I’ve been more-or-less¹ in Sweden for the past few weeks. It’s got me thinking about the Nordic countries. I planned to fly in for a larp, then discovered I had friends celebrating their birthdays, and gradually expanded the amount of time I was staying until I was here for a full three weeks.²

Like a lot of people in the United States, I had only a vague sense of Northern Europe while growing up. My understanding of the culture was kind of an amalgam of ABBA and Ibsen and Lars von Trier, which is to say vague, shallow, undifferentiated, and almost wholly inaccurate. That only changed once I started attending larps in Europe. The kind of larps I like — weekend-long events which lean towards heavy themes and light rules — tend to fall within the tradition known as Nordic Larp, and not surprisingly attract an overrepresentative number of larpers from Nordic countries. So I’ve made a lot of friends from there and had any number of excuses to visit. And when I started attending KP, the annual larp convention which rotates through the Nordic countries, I got to see all of them.

It’s always both humbling and gratifying to replace ignorance with experience. I’ve obviously learned a lot since I started traveling.³ What’s particularly interesting is that as my knowledge of Northern Europe expanded over the last decade so did the relevance of the Nordic countries to the cultural conversation in the United States. They’re often held up as the poster children for democratic socialism. This apparently terrifies conservatives in the US, who spend a surprising amount of time trying to convince people what horrific lives they live in Scandinavia with their comprehensive health care and robust social safety net and generous vacation policies.

It’s somewhat unfair to lump all the Nordic countries together — there are a lot of separate stereotypes, of varying degrees of accuracy⁴ — but that’s true of most places, when you drill down enough.⁵ And it’s also true their reputation for progressive economics is a little overstated; the so-called “Nordic model” used to be the accepted model across the EU. That they’re now considered outliers is a result of the Nordic countries going a little bit further and resisting the subsequent swing towards neoliberalism a little bit more successfully than their neighbors.

There’s still a tremendous amount they have in common, geographically, culturally, and linguistically. They’re more civic-minded, more invested in keeping income inequality in check and investing in communities, than many other countries. All of which is to say that flying into Stockholm for me — like flying into Oslo, or Helsinki, or Copenhagen — feels less like touring and more like taking a couple weeks off. I’m still seeing a lot of stuff, mind you, but for me it’s like visiting New York City. I can crash in the city, do a little or a lot as the mood strikes me, and not feel like I’m missing out.

I did take some time while I was here to head to the Åland Islands. And that instigated, for me, a minor categorical crisis.

When I first started this blog I was posting every time I moved, so the first six months or so have a lot of short, staccato entries. It was hard to keep up that pace; more importantly it didn’t feel like I had an opportunity to get a feel for somewhere before I suddenly had to offer opinions about it.⁶ I won’t argue that’s bad — it encourages a more precise focus, if nothing else — but it is more work.

So I switched to writing whenever I crossed a country border. And that opened up a whole mess of questions. Essays tend to be stronger when they talk about discrete subjects: what it’s like driving across France, or what it’s like to ride a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. That’s great if you write frequent, focused posts. But travelogues, like the travel they describe, have a tendency to ramble. So I cheat. A month in the United States gets broken into two parts: one half when I was sedentary in New York City, the other when I was roaming through the Western United States.⁷ The couple days I slipped into Germany while I was driving across France didn’t really feel like I had a lot to say about Germany⁸ so I only posted once for the whole trip.

So I mostly post when I cross a country border, but what constitutes a country is a political question. The Vatican City⁹ counts, but I’d be unlikely to post a separate entry even if I somehow managed to stay there overnight. Guam is indisputably a territory of the United States but feels more like a country than the Vatican does. I’d absolutely post a separate entry if I visited. And the more you look, the more ambiguous cases you can find.¹⁰ These can quickly turn into fraught political questions. Is making a separate post taking a position? Is not making a separate post taking a position?

This probably seems like a lot of words for something as trivial as how frequently I update this blog, but for me it all ties back to something fundamental: how do you make sense of existence? You tell stories, of course. This blog is, among other things, an attempt for me to make sense of the world. I’m trying to respect the places I find myself passing through. At the same time I’m trying to describe the experience of travel which, since it is how I’m living, is also the story of my life. Sometimes I have to compromise one or the other. Don’t read too much into it.

