Eleanor Saitta: So the first ques­tion that Ellen asked me when she asked me to give this talk was why am I com­ing to Norway? Because it’s a long way. It’s about…I think 1,600 pounds of CO₂ from where my apart­ment is. And I mean obvi­ous­ly I came out here because of Nordic larp. But why and what is that spe­cif­ic thing that I see in the world? 

So, I lived in Seattle for sev­en years and I moved out of there just before I end­ed up in the larp world. And when I left Seattle I got rid of my D&D books and oth­er stuff because I like you know, I’m kind of bored with this stuff. All of this role-playing stuff, nobody wants to tell real sto­ries. It’s just a bunch of bull­shit about killing orcs and like… You know, it’s great enter­tain­ment but I want to go do things in the world. And I’m tired at the medi­um that I can’t seem to find a way to express and inter­act with around doing the things that I want to do in the world. 

And then I met Andy Nordgren at a hack­er con­fer­ence in Berlin. And she start­ed telling about this crazy thing, these larpers. And that kin­da blew my mind and I sat down and read all the books, and then I showed up here because I had to see if this thing actu­al­ly was what I’d been sold. And it turns out it was.

So I think of larp in a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as sto­ry­telling for the net­work age. This is sto­ry­telling in the first-person present tense plur­al, and it is not very often that human­i­ty comes up with a new tense in which to tell sto­ries. That’s actu­al­ly kind of a big deal. And we can talk about oh, psy­chodra­ma, these pre­de­ces­sors and what­ev­er but there is some­thing about the thing that we do with larp, and specif­i­cal­ly the thing that we do with Nordic larp, which is inter­est­ing and dif­fer­ent in ways that are pret­ty meaningful.

So why does this mat­ter? A friend of mine Quinn Norton—who’s some­body you may have heard of; she’s a jour­nal­ist and writes about the Internet among oth­er things—likes to talk about the invis­i­ble city. So, start­ing some­where in the 1840s or so in the West, peo­ple start­ed mov­ing into the cities for real. And it took about 140 years for urban­iza­tion to kind of take place to the point that it has. And that was for about a bil­lion peo­ple, maybe a bit more, to move into urban cores. And it took us a long time to fig­ure out how to live with each other.

How many of you have sat down next to some­body in a cafe who was talk­ing about their sex life and not lis­tened because you had oth­er shit to do? Yeah. That was not a thing that we knew how to do. It’s called civic inat­ten­tion. And it was a thing that we have to col­lec­tive­ly learn as…basically as a species. Because we were liv­ing in places where if we did­n’t do that no one would get any­thing done. 

So for anoth­er exam­ple, in New York in the 1870s and 1880s, if you want­ed to move a heavy load around you attached a horse to it. And they had a lot of heavy loads to move around. Which meant they had a lot of hors­es. You know what hors­es do, all day? Shit. So they had about six­ty thou­sand tons a day of horse­shit to get out of New York. You know how you do that? More hors­es. This was the Manure Crisis. This was actu­al­ly like—it was a pub­lic health night­mare. And also it made the city real­ly unpleas­ant to live in. I don’t know how many of you’ve been to New York in August. It gets real­ly real­ly hot and it stays hot. And imag­ine that with just tons of horse­shit on the side­walks and the street and every­where, and on your boots and…yeah.

And so when they came up with the car, they were like, ​“Man, this is amaz­ing.” They did­n’t think about like, ​“Hey, this is gonna destroy the world,” and you know, it’s going to end human civ­i­liza­tion and these things are going to kill hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple a year. No, they were like, ​“Oh my god. We don’t have tons of horse­shit on the road.” 

So, now— I don’t actu­al­ly have it my pock­et, it’s over there. I have the entire sum of all human knowl­edge kind of sit­ting in my pock­et. And we for­get that like hey, I can talk to every­one I know in the world instant­ly. And how many of you get in argu­ments about facts? But like actu­al­ly get in argu­ments about facts in a bar and they don’t end by some­body just going and look­ing up the fact and being like oh, actu­al­ly these are the bat­tles men­tioned in you know, some Russian nov­el, and here’s what actu­al­ly hap­pened in them? 

