The Baltic Warriors - polish edition
International larp brings ecological issues to Sopot
On Monday the 22nd of June, politicians, activists and lobbyists will come together in a conference organized in Sopot, at Teatr na Plaży on the very shore of the Baltic Sea. They will try to balance the interests of the environment, business and the communities living on the seafront.
The conference is a fictional participatory event called a larp. Anyone can join and take on the role of one of the people debating the issues. And while the characters are fictional, the issues are very real. Discussions about what should be done to help the Baltic Sea have been going on for decades, yet not enough is happening.
The larp is called Baltic Warriors, and it's part of a seven-game campaign touring through the Baltic Sea countries of Estonia, Russia, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. After Sopot, the next game will be in Kiel, and the one after that in Copenhagen. The larps are organized by the German company Kinomaton, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. Local partner in Poland is the Baltic Sea Cultural Center in Gdansk.
This project comes from a place of frustration: We know what should be done, and everyone in the Baltic countries agrees on this. So why are we waffling? lead designer Mike Pohjola says.
Unprecedented
Participatory culture is one of the strongest emerging trends of the 21st century, and larp is one of the fields where change and progress is happening the fastest in countries like Finland, Germany and Poland. Baltic Warriors builds upon the methods and techniques created in these grassroots cultures to take on serious issues such as eutrophication, the process leading to the growth of oxygenless dead zones in the Baltic Sea.
Raising awareness is not enough for us", Pohjola says. "In a Baltic Warriors event, you will be one of the people working on this issue and after the event, the problems of the Baltic Sea will be part of your direct experience.
Because this type of larp is a new thing, the internationalism of Baltic Warriors is on an unprecedented scale. Taking larp from one country to the next is already very unusual, but in Baltic Warriors, the game will tour seven countries, and the games will form one unified storyline going from one game to the next.
Perhaps in the future, larps will go on tour all the time. But right now, we're doing something that hasn't really been done before, Pohjola says. Each game is based on local issues and done together with local organizers to ensure that participants will get to engage with issues directly relevant not just to Poland, but to Sopot.
Cooperation among the Baltic Sea countries is essential for making progress, Magdalena Zakrzewska-Duda from project partner The Baltic Sea Cultural Center says.
Transmedia
The seven larps played this summer are part of a wider Baltic Warriors transmedia project comprising of a documentary film, a mobile game, and other events. Each larp is followed by a panel discussion linking the game's events to real world issues. The panelists are experts, politicians and activists from national and international NGO's active in the Baltic Sea region. In a Baltic Warriors larp done in Finland last year, one of the panel participants was the Finnish Minister of the Environment, Ville Niinistö.
The lead designer for the larps is the Finnish veteran game designer and novelist Mike Pohjola, who also won an Interactive Emmy award from his project Sanningen om Marika. As larp producer, the project has Juhana Pettersson, the producer for the Finnish-Palestinian larp Halat hisar and author of the novel Sokerisamurai.
Contact:
Harmke Heezen
heezen@kinomaton.de
+49 152 515 67 212
More information:
www.balticwarriors.net/press
https://www.facebook.com/balticwarriors
https://www.facebook.com/events/1442189579419492/
