No matter how interesting the premise of a given Nordic larp, it will raise two questions. Firstly, why not just play it as a rule-based larp or RPG? And, following that: why not turn it into theater? Most larp already walks a fine line between play and acting, and Nordic shares enough traits with standard improv that it’s easy to wonder why participants don’t just limit it to one area and invite an audience. According to Mad About the Boy’s organizers, though, the participant-spectators of Nordic larp can get an experience that’s impossible outside the medium. “When you’re watching a theater play, you can be empathic to what’s going on... kind of put yourself in their place,” says Lindahl. “But it’s totally different when you are there and you’re actually feeling the feelings, not just understanding them.”

Lizzie Stark, the journalist and larper who helped bring Mad About the Boy to the US, also sees it as a kind of art where you’re required to create, not just consume. In something like theater, she says, you’ll probably have a pretty good experience and identify with the characters as long as the actors are good. “But in larp, there’s this extra level of anxiety: getting that emotional gut punch depends on how well you’re able to immerse into a character.”

Players have a much larger role than spectators in bringing fiction to life, but the authors still have to choose how much control they’re willing to give up. Kapo, a well-known Danish larp that simulated brutal conditions inside a prison camp, was almost entirely linear. Players could have virtually no effect on the game’s events, which were designed to drive home their powerlessness. “You will die or prey on those weaker than you, ultimately forcing you to choose between yourself and your loved ones,” reads the larp’s description. “There will be no revolutions during the game.”

The game ended with a convoluted quadruple-cross and a lot of brandished prop guns

Other larps build a more open-ended world. The White War, a larp about military occupation, is one; Mad About the Boy is another: it has a few scripted events, but the outcomes have been vastly different over its three runs. In one Norwegian run, the Last Man’s arrival was met with tea and blankets. In our version, the game ended with a convoluted quadruple-cross and a lot of brandished prop guns — although, while our organizers feared Americans might be trigger-happy, none were actually fired. The forty of us were given a place to live and people to be; what we did with that was up to us.

Giving players this control tends to lead to unexpected results. “I don’t think I’ve ever organized a larp where at one point I haven’t said the following words: He did what? She did what?” Raaum says. In one of her larps, the World War II