorically speaking). And I guess the first one still keeps the scene more alive than the latter one.
So instead of trying to please someone, please yourself. Make games or events you like. May it be 300 player adventure game, minilarpweekend, 5 person immersion for 5 days, hard sci-fi on the second christmas day or what ever pleases you. And talk about it, advertise it. Put it on the (these days often updated!) larp calendar so that everyone will see how wonderful event you’re doing; Even if they couldn’t make it there, they might get inspired and organise their own larp with same themes next month. Make it a facebook event so that people will see that all their friends are going there and enjoy their time when you just sit home playing WoW. It’s not that “someone” should do “something”, it’s not that you should do everything. You just need to do what you do, and a bit more better. And advertise it a bit more. Even if you’re just a player, you can advertise the games you’re going. Hype them a bit more so that others will get interested too. It’s not really that hard. But of course harder than whining or getting depressed about the state of the roleplaying scene. 😉
Heidi larpwise 