You know how long it would take like thir­ty years ago if you want­ed to fin­ish that argu­ment? You’d go to the library the next day and pho­to­copy a bunch of shit. And then three days lat­er you’d go to their offices like thump, ​“I was right, bitch.” Now you can lit­er­al­ly do that so quick­ly you for­get that you’re even doing a thing. Because you just call up the sum of all human knowledge.

Quinn talks about this as mov­ing to the invis­i­ble city. In the past twen­ty years, 2.5 bil­lion peo­ple have moved to the same city. And we have no fuck­ing clue how to live togeth­er. You know, we have giant piles of steam­ing horse­shit sit­ting in our pock­ets. And in the mid­dle of our liv­ing room. And it’s ter­ri­ble.

So, sto­ries are pol­i­tics. And a lot of learn­ing how to live togeth­er is a polit­i­cal act. This is rea­son­ably per­son­al right now. On Wednesday I blocked 50 thou­sand Nazis on Twitter. It was kind of annoy­ing. I found out that this breaks the mobile web inter­face. It’s…yeah.

And over the past cou­ple years, I lost two coun­tries I was plan­ning on using, to sto­ries. How many peo­ple here…kek, Pepe the Frog, meme mag­ic? Are these things…? It’s real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, though, right? All of these peo­ple took our core under­stand­ing that like hey, real­i­ty is a social con­struc­tion… And they actu­al­ly got it—they got it for real. And then they turned it into a weapon for fas­cism that’s destroy­ing super­pow­ers. That’s…terrifying but also kin­da cool? Like, I mean…shit works, yo. Now we have to fig­ure out what we’re going to do about it and how we’re going to respond. Because we don’t have much time and we should maybe fig­ure that out.

So, there was a ques­tion recent­ly on [BFF?] about whether or not Nordic larp was inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal. And the con­ver­sa­tion went all over the place. And I recent­ly went back and read through some of the threads. And I think that Nordic Larp—capital N, cap­i­tal L—is inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal, not because of our sto­ries. The sto­ries, like Eirik said a cou­ple years ago in a Nordic Larp Talk, I don’t know if Nordic larp mat­ters but Nordic like design def­i­nite­ly matters. 

And Nordic larp orga­niz­ing is incred­i­bly polit­i­cal. Not in the sense of like oh, how are we going to acco­mo­date the veg­ans this week, and what gen­ders are allowed in this larp? But there are four pil­lars, right? Nordic larp believes very strong­ly in equal­i­ty of out­come. We work very hard to make sure that every­one play­ing the game has some kind of equal share in the out­come. If you run a game and the king has an amaz­ing game and the peons have a bor­ing game, it’s a shit­ty larp. Or rather, it’s a shit­ty Nordic larp. Unless it was about the design expe­ri­ence of the peons hav­ing a shit­ty expe­ri­ence, but that’s not what we’re talk­ing about. You know. If they’re bored, that’s a dif­fer­ent thing, unless you’re play­ing with the aes­thet­ics of bor— Whatever, you know what I mean.

But we work on that for real, right. You go to an American larp, and it’s kind of con­sid­ered rea­son­able— Has been in the past, cer­tain­ly, con­sid­ered rea­son­able that you know, you show up there and you’re a new­bie and the first thing you’re going to do is spend a year or two kind of grind­ing through play­ing some low-level char­ac­ter. And you’re going to have a real­ly bad time. But that’s like you’re pay­ing your dues. And then you get to do the cool shit lat­er. And it turns out that’s a ter­ri­ble design idea and that’s why we don’t do it. But that is a polit­i­cal choice. It’s a very pro­found polit­i­cal choice. 

We believe in cocre­ation. And this is part and par­cel of that same thing. We believe that every­one who shows up at a larp has a stake in cre­at­ing that larp in some way, and that their cre­ations are mean­ing­ful in the world.

