This, in a nutshell, summarizes the weirdness around my life these days. I spent 30 days where, barring a single day where I met a friend for dinner, I spent the time alone.¹ This past week I’ve spent every day with friends, culminating in a weekend spent with 600 people, of which I knew about half.

This is emotional whiplash on a grand scale. A massive serotonin overload. A total resetting of my mental fusebox. I guess if I’m not going to live near friends and that means I see them every couple of months rather than a couple times a week, this is one way to make do.

I’m in Denmark for Knudepunkt, the yearly larp convention held in the Nordic countries. It’s a highlight of the year for a lot of people — one of my friends referred to it as “Christmas for larpers” — and it’s a really intense three days of talks and workshops and games and hallway discussions and parties. You can go and just attend academic presentations. You can go and just spend all your time wandering around getting dragged into discussions about larp design and theory. You can go and just dance and drink all night in various rooms set up to look like discotheques.

Most people end up doing some combination of all three. I had pitched a talk some months ago so I gave a presentation.² I also co-hosted a discussion I agreed to following up on something from last year, and shortly after arriving I had been asked to join a panel discussion so I spent a semi-terrifying two hours on stage staring into klieg lights trying to seem like I knew what I was talking about.³

Knudepunkt has, weirdly, a reputation both for being incredibly inhospitable for beginners and for being very welcoming. I suppose it depends on how you approach it. I think I got a little lucky; I started attending it long before I really knew who anybody was⁴ and so I never felt like I was trespassing places I hadn’t earned a right to be. And I think the community puts a real effort into making it as friendly as possible. It’s one of the nicest things about the community really; I’m not quite sure why,⁵ but I’ve always found it much easier to feel like a part of the group, even from the very first game I attended over here.

And this year I really felt like I was a more integral part of the community, in a way I hadn’t before. I think I hit a critical mass — I knew enough people, had enough conversations, made enough connections that when I showed up I had lots of people seek me out and invite me into conversations. That made it feel, well, a lot like coming home.

The whole week was a nice transition away from being alone in India. There’s a huge difference between getting off an airplane and heading to a hotel, versus heading to friend’s place. And Copenhagen is especially nice, since the train system is so well-integrated into the airport; I literally walked off the plane, walked out of the terminal to the train station, and boarded a direct train to Odense. Granted, I was terrified I had bought the wrong ticket during the whole thing, but it all worked out.⁶

One of the particularly nice things about Knudepunkt is that it’s preceded by “A Week In” where the host city⁷ invites people to arrive early and hang out. It’s a great chance to see cities you wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see, and to have locals show you around. It also gives a great chance to ease into the convention; rather than arrive in the middle of 600 incredibly intense larpers you get a chance to hang out with smaller groups, meeting people in small batches and gradually seeing more and more people, only to work your way up to the crowds. It’s great.

In my case, I had a friend who insisted I stay with them. As it turns out I was still recovering from being sick all January, so the first half of my week was spent popping antibiotics and going to social gatherings only to beg off early and crash at home. And honestly, that was fine. I had more-or-less recovered by midweek,⁸ and even before that I was able to see the Odense Zoo and go to the street food market and meet friends for dinner a couple times.

Of course, these things can’t and don’t last forever. The final party was Sunday night, and everybody managed to stumble through the closing ceremonies on Monday and head back to wherever they came from. I crashed with a friend in Copenhagen⁹ Monday night, and shoved myself into a taxi for a ride to the airport.

Next stop is Toronto, where I know some people, although I don’t have solid plans of anything to do other than survive the con drop. And after that a brief stopover in the United States, and then I’m off, once again alone for a month, to see if I’ve learned anything from the past six weeks.

Next: Toronto (YYZ) to Boston (BOS)
Prev: Dubai (DXB) to Copenhagen (CPH)

Footnotes

¹ Alone in crowds, granted, although in a lot of ways that’s a more isolating experience

² Note to future self: 10am is not a good time slot. Everyone will still be sleeping.

³ The topic was “The Americanization of Nordic Larp” and it went surprisingly well, especially since I don’t have a lot of opinions on the topic. Maybe because I don’t have a lot of opinions on the topic. I have been around the scene during the big uptick in American attendees of European larps, and I’ve been watching various larps in the United States launch with various ambitions towards Nordic design goals, so it could be that’s enough to be able to speak knowledgeably about the topic without being incredibly invested in any particular interpretation.

⁴ To a rather surprising extent my reputation in this community, to the extent that I have one, largely rests on having a tendency to show up a lot of different places.

⁵ I highly suspect that larp (especially Nordic Larp) relies on such high levels of trust and cooperation that the communities which form around it naturally incorporate those principles. Or maybe it’s just a European thing.

⁶ Compare to my train ride the last time I was in the United States, where I had to get off the plane, catch the “AirTrain” to a subway, catch the subway to Penn Station, and then get on the train that would take me to Philadelphia. I do not believe I would have managed it if I hadn’t lived in New York for a decade.

⁷ Or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof. This year KP was held in Vejen, population ~10,000, so “A Week In” was held in Odense with about 20𝗑 the population.

⁸ Although that didn’t stop me from panicking and rushing off to see a doctor midweek. They figured I just needed to rehydrate and give it time. So I gave it time.

Again, and I hate to keep harping on this, but the cost for me to see a doctor in Denmark, without insurance, is the same as the cost to see a doctor in the United States, with insurance.

⁹ I am still annoyed that after year-after-year of running Thursday through Sunday, this year without fanfare they moved the dates to Friday through Monday. I booked a flight out Monday, and I wasn’t the only one. so I had to reschedule my flight to Tuesday at the last minute. It wasn’t cheap.