The Åland Islands, like Finland itself, were a part of Sweden until Sweden was forced to cede its easternmost third to Russia at the end of the Finnish War in 1809. So there’s this odd archipelago, undeniably culturally and ethnically Swedish, which ended up constituted as part of the Grand Duchy of Finland. It came under attack by the British and French during the Crimean War — the Russians were using its trade routes through the Baltic Sea — and at the end of the war the island was forced to demilitarize. Finland broke free of Russia in 1917 and Åland became an autonomous region in 1922, a status which was reaffirmed as recently as 1995 when Finland joined the EU. The current residents seem to be perfectly content being a special case, particularly since their autonomous status gives them a lot of flexibility to set their own tax policy.

They’ve used that flexibility to encourage tourism by opting out of the EU VAT.¹¹ That’s helped make Åland a lovely and well-manicured vacation destination. The weather was sunny and mild, at least for the three days I was there, and it’s crammed with beaches and golf courses and bike trails and hiking paths. The capital of Mariehamm is filled with exactly the sort of cafés and boutique shops and refurbished hotels you’re imagining. It’s idyllic and placid. And I was completely unprepared for it.

Maybe I should have planned better, or researched more, or something. But there were no available hotel rooms in Mariehamm, so I booked a B&B just outside of town. And when I tried to rent a car, there weren’t any available either, so I figured I’d land and rent one when I got there.¹² Of course, when I landed at 10pm everything was closed. They literally locked the airport behind me when I stepped outside. It probably wouldn’t have mattered; it appears there’s simply weren’t any available cars to rent. I imagine they were already taken.

So I was relying on the buses to get around, but like a lot of rural places the bus was infrequent. There was one roughly every 2½ hours, which made hopping into town for lunch kind of unworkable. I assume there’s some darling bicycle rental I didn’t know about, but I didn’t know about it. So I did a bit of hiking over to the shore, and I went into town once to grab lunch and pick up supplies, but otherwise I mostly stuck to the B&B.

So if you want to visit Åland, I guess my top-line advice is to bring a car. But don’t cry for me. The B&B was next to a lemonade manufacturer,¹³ and that was on top of a custom chocolate shop, so I did just fine.

During the time I was in Sweden I attended Vedergällningen,¹⁴ a viking larp. Vedergällningen was held at a larp village four hours south of Stockholm, a collection of about a dozen wooden cabins set a modest distance into the woods. Like a lot of campsites there was no electricity or heating or plumbing.¹⁵ On the one hand, this was great for immersion. Vikings didn’t have any of that either. On the other it got surprisingly cold for summer evenings. I was quite happy to get back to the world of flush toilets and hot water.

The plot was straightforward. A band of vikings wash up on the shore of a village of vǫlva, mostly female practitioners of a kind of magic known as seiðr. The vikings were limping in from a disastrous raid on England; of the three ships they started with one had burned under mysterious (and likely magical) circumstances and while the survivors were sailing back home a second one sunk under equally mysterious circumstances. So a miserable and demoralized gang of men¹⁶ enters a village that is outwardly hospitable but features enigmatic cults and secretive rituals for power. Then an accidental violation of the ancient rules for hospitality was thrown in at the welcoming feast and it looked like we were off to the races. I thought we were primed for a classic folk horror game. It didn’t play out that way.

There are a lot of decisions to make in larp design, and one of the critical ones is about how much control players have over the direction of the game. In many games, the answer is not all that much. Players might make choices over their personal stories — do I marry the prince or elope with the princess? — but there’s still going to be a big celebration at the end of the game, not least of which because the organizers already paid for it. Maybe there are factions and one side wins over the other, but often that just means the game ends with a speech by a different leader.

One word for this is railroading. I don’t like it as a term because it comes with a heavy negative connotation. I prefer to think of it in terms of boundaries: defined limits beyond which the larp, by organizer fiat, just isn’t going to go.¹⁷ As an example, in Triumph (the Hunger Games inspired larp I’m running this November) we’ve already made it clear that there’s not going to be a way to trigger a rebellion. No organizing a resistance movement and turning violently on the citizens.¹⁸

Some larps remove a huge amount of player agency, going so far as to dictate specific choices the characters must make and the times they must make them.¹⁹ Most larps put it somewhere in the middle; there’s going to be a big set-piece battle or apocalyptic ritual or gala event, and it’s up to you how your character gets there and the side they end up on. On the other extreme you have Vedergällningen, which pushes about as much agency as possible onto the players.

In practice that means there’s very little planned for the game. The players might summon gods, or they might not. There might be war between the vikings and the villagers, or not. Rituals might work or get broken or go haywire, there might be a lot of deaths or very few, the game might end in triumph or tragedy or farce or all of the above, based on the choices the characters make. More to the point, none of what that looks like is built into the game by the organizers; they react to the events of the game, but don’t put effort into steering it or shaping it. Whatever happens, happens.