We believe in empa­thy and agency as core design aes­thet­ics. We believe in ensur­ing that if you are play­ing a char­ac­ter and you have no empa­thy for the oth­er char­ac­ters, some­thing has gone wrong in the design process because you’re not emo­tion­al­ly engaged with the struc­ture and the fic­tion in the world. And you know, that might be an issue of play­er choice but whatever—something has gone wrong. That is also one of our core pil­lars of orga­niz­ing and design. And we believe that empa­thy always needs to come with agency or it’s a shit­ty larp. 

And we also believe in a cul­ture of reflec­tion, right. This thing? that we’re doing right now is not nor­mal in fetish com­mu­ni­ty, right? Having this kind of deep reflec­tion is rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al. And that is also a polit­i­cal choice and a polit­i­cal statement.

So, a lot of dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics can use some of our tools. The meme mag­ic guys can go take the social con­struc­tion of real­i­ty and do things with it. But the rest of it, that frame­work, those four pil­lars, you can’t just repur­pose for fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da. Because fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da that believes in equal­i­ty of out­come and agency and empathy…isn’t fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da any­more, in a fun­da­men­tal way, because the orga­niz­ing struc­ture has car­ried that world­view with it.

And even if you try to use our tools with their orga­niz­ing cul­ture to build these things, larp teach­es you how to see through the pro­pa­gan­da. Not always in the moment, right. The tools of pro­pa­gan­da work, the tools of brain­wash­ing work, We are sacks of meat walk­ing around and the things that work on sacks of meat work on us. But, that moment of reflec­tion, it gives you a chance to see these things and recov­er. The learn­ing does­n’t hap­pen dur­ing the game, the learn­ing hap­pens after­ward as you think about it.

One of the things which is also inter­est­ing is that this set of tools… How many peo­ple here have heard an Overton win­dow? So, an Overton win­dow is the set of things that are polit­i­cal­ly sayable in pub­lic. And so one of the things that the right has done for ages is they have peo­ple who go out and say, ​“I think that it’s per­fect­ly rea­son­able to rape chil­dren on the side­walk.” And then some­body else comes along and says, ​“No no, he’s crazy. However, we’re gonna ban abor­tion.” And then all of a sud­den that per­son looks way less crazy because he’s not rap­ing chil­dren on the side­walk. And this is a tac­tic that has been used very suc­cess­ful­ly to shift debate and dis­course since Goldwater in the US, and it’s spread pret­ty much everywhere—I’m sorry.

Trying to tell sto­ries in Nordic larps pulls authors towards the left edge of their Overton win­dow. It pulls authors towards more inclu­sive sto­ry­telling, just by the struc­ture of the orga­niz­ing that we’re try­ing to do, and the design prin­ci­ples. So it’s kind of inter­est­ing as an art form and as a sto­ry­telling form that larp has a real con­cep­tion of design as sep­a­rate from the artis­tic struc­ture. Like there’s an under­stand­ing that the artis­tic moment and the design of the artis­tic moment are some­what more dis­tin­guished, and some­what more for­mal­ly dis­tin­guished than they are in a lot of artis­tic mediums.

The most pro­found thing that I have got­ten from this com­mu­ni­ty, and this is actu­al­ly why I will keep com­ing back, is that you have all taught me how to see social sys­tems, in a real­ly deep way. I’ve been a sys­tems per­son from when I was fair­ly small and kind of have looked at the world through that lens for a long time. And I’d seen yeah okay, ori­gins of like, psy­chol­o­gy and AI and social fram­ing the­o­ry and these things. And then I came out here and I saw oh, actu­al­ly this isn’t the­o­ry, this is an applied sci­ence. We can go do this stuff. And even if we’re only doing it in art, it still works. And it works actu­al­ly a bit more deeply than we think, in some cases.

