Roleplayers, everywhere
In Gothenburg, at the FSCONS conference. Henri Bergius, a Midgard developer from Helsinki, was here, and I asked him: “Is Finland small enough that you know Timo Multamäki?”
“Why, yes, I know him.”
And with that, Henri proceeded to tell me about Monday Night Larp, a 2-hour event, every week, that’s been going strong for 14 years (that’s fourteen!). “We started it when I was in high school, and others have taken it further since then.”
What a great little format. After school, short enough that you could even risk a so-so game (it would END, mercifully).
The talk is quite good, introduces Midgard 2 (experimental). Neat that it’s got bilingual examples (PHP and Python, side-by-side).
There is some information about the Monday LARPs in Finnish in http://www.greywolves.org/toiminta/marpit.html
Oh, a neologism: marping. “On Mondays we play marps or Monday-mini-larps, which usually last for an hour or two. Marping is a chance to get together and have fun during the week, and since it’s not very demanding, it also serves as good practice for LARPing.”
I’ve seen marping in the new Finnish dictionary (or at least in some press stories about it). So now it is a proper word :-)