Solmukohta¹ is the Finnish edition of the yearly Nordic Larp convention I’ve been attending since 2016. I couldn’t miss it. This year’s was held in Tampere, a small city about a 1½ hour train ride north of Helsinki. I got in on the Monday, so I was there for the whole week leading up to the convention, which enabled me to attend a larp on Tuesday and the Nordic Larp Talks on Wednesday.²

I had rented an AirBnB with friends for the time before the convention and I should have made the time to tour Tampere more. There’s a Moomin museum and a game museum, both well-regarded and well within my interests. But I only managed to trek out north of Tampere to see an earthwork sculpture.³ And suddenly Sulmukhota was starting.

Sometimes these things are raucous, sometimes they’re jittery, sometimes they’re joyous, sometimes they’re soothing.⁴ This one, for me, felt pretty chill. There were no major issues with the hotel, or the convention rooms. The food was decent. The weather was mild. The hotel had a sauna.⁵ After a rough year of travel, it was good to see everyone again.

And just as soon as it started, it was ending. It’s always too short, even if you come in a few days early to hang out, even if you leave a few days later following the stragglers. It’s a small, intense dose of the amorphous community I’m always chasing. And if I still don’t quite feel like I really belong — I’d need more late night debates in small groups, more chance meetings in hallways that turn into hour-long conversations, to feel completely at home — it’s about as close as I ever get.

The larp I played before the convention was 3 AM Forever, produced by Participation Design Agency, the same company responsible for End of the Line and Inside Hamlet. It’s set during the afterparty of a production at a not-particularly-good theater called the Orpheus. The productions at the Orpheus are typically avant-guard and incomprehensible but the afterparties are legendary: excessive and debauched and licentious. This is because the theater sits close to the fairy realm; unbeknownst to humans the fae take turns manipulating the attendees, pushing them to greater heights of ecstasy and madness. Think Studio 54 without the budget but with amoral creatures of myth running the DJ booth and you’ve got the general vibe.

This may strike you as less of a larp than a flimsy excuse to throw a bacchanal and that’s not entirely wrong. But that’s missing the point. There isn’t a distinction between the larp and the party. The larp is the party. The game is more about the embodied experience than the narrative. You could compare it to a movie like Lost in Translation or 1917.⁶ The story is far less important than immersing yourself in the sensory experience.

I knew, going in, the game probably wasn’t going to work particularly well for me. To start with the larp only ran for about 4½ hours. I really need longer to find a character. The play is also almost entirely centered around a dance floor with loud thumping music and lots of smoke and flashing lights, which is generally just terrible for my ADD.⁷ Plus I just don’t dance.⁸ But I’m more than willing to play along and the game wasn’t full so I wasn’t blocking anyone else from attending. I’m glad I signed up.

The action starts with the three-hour play⁹ having just finished. There’s some applause for the actors and a couple speeches by the principals of the theater, and then the doors are opened, the crowds waiting outside rush in,¹⁰ and the music starts. Within an hour the dance floor was starting to get crowded, and by the end of the evening everyone was jammed on there.

There really wasn’t any plot to speak of. Characters weren’t especially interconnected, by design, so while you might be a part of the much-better-funded-theater-ensemble-across-town group or the hostile and bitter critic’s circle or the wastrels and party people, you mostly had an archetype and a half-hour to come up with some intragroup drama during the workshops. I got the character of the play’s director, so I had a fun time at the beginning of the game with people coming up to me and talking out their ass about how great it was, and a fun time at the end of the game with people coming up to talk about how they really felt.

Things ramped up quickly. They had to, since you had just four hours to complete whatever it was you had decided to do for the game. That’s primarily what the supernatural elements were there for; some of the characters were secretly fae and could heighten your emotional state or force you to make bad decisions.¹¹ There was plenty of (mimed) sex and plenty of (ersatz) drugs, but the actual level of debauchery wasn’t particularly worse than I can recall from any number of high-school dances I attended with inattentive chaperones.¹²

The party was sufficiently contagious that even I got sucked into the dancefloor once or twice, briefly, the last time memorably to fire one of the actors involved in the production.¹³ But I ultimately didn’t find a character arc to pay off in the final act. It was fun anyway, but would it have been more fun if I had found one? Would it have been more meaningful? Why do we play these games, anyway?

Most larps rely heavily on emergent narrative, the kind of stories that aren’t explicitly written in at the start.¹⁴ Part of the power of those stories comes from being able to craft one for yourself, not knowing what’s going to happen moment by moment until you reach it and see. And since you’re making those decisions at the same time everyone else in the game is, the possible stories keep shifting. Maybe you’ll reconcile with your current paramour and have a happy ending, only suddenly they get married to your mortal enemy, so you instead declare revenge and join the assassin’s guild, where you discover your first love has been living under an assumed name, so you together decide to run off to a commune, but the revolution kicks off before you can make arrangements, etc, etc …¹⁵

Most larpwrights cheat this process, though. They’ll often create an overarching narrative that everyone fits into. In Inside Hamlet everyone dies when the castle gets stormed in the last act, if you haven’t shuffled off your mortal coil beforehand. Sometimes the characters are written in such a way that it becomes difficult to slip the narrative rails; if you know the organizers have planned an elaborate wedding scene it’s a little hard to justify breaking off your engagement, no matter how good the character reasons are.

