I’ve spent the last week in Linköping for Knutpunkt, the Nordic Larp Convention¹. I’ve written about KP before; this is the last of two that got bumped to the autumn as a result of COVID, meaning the next one in 2023 will be happening in the spring again. Having only seven months until the next even feels like incredible good fortune, like Santa forgetfully stopped twice at your house to drop off Christmas presents.²

I came in early enough to give a presentation at the Nordic Larp Talks titled The Ethics of Storytelling and it went very well.³ It was a nice transition into the convention proper. And I have to say, the energy going into KP was just amazing.

There was a Ukrainian contingent who gave a sobering presentation on their larp community during wartime. I attended a number of interesting panels on design. I pitched an idea I had for a portal for new players to a number of organizers which was pretty well received, and subsequently got pulled into an even more ambitious project which I’m very hopeful makes some headway.⁴

And of course a lot of my friends from the United States were able to attend, unlike the previous year.⁵ All of which is to say the first night and first full day of KP were nearly perfect. Of course, it didn’t last. Great things rarely do.

You might think, at a convention entirely devoted to experience design, that the organizers would have the convention experience on lock. And for all of the fiddly details that make these things a nightmare to plan, the basic experience is rather straightforward: hotel rooms and food for everybody, spaces during the day for talks and presentations and workshops and larps, spaces during the evening for parties and dancing and hanging out.

Weirdly, though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It could be that the act of rotating through Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway means the institutional knowledge isn’t as robust as you might expect — there’s a different organizing team for each country, so each team has roughly a quarter the knowledge they’d otherwise have — or maybe there’s a willingness to experiment that not infrequently backfires.⁶

This year, the innovation was having a separate hotel and convention center.⁷ The locations were about a seven minute walk away from each other. That sounds close but it’s really not ideal; they were far enough away from each other that you couldn’t easily sneak back to your room for a half-hour nap or pick up some costume pieces for your cabaret act between talks. But there was a peculiar interaction between the distance and KP culture that made it a dreadful choice.

KP is well known for its parties.⁸ There were a ton of parties scheduled at the convention center from 9pm to 1am, mostly raucous affairs with loud music and flashing lights and lots of sweaty crowds dancing with exuberance. Many people — most people, I imagine — would point to this as one of the best things about KP.

And it absolutely is, unless you’re neurodivergent and tend to dissociate when you’re around loud music and flashing lights and lots of sweaty crowds for too long. I actually like having those kind of parties around, because I can kind of loiter around the edges of them for 10 minutes picking up all that energy and then wander off someplace quiet to hang out and talk to people for an hour before circling back.

But those spaces were really all there was. There weren’t any quiet, inviting spaces to escape to at the convention center.⁹ The quiet, inviting spaces were back at the hotel, which was practically abandoned, since everyone was at the parties in the convention center.

In all the previous KPs I’ve attended¹⁰ this just wasn’t an issue. People were constantly running room parties as a way of counter-programming what was happening in the official spaces. You could swing through the dance floors then wander up through the room block and find something smaller and more subdued to cool off for a while before heading back. Even if you didn’t find anything you could crash in your room for a bit and head back out. Or just dim the lights in your room, put on some soothing music, and crack a bottle of wine. You’d have people hanging out in no time.

Here your choices were the sensory overload of the convention center or being completely alone in the hotel. The hotel scene did pick up around 2am once everyone cleared out of the convention center, but even then it was this massive influx of people who were completely wired up and wanted to keep the party going. There may have been more relaxed room parties happening somewhere, if you even wanted to be up past 2am, but without any way of knowing where they were you were out of luck.¹¹

I had stocked up on a couple of nice bottles of alcohol in duty free on my way to Stockholm, assuming I’d be swinging through a number of parties.¹² I had intended to hit the social scene harder than I have in past years. And I found out the organizers had managed to design a KP in which you literally could not find a room party in the hotel at midnight if you were looking for one. I left most of the alcohol undrunk; I simply couldn’t take it on the airplane.¹³

I don’t know if the organizers simply didn’t think through the implications of their choices or if they understood and decided it was the least bad of a lot of bad options. But it hurts to find a space you previously found warm and welcoming has become hostile and inhospitable. I was alone and depressed in my room in the middle of the biggest convention in the larp world. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible before last weekend.

I’m now sitting on the floor of Schiphol Airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Newcastle upon Tyne. I would have liked to stay later, taken the train to Stockholm and hung out with friends for the night, but I was supposed to be meeting a friend in Newcastle. Joke’s on me; my friend had to cancel at the last minute. Such is life.

Truthfully, I can probably use a couple days alone. KP is always a massive overload, social and otherwise, and I need a little time to recover. I’m spending roughly another week in the UK and then I’m flying off to the United States — always a fraught trip, these days — before returning to Europe.

I guess KP is always a work in progress. Every year I know more people, find more friends, make more connections. I’m still learning how to navigate it, six years after my first one. I’m looking forward to the next one. Maybe that’s the one I’ll get exactly right.

Next: London (LHR) to New York City (JFK)
Prev: London (LGW) to Stockholm (ARN)

Footnotes

¹ That’s Nordic (Larp Convention), not (Nordic Larp) Convention, although the distinction has been a little blurry at times.

² We deserve it, after waiting 2½ years between KP 2019 and KP 2021.

³ Someone approached me afterwards wanting to share it with their class and asking if I had written anything else about the topic. It was the nicest thing anyone could have said.

⁴ I’m not holding my breath yet — it’s easy to get people excited over a big idea and much harder, a week later, to get people excited about actually doing the work to make it happen — but it seems to have the right mix of people and enough momentum to actually get something off the ground.

⁵ It was a weird Norwegian political bureaucracy thing with COVID passports. Now, of course, no one cares about COVID passports at all. It’s been a weird year.

⁶ KP on a boat, from 2016, is often pointed to as a failed experiment.

⁷ I’ve been reminded that three years ago at KP there was a separate hotel and convention space, but it didn’t feel that way, at least in part because they were kind of off by themselves. And the space was big enough to run all the room parties in the main hall.

⁸ If I had to put incredibly rough numbers to it, I’d guess about ⅓ of people come for the talks and the networking, about ⅓ come for the parties, and about ⅓ are there for both. But just about everybody does a little bit of everything.

⁹ This was exacerbated by the Swedish alcohol laws, which forbade bringing your own alcohol to the convention center. So even if you found a quiet corner, you’d be forced to head back and wait through a long line for another drink rather a lot.

¹⁰ Which is starting to be rather a lot; I’ve been to every one since 2016.

¹¹ There were rooms one could reserve for parties at the hotel; I borrowed the keys to one and had a small get-together for people from 22:30 to 23:30 on the final night. That was okay; I had a great conversation with a few of the others who were back at the hotel. But it’s a sign of how dreadfully unpopulated the hotel was that neither the person who reserved the room at 23:30 nor the person who reserved the room at 00:30 even bothered to turn up.

¹² You are rarely unwelcome at a KP room party, particularly if you show up with a bottle of Kraken rum.

¹³ I’m guessing most of it got ravished by the partiers who arrived after I went to bed.