(no subject)

Saw the film Russian Ark yesterday. It was, frankly, dull. The gimmick effect of the 90 minute shot is used moderately well, panning all over the Hermitage, but the whole thing seemed like a giant set piece to me. A very impressive set piece, and one which captures its setting aptly, but still fundamentally static. It failed to inform someone who does not already understand every aspect of the topic as to the connections between time slices, and although the characters have dialog that hints at their relationships, the translators chose not to subtitle it. Although it has a certain fascination, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who is not an expert in Russian history, and possibly not even then.

Intercon C

So I went to my first Intercon last weekend. It was a lot of fun, and I will definitely be back next year, particularly given that it may be my best chance to play a lot of high-quality previously-run games. Of the games I played in, I highly recommend Those Who Serve and House on the Hill, and the only truly awful one was Immortal Country. I now have a benchmark low to replace the game where the GM wandered off mid-game with no instructions on when to stop.

Intercon was a little odd for me, though. When I started LARPing so long ago (ok, it was only 1997) it was with the MIT Assassins' Guild, which has a reputation as isolationist, bloodthirsty, and mechanical. That's actually mostly true, although they are getting a lot better at playing with others. I really liked the stereotypical Guild style of games, but I am also very glad that I got exposed to other types of LARPing as well. I've played in several LARPs from the WPI crowd, and a bunch of miscellaneous others. Before this year, I had pretty much ignored Intercon as being a type of LARPing that didn't interest me. However, once I joined the Bid Committee I started to realize that there really was a much wider variation than I had thought, and I even ran a game there that I had previously run with the Assassins' Guild.

In fact, it was in the course of rewriting Saturday Morning Massacre that I really noticed the limitations of Intercon as a venue. As a GM you aren't limited in genre or setting, but you are pretty sharply limited in time and space. Luckily, since we had to rewrite most of the game anyway, it wasn't excessively more work to transform an 8-hour game that used four buildings into a 4-hour game in 20'x30' room. But the challenge is still there.

There are a lot of games that could not run at all at Intercon without substantial rewriting. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does lead to a certain narrowness of genre. My favorite games were those that worked against the default setting by building space of their own with chairs, etc. and forcing the venue to suit the game. Quite a few authors took the opposite approach, however, and wrote games that were, well, static. I had a lot of fun in Naptime and Panel, but they feel like one-idea games where you think of something clever and leave people in a room to screw around with it. Whether that style (thought of as more pure roleplaying by some) is so strong at Intercon because of space or because of community I don't know, but it is exactly the kind of game because of which I had originally avoided Intercon.

Now I can actually enjoy playing 'gimmick' games like that, but if that's all they had I'm not sure if I would come back. How fortunate that I have other options as well.