3 AM Forever doesn’t do any of that. You pick a character group (like the actors) then a character “seed” (like the fading Hollywood star or the ingenue). You get to choose some other elements, like a dream you once had or a memory of a past party. And that’s it. Everything else is up to you. You could double down on your group dynamics. Maybe you’d rather lean in on the mysterious encounter with the fae you had years ago, or settle a score from the last party you attended. Maybe none of that sounds appealing and you’d rather just dance for four hours. It’s all good.

One of the Nordic Larp Talks this year talked about narrative in larp, in the context of transformative experiences.¹⁶ The argument made there was that players often play out these complex, transgressive narratives yet by the end of the game drive themselves into these pat, clichéd resolutions which rob those journeys of their revolutionary potential. It’s in part this oddly slavish devotion to conventional narrative structures in our fantasy lives that stifles our ability to break free of them in our real lives.

I don’t know if I agree with the argument as presented, at least not entirely.¹⁷ But I’ve been thinking about it, and thinking about larps which seem indifferent to narrative. I think I want a little more to play on, in a game, some kind of plot to weave my story in and around. That’s not to suggest 3 AM Forever should add some; it’s a fine game as is and you should play it given the chance. But, you know, even if they did some more structure to it, even if I played it and got to the end and had everything up tied up in a bow, maybe I’d have been happier at the end. But I’m not sure I’d actually be better off.

I’m booked to play Sahara at the end of this week, so I’m in the midst of the most direct transit I could take to get to Tunisia, which means I spent the night at the airport hotel in Paris. It’s been dreadful, honestly, since I got in late and had to be up before 5am for a 7am flight. I hope I get some sleep on the plane.¹⁸

I did get one last hurrah in Helsinki, meeting a couple other attendees for dinner on Sunday night and then managing to meet up with more people at the airport on Monday and spending the afternoon waiting for flights while arguing about the convention. It was nice to ease myself out of the space gently.

I’m sad to have left Finland. I’m sad to have had to say goodbye to all my friends. I’ll be back next year in Norway, as always, if there’s any possible way to manage it.

Next: Tunis (TUN) to Rome (FCO)
Prev: Dublin (DUB) to Helsinki (HEL)

Footnotes

¹ Which I still have to look up every time I type it out.

² I consider the Nordic Larp Talks kind of essential; many of the key figures in the Nordic Larp scene attend so it’s one of the few places where the community kind of directly talks to itself, and it’s intimate enough that you typically have a chance to talk to the people who presented afterwards if you want to follow up on something.

³ Norway in late 2021, where the community got together after the lockdowns of COVID and the cancellation of the 2020 iteration, had a genuinely grateful vibe.

⁴ Tree Mountain, an artificial hill built on a former gravel pit and planted with 10,600 trees in a spiral pattern. It was a hike to get there; there’s still ankle deep snow on the ground so it was kind of a slog walking the last 15 minutes. But I saw it.

⁵ Multiple saunas, in fact, if you were uncomfortable saunaing with people of other genders. Finnish saunas remain a thing, and there was even a brief class at the start of Solmukohta so anyone uninitiated could learn the culture.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the saunas are typically mixed-gender and completely naked. I was familiar with it, mostly because I had gone through that culture shock eight years ago at my first Solmukohta.

⁶ Or, if you’re the kind of pretentious asshole who turns up at the Orpheus, like Enter the Void or Upstream Color

⁷ I tend to disassociate, making it pretty hard to interact with people in real-time.

⁸ I’ve never danced, I’ve never been comfortable dancing, I’ve taken a few lessons in swing dancing — enough to know I enjoyed it — but not enough to ever get comfortable enough to do it in public. And now I’ve discovered the blood pressure meds I’m on cause me to get dizzy if I do things like, say, bounce rhythmically up and down.

I was staggering drunkenly every time I stood up after an hour into the larp and it was getting worse over the course of the evening, which was impressive since I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol the whole night.

⁹ No intermission. The first indication that we were in a fictional space should have been that nobody ran for the restrooms.

¹⁰ The attendance for parties at the Orpheus frequently boast double or triple the attendance for the shows. The second indication that we were in a fictional space should have been that everyone arrived on time for it.

¹¹ Well, force your character to make bad decisions; as a player you could opt out of anything you were disinclined to do.

¹² Okay, some of the costumes were moderately risque and there was scattered but notable toplessness here and there which would have almost certainly resulted in expulsions in my high school. But that was about it.

¹³ They reacted poorly, knocking me to the ground with their hands around my throat and throttling me until they were dragged off by some of the other patrons. It was honestly kind of nice; I’ve been avoiding anything that could raise my blood pressure since the heart attack for longer than was strictly necessary and it was fun not worrying about it.

¹⁴ Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a term for the opposite of an emergent narrative, which I’d have thought would be something like “designed narrative” or “prescriptive narrative” or “explicit narrative.” It’s just narrative.

¹⁵ It’s not uncommon, of course, for players to deliberately steer towards narrative outcomes they prefer, or even to plan entire storylines for their character before the game starts. Maybe that act makes those narratives less emergent and more premeditated. But they’re still not designed into the game by the larp writers.

¹⁶ Kitsch, Netflix, and the Recuperation of Larp, by Jamie MacDonald

¹⁷ My main objection is that I’m not convinced that choosing a conventional resolution and playing it out, in a larp, is the same as watching a conventional resolution and passively accepting it. Maybe it is. Or maybe it is if you do it uncritically. But I tend to think there’s a difference.

¹⁸ Reader, I did not.