This presentation was delivered on October 20, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Play cultures (Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler 2006; Bowman 2017) and meta-play (Boluk and LeMieux 2017) drive most game design, particularly in the realm of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs; White 2020) and live-action role-play (larps; Montola and Stenros 2010; Koljonen, et al.). Nevertheless, as Elaine Fiandra (2019) articulates with respect to video games, tracing a single author’s or studio’s work is “still a commonly accepted way to analyze [media]” and, in particular, a valid method for games “made by an extremely low number of people.” Fiandra uses Andrew Sarris’ (1962) pivotal work on auteur theory to look at “patterns and expressions of a personal style in the games directed by the director in question” (Fiandra 2019), and then thematic outcomes from actual play of their games. A game analysis method attentive to both play culture and authorial style is warranted, too, in the analysis of larp design, especially as larpwrights make more of their materials and creation process publicly available (Pettersson 2021).
Blackbox larps, defined by Stenros and Montola (2019) as “larps that are played in a minimalistic set, with precise control over light, sound, and props” (20), are ideal objects of study with their constrained conditions of production and intensive implementation of the designers’ vision over the course of several hours of play. This proposed paper and presentation examines blackbox larps of Danish creators Jeppe and Maria Bergmann Hamming through the dual lens of both their own authorial style and the Nordic larp culture that affords and supports their work, particularly the “freeform” larp culture of Fastaval. Fastaval is an old Danish convention which has, at its heart, a role-playing scenario competition with awards and recognition, which has long cultivated artistic vision and experimentation with the TRPG and larp forms. Maria’s first Fastaval scenario, Skyggernes spil (1998) with Maiken “Malle” Nielsen, reflects on the nature of “role-play” itself through a 1990s gothic horror game, later adapted for the blackbox context as A Play of Shadows (Bergmann Hamming and Bergmann Hamming 2017). Jeppe’s own Fastaval debut was in 2008 with Stormen, a late-1990s family drama set in a winter storm. However, this paper and presentation will focus on their joint blackbox larps in English, Deranged (2015) and Encore: A Rococopunk Opera (2022). Deranged concerns the life of composer Robert Schumann as narrated through the perspectives of different important figures to him as well as his own musical pieces. Encore smashes together 11 different operas, reduced to their barest of components across 50 different characters, into a single space with live opera-punk music by Ras Bolding serving as interludes.
The Bergmann Hammings’ remarkable, Fastaval-fueled artistic signature becomes clear in these 2 games: simplifying and emphasizing the emotional weight of the original material for a lay audience while also activating game-appropriate player agency over narrative methods and story outcomes. As we concern ourselves with the capacity of TRPGs and larps to communicate history and heritage (Mochocki 2021), the Bergmann Hammings’ work exemplifies blackbox larp’s capacity to adapt literary and musical material into role-playable forms.
Bio:
Evan Torner is Associate Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he also directs the Undergraduate Program in German Studies and the UC Game Lab. He has published widely on tabletop role-playing games and larping, and his games have been on occasion featured at Fastaval since 2012. He co-founded and runs both the Golden Cobra Challenge and the Analog Game Studies Journal, and is a coordinating editor for the International Journal of Role-Playing. He is currently working, among many other projects, on a short monograph about the role-playing game Apocalypse World.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).