As a matter of purely personal taste, here’s what I like about tabletop roleplaying games: 1 – Playing a complex and contradictory character engaged in interesting social environments. Experiencing the game principally through this character. 2 – Sex and violence, craziness and stupid decisions, the kind of stuff that is Continue Reading
Non-Digital
Non-Digital: The Last Ropecon at Dipoli
Ropecon is a Finnish roleplaying game convention. It’s also been something that’s been a part of my life for twenty years now. It was first organized in 1994, but I missed the initial years. I’m pretty sure my first Ropecon was 1996. I was sixteen and had just discovered Werewolf: Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Baltic Warriors Tallinn
I work as a larp producer in the Baltic Warriors project, and first game of our summer season was played last Saturday in Tallinn. It’s quite intimidating to go another country to do a game there. I had never even played in an Estonian larp, but it seemed to go Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Murder in Helsinki
(Photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen) Tonnin stiflat is a Finnish larp campaign played in Helsinki in 2014. Consisting of three games, it was organized by the veteran city game designers Niina Niskanen and Simo Järvelä. The setting is Helsinki in the year 1927, and the subject matter crime, Continue Reading
Non-Digital: The Arcane Mysteries of Descriptive Game Design
I wrote about the booklet Manhattan 2010 here. It was an attempt to map out a childhood roleplaying game as a playable design. In conceptual terms, there’s something very interesting going on here. Almost all game design is prescriptive. “This is how I think you should play the game.” However, Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Against Chess
Chess has arguably pervaded our culture more thoroughly than any other game. It’s used as a metaphor, a visual motif and as decoration, and sometimes people even play it. My chess career started and ended while I was still underage. There’s one game I remember loving as a child much Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Interaction Design Love From Denmark
This weekend, I was at the larp and roleplaying conference Knudepunkt in Denmark. The conference has a heavy focus on larp design, which often boils down to interaction design. It was interesting to see how the tools we have developed to make larp could also be used to design conference Continue Reading
Non-Digital: What Gets Included in Roleplaying History?
I have in my hands something that’s probably destined to become one of the most obscure Finnish roleplaying books ever published. To be honest, it’s not even really a book, but a 24 page printed booklet. It’s called Manhattan 2010, and contains almost no information about its circumstances of publication, Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Profound Larp Thoughts
This year’s Knudepunkt larp conference saw the publication of two books, first the Nordic larp yearbook 2014 and now a collection of articles about larp, the scene, game design, and other related matters. Edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, it’s called The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, and you Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Last Year’s Nordic Larp
Knudepunkt is an annual conference dedicated to ambitious larps and other roleplaying games. Every year, one or more books are published along with the event. The Danish book editors Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted are attempting to start a tradition of a yearbook collecting articles about games played the Continue Reading