I just finished Knudepunkt, the yearly larp convention. Was this the best one I’ve attended? It might have been. I’m exhausted, my sleeping schedule is all screwed up, and I can feel the very beginning of con drop starting to settle in. But I reconnected with a bunch of old friends, made some new ones, and felt for the first time like I really balanced the talks/parties/sleep triangle without feeling like I missed anything significant.¹

It’s useful to compare this with the 2022 iteration, because I didn’t have a particularly great time at that one. And it’s a little weird, because I think 2022 was better organized.² But it really all comes down to the venue. Last year’s was in a loud, vast, echoing conference hall which was great for attending talks but wretched for relaxing and talking to people, which is really the main attraction of KP. And when there were parties happening, they threw off enough noise that I couldn’t handle it. The venue this year had plenty of soft couches and chairs to lounge around on and some bizarrely good sound isolation; I could hang out just outside the entrance to the big dance party and chat with people, which wasn’t remotely possible last year.

I do miss the room parties. The last few years have featured venues separated from the hotel, which means you couldn’t wander the halls looking for people celebrating in their rooms. It used to be possible to hop around like that all night, going from manic vibes to chill ones as your mood dictated. It was one of the best parts of KP. They’ve tried to replicate it by letting people schedule and host hour-long events but it no longer has that impromptu vibe. They can be great³ but they aren’t a suitable replacement.

This year’s KP was only eight months after the last one,⁴ and while I’d be happy with two a year carrying on in perpetuity it would probably exhaust most of the organizers and many of the participants. The next one’s in April. I’m leaving with a kind of mellow, buzzy vibe from everyone I’ve seen and the hint of a bunch of projects which might get kicked off in the next few months.⁵ I’ll be coasting on that for a while. My flight’s out later tonight, so I’m spending my final day in Copenhagen gently hanging out with friends.⁶ And then I’ll just have to settle in for the wait until next year, when Finland hosts their Solmukohta.

Next: Sofia (SOF) to Vienna (VIE)
Prev: Tórshavn (FAE) to Copenhagen (CPH)

Footnotes

¹ This is a lie — there was too much going on to not miss something — but it at least feels that way.

² Because organizer duties rotate between the host countries, there’s very little continuity in the organization team from year to year. Even within countries the four-year gap between hosting duties means the teams rarely remain the same. It’s frustrating, attending as long as I have, seeing the conference evolve while the teams running it churn and stagnate. Every one seems to start from scratch and as a result it feels they often repeat the same mistakes or find fresh new ones.

This year the schedule wasn’t posted online — it was only available in a badly-organized PDF — and it wasn’t updated as events changed. You had to go to the main hall which had one printed out on the wall, and by the end of the event it had acquired dozens of annotations with last-minute updates. They also didn’t list what events had participant limits so you’d end up planning around something only to discover you were shut out.

Maybe worst of all, this was the first time in 20 years there wasn’t an accompanying book. This is a community which prides itself on documentation, and skipping the book feels tantamount to a dereliction of duty. But there was a talk driving home this point far better than I can, so I’ll leave it at that.

³ One was so exclusive nobody was invited. Everyone had to figure out a way to sneak in.

⁴ The 2021 event was moved to the autumn due to COVID, and 2022 was as well. This year moved it back.

⁵ I’m mulling yet another larp idea which I may or may not manage to put a team around. There’s a couple tech projects with at least a little momentum behind them. And maybe the most interesting suggestion was to start a group for handling larp tech needs more generally, with a goal to run a hackathon before next year’s KP.

I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm about these things, and it’s entirely possible nothing will happen on any of these fronts. But hope springs eternal.

⁶ I’d probably prefer to be on my own, given the social overload of the weekend, but I’m going to be alone for the next month so it seems wise to get as much time in with people as possible.