So the game I thought was going to be folk horror wasn’t, because not enough people opted into it. Ditto epic fantasy, or gritty drama, or magic realism. Elements of all of that cropped up at various times as players steered towards and away from it, but the game didn’t hew to any genre in particular for very long. All larps are what you make of them; that seems especially true of these kind of games. You need to decide what kind of experience you want, and then go out and find it — and convince enough other players to go along with it — because it’s very unlikely to come to you.

As with most things, whether that’s good or bad is going to depend on the player. Some people are going to do better in something with more of a structure, with clearer goals and more concrete obstacles. Others are going to know exactly what they want and are likely to find any structure getting in the way. I suspect more structure is better for beginners²⁰ although that doesn’t mean less structure is necessarily better for experienced players; once you know how to navigate either kind of game you’ll probably be equipped to decide which clicks with your preferred playstyle.

If there’s one curious thing I’ve discovered, after playing lots of larps from lots of different larp traditions, it’s that they are almost universally terrible at effectively communicating what kinds of boundaries a game entails. How much agency you have as a player — to what extent you’re expected to project your own challenges and solutions into the game — relies almost entirely on a unspoken shared understanding, and that understanding turns out to be very specific to any particular larp culture. And communicating those expectations becomes increasingly important as more and more larps attract an international crowd; the five players in the crew of my viking ship included someone from Finland, someone from Croatia, someone from France, someone from Sweden, and myself. I suspect many of us entered into the game without quite grasping how we were expected to play it, and that meant we had to pick up how to play it on the fly.²¹

So it was a good game for me, well designed and well run, but I really could have gotten a lot more out of it if I had understood what was expected from the beginning. Lots of other players got more out of it, no doubt because they came in with a better understanding of how to play it. And that’s fine. I had fun, and it’s rare I leave a larp without wishing I had made at least some different choices during it. I’m just wondering if there’s a way to better prepare players before they go in.

I spent some time kicking around Stockholm, both before and after the larp. I visited some friends, even attended a birthday party and made some new ones. I got to see Gripsholm Castle and Drottningholm Palace.²² I also toured the Vasa Museum, featuring the recovered hull of the most impressive 17^th century warship to sink within an hour of launching.²³

I’ve been less successful getting some errands run. I’m low on medication, and hoped to see a doctor and get a refill here. But Sweden, like a lot of places, makes that nearly impossible if you’re not a resident. You can’t sign up for an appointment online without an official number so you’re stuck calling places as soon as they open²⁴ and trying to score a same-day reservation. I tried multiple times — sometimes I’d get through the automated phone system and reach the point where I could request a callback, only to never receive one²⁵ — and when I finally got a callback they explained they’d need to issue a temporary number to make the appointment, and those were backed up so it could take weeks, and I’d be out of the country by the time it came through.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing, I’ve found. The health service website doesn’t have an English translation, so you have to fumble through Google Translate if you’re trying to navigate it.²⁶ There aren’t really a lot of laundromats because Swedish apartment buildings all come with washers, so I only managed to track one down and run my clothing through once. Stores and restaurants often keep odd hours, opening late and closing early. The automated driving directions send you the wrong way down one-way streets or through clearly marked pedestrian zones.²⁷

These are the sorts of things which are annoying as a visitor but practically invisible if you’re a local. Restaurants which close at 8pm aren’t especially bothersome if you’re eating dinner at 6pm, particularly if most of the time you’re doing it at home. Driving directions are irrelevant if you’re on public transportation all the time. The closer you are to being the “typical” Swedish citizen, the less these things are going to affect you.

I’m not trying to be critical. I certainly don’t expect websites in English or restaurants going out of their way to accommodate when I’d prefer to eat. But it does fit with a critique you sometimes hear about the Nordic countries. They’re great places to live, as someplace to settle down and raise a family. But they can be surprisingly insular for all that. And that doesn’t just apply to foreigners, or immigrants, but also to locals who fall outside of the mainstream for one reason or another.

My flight to Kraków leaves within the hour. I’m finishing this entry in the airport. I’ve enjoyed Stockholm, I really have. I look forward to coming back. But there’s a subtle division between myself and the city. I’m distinctly odd. I’m not sure it could ever really feel like coming home.

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Footnotes

¹ I spent a few days in the Åland Islands, which is Finnish. Sort of. It’s a weird case. More on that later.

