The Making of Nordic Larp: Documenting a Tradition of Ephemeral Co-Creative Play

Stenros and Montola's paper examines the difficulties of documenting larp, or live action role-playing, a form defined by its ephemerality, subjectivity, first-person audience, and co-creative character. Drawing on their experience producing the Nordic Larp book, which covers thirty Nordic larps selected through community collaboration and soft quotas, the authors argue that larp documentation shares affinities with performance-art documentation but requires game-studies tools adapted to the form's distinctive features. Effective documentation, they contend, must capture three interrelated dimensions: the game design itself, the individual experiences of players, and the subcultural understanding that emerges after play has ended.

To meet these challenges, the editors adopted four strategies: polyphonic case descriptions written by multiple authors, a diverse range of source materials including player photographs and debriefs, a requirement that contributors be participants themselves, and standardized infoboxes to organize factual details. The authors acknowledge that these measures cannot fully eliminate subjectivity, insider bias, or the tendency toward narrativization, and they engage critically with concerns such as Örnebring's warning that scene insiders may produce self-celebratory histories. They further demonstrate that even apparently objective data, including budgets, player counts, credits, duration, and location, depends on numerous normative judgments, particularly given that Nordic larp is non-commercial, unstandardized, and co-creative, with many costs and contributions remaining largely invisible.

The paper concludes that documentation inevitably involves transparent normative choices, since decisions about naming, location, and format actively shape how the Nordic larp community understands itself. The authors identify unintended consequences of these choices, including the formation of a canon of notable larps, the imposition of a single documentation format, and the powerful construction of "tradition" as an organizing concept. Their central recommendation is to study game design, player experience, and subcultural understanding together rather than in isolation, an approach that positions the work as both a historical record and a reflexive contribution to the methodology of studying ephemeral play.