Cherish the joy, you keep bringing it into my life

We accidentally found out on a dinner table of Knudepunkt, that Fabe, who was sitting on the same table, was studying at The Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki, but she hasn’t participated even on one larp in Finland, because they’re all in finnish. And of course many larps have characters that one might play even without speaking finnish, but it’s impossible to find out which they are and what are the themes and genres of those games.

I guess idea of putting english summaries at the end of each event would be nice, but too much work as I usually don’t even bother to correct misspelling and bad structuring while updating calendar. (I say it’s because I wanna people to get a realistic view on each game, but it’s also laziness.

So either it could be put on the line of “This would be nice to see happening someday, maybe someone should do a wiki page, but before that we can start arguing what wiki we should use”-projects, or make it happen with the resources we have.

And the resource we always have, is Facebook. So there it is, Larps Looking for International Audience. Massi has already been spamming the link everywhere today, but if you haven’t yet bumped into it, there it is. Use it, like it, share it. And share your games there, or I’ve used that half an hour this morning for nothing.

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If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.

If I wouldn’t use stupid lyrics on topic, I would have named this Read more! But as I am, I use some lyrics from the another brick in the wall. It’s the song that goes with “we don’t need no education” and so on. As Pink Floyd is wrong and everyone would need some education. Or at least some new ideas to open their eyes.

As most of you didn’t know, Knudepunkt 2011 put out three books this year. Think Larp is about theory and academic stuff, the things you might want to use when you do your bachelor degree or master’s thesis. Yes, some of them are boring, some of them are not easily understandable, but they’re there for a reason. They’re part of the academic research that we simply need to make our little hobby look good in the eyes of adults and to let it evolve.

Do Larp is much more interesting. It tells about larps that have been organized. It gives you ideas. As nobody will never know, if you steal an idea for a character or event or whatever from a danish larp organized some years ago (except if you tell it to them yourself). So it is something that people who organize larps should read. Maybe it won’t change a thing. Your games are already perfect. Or maybe you will remember some of that stuff when you’re organizing your next game and think would something fit there. It’s pretentious to say that nothing influences you that you made all that amazing stuff just out of your head. Maybe it’s movies, maybe it’s books. But other larps can inspire your larps as well, so I would suggest anyone to read or at least browse through it. At least you know then if it has nothing to give to you.

Talk Larp is something I would vote even those read who don’t make larps, just sit on a bar and talk about them, whine about them, gossip about them. Not all points are valid from my perspective, and as I stated on Facebook, it was too much with Stop!, Not! Don’t! and Fuck! but still most of the texts gave me some thoughts. First I thought I should just recommend some of them to some of my friends like “hey you, you should really read this, because you’ve been giving lectures about same subject”, but then again, no. Those articles are so short that you can even print the whole book and read it in a toilet in a week.

How ever there’s a couple of articles I might have to recommend. Start with Berner’s Stop Crying. And if you’re planning after reading Do Larp stealing some of those ideas, I’m not holding anything against you, but maybe you should read J.Tuomas’s You’re not that Brilliant before doing it. 🙂

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