Eirik, again, said in his larp talk this past week about there’s this thing, there’s this lit­tle thing that we all think is super impor­tant here. And we can’t quite fig­ure out what it is. And for me I think that thing is cul­tur­al engi­neer­ing. Which is a real­ly disturbing-sounding word. I haven’t found a bet­ter phrase for it yet. But it’s basi­cal­ly the idea that like, we have a toolk­it here. We have to a toolk­it that’s par­tial­ly expressed in the orga­niz­ing, par­tial­ly expressed in the design, par­tial­ly expressed in the struc­ture of how we think and how we see. And that toolk­it works and it can work out­side fic­tion. Or it can work on the bor­der. It can work on things that slide back and forth. And we don’t have to be too hon­est or too care­ful about what we call art and we call prac­ti­cal. We can be a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal there.

Trying to teach that toolk­it is real­ly hard, it turns out. And that’s I think one of the rea­sons why I’m still here, oth­er than the art and the sto­ry­telling and the fam­i­ly I have here, is that I don’t know how to teach that thing yet, or the core of it with­out being like, ​“Okay guys, I know this is sort of weird, and we’re in the office and we’ve been talk­ing about like our engi­neer­ing cul­ture and what we need to do about like fix­ing our pull requests sys­tem. So now we’re gonna play a bunch of larps. And then we’re going to talk about how to make engi­neer­ing bet­ter.” Yeah. It’s a hard sell. I think I’m going to end up doing it at work anyway.

One of the things which is real­ly inter­est­ing, though— So when I talked with my CTO at some point about cul­tur­al engi­neer­ing and like, ​“Hey, we have this cul­ture debt prob­lem that we haven’t been pay­ing back into it.” And he was like, ​“Oh, that’s bull­shit. We can’t do cul­tur­al engineering—it’s impos­si­ble. It’s all about incen­tive structures.”

Yes, and. And that is I think one of the things that we have learned with a lot of the polit­i­cal games that we’ve tried to make, is that you can­not build a new social script if the incen­tive struc­tures aren’t lined up already. That is the pre­req­ui­site. And I think that this is the prob­lem that we have on Facebook. All of the incen­tive struc­tures on Facebook are designed to get us angry so that we will gen­er­ate more ad views and keep com­ing back. And this is fan­tas­ti­cal­ly use­less for try­ing to have mea­sured and rea­sons con­ver­sa­tions. But we’re not going to be able to fix that unless we find a way to change the incen­tive struc­ture under­neath it.

So, as this is an anniver­sary con­fer­ence I think a lit­tle bit of look­ing back is oblig­a­tory. I’ve heard a few peo­ple say the phrase that you know, Nordic larp is grow­ing up, right. We’re kind of grow­ing up and we’re…we’re 20 now, you know. We’re mov­ing out of the par­ents’ house. Got a job maybe, some­thing. We’re actu­al­ly mak­ing mon­ey doing this shit.

Nordic larp is not becom­ing some­thing new. Something entire­ly dif­fer­ent is hap­pen­ing. Again, look­ing back in one of those com­ment threads, some­one (and I should’ve made a note of who) said, ​“Actually I think Nordic larp is over.” Nordic larp end­ed ehh…2013, 2014, some­thing like that. We are now some­thing else. We don’t know what this oth­er thing is. But we are deal­ing with scale, and we are deal­ing with mon­ey, and we are deal­ing with inter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies and pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion and the art world—oh god, the art world—and a lot of these things. And we don’t know how to deal with them very well yet.

So as not­ed larp the­o­rist Benjamin Franklin once said, ladies and gen­tle­men, ​“A larp com­mu­ni­ty, if you can keep it.” There are four things that we need to do to keep this larp com­mu­ni­ty. We need to fix our bro­ken stairs. Our bro­ken stairs cost us far more than we can think. We need to fig­ure out how to not just bring peo­ple into the scene, which we’re get­ting pret­ty good at, but bring them into the tra­di­tion and the fam­i­ly. And real­ly bring them in so they under­stand the cul­ture in a deep way. We need to hold each oth­er account­able, right. We need to say to those peo­ple who are going out and there’s com­pa­nies and doing shit we don’t agree with, ​“Hey, that thing you did. That was maybe not cool, let’s talk about it.” And we also need to embrace hypocrisy and go build things with those peo­ple any­way, and go play. Thank you.