² I had initially planned on staying even longer and seeing what Midsummmer festivities looked like in a rural Swedish village — nothing could go wrong there — but there’s a larp convention in Kraków and I wanted to check it out.

³ I got to spend three weeks in Denmark last year, which does wonders for your grasp of Danish history if all you knew growing up is they had something to do with vikings.

⁴ Finns are standoffish, Danes are hedonistic, Norwegians are rustic, Swedes are full of themselves, etc.

⁵ I can talk your ear off about the distinctions between Clevelanders and Yinzers. It’s the narcissism of small differences.

⁶ My first trip to Mexico, for example, featured eight separate posts for the month I spent in the country. My second trip, about as long, I consolidated into one.

⁷ Although, rereading it now, I’m wondering if dividing it into New York/the Northwest/the Southwest wouldn’t have made even more sense.

⁸ The area around Strasbourg, like a lot of borderlands, is a kind of weird mix of influences from both sides as it is.

⁹ A “sovereign entity” and “independent city-state.” I’m not sure it’s a nation-state; do Catholics constitute a nation? It’s definitely a country.

¹⁰ Just to name a few territories claimed (rightfully or not) by the UK: The Falkland Islands? Gibraltar? Bermuda?

¹¹ Åland is officially part of the customs territory of the EU but not the fiscal territory.

¹² Most people take the ferry, but I got violently ill the last time I was on a ferry, and I really didn’t want to risk going through that multiple times in quick succession. So I flew in, and I caught the ferry back.

Turns out the Baltic Sea is notably calmer than the North Sea, and I should have just caught the ferry both ways. Live and learn.

¹³ I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the “Limonadfabrik” sign next door meant because it sure looked like “lemonade fabricator” but that was crazy.

¹⁴ The name translates as “Retribution,” although even after playing I’m not quite sure who was getting retribution for what.

¹⁵ Asking about showers prompted a lot of Swedish larpers to helpfully point out there was a creek with a particularly deep bend just down one of the trails.

¹⁶ Mostly men, anyway. There were a number of shieldmaidens, more than the historical record properly supports, but this was a game which had gods walking around as a plot point so I’m not going to quibble.

¹⁷ Although even those may be open to negotiation; players can and not infrequently do ignore the instructions of the organizers. Better players ask first.

¹⁸ That sounds like an interesting game, but it’s not the game we’re trying to run and we would have made different choices if it were. So we’re just taking that option off the table.

¹⁹ A Nice Evening with the Family, for example, gives you a character from a play or movie and then expects you to play out their plot more-or-less exactly as it is in the work. While you are technically allowed to make different choices, doing so impacts other player’s ability to play out their plots, and it’s discouraged. Your freedom is limited to how you interact with the other characters.

²⁰ Games with more rigid plots and better defined goals are likely to push plot onto you rather than requiring you seek it out, which if you have no idea what’s going on or how to engage other players is probably for the best.

²¹ One example: the vikings felt they were under a curse, and we had decided our major motivation — indeed, the whole reason we didn’t run off when things started to go south — was to lift the curse so we could return to our villages without dragging it along behind us. And we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was causing our bad luck. There were all sorts of tantalizing hints sprinkled through the characters, so it always felt like we were getting closer and closer without actually making much progress.

In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like there’s actually an answer written into the game at all. Certainly, if we had arbitrarily decided X was the cause the organizers would have backed us up. Had I known that, I would have sat down at the start of the game and explicitly talked about how we wanted to approach it as a crew. Should we eventually manage to lift it? If so, when? If not, how much did we want to play into trying and failing to find answers?

I can’t speak for the other players. Maybe they understood it from the start or it played out they way they wanted anyway. But it would have helpfully focused my game, at least.

²² Gripsholm has better art and a famously derpy taxidermy lion, while Drottingholm has some incredibly over-the-top rooms. Fair warning: if you want to tour the Royal Theater, which is supposed to be stunning, you need to sign up for a guided tour and there’s only one per day.

²³ It may say something about the Swedish character that the Vasa has become such a celebrated symbol of the country. It’s hard to imagine the United States doing the same for the shattered pieces of the Challenger. Or maybe that’s just the perspective you get 300+ years after a disaster.

²⁴ Typically at 8am.

²⁵ I called the general helpline and explained this, only to be told that was extremely odd and I should just keep trying.

²⁶ The one exception is the information for Ukrainian refugees, which is in English, although not Ukrainian.

²⁷ And before you ask, I saw the same errors on Google Maps and the built-in satellite navigation on the rental car, so something isn’t updating the base data in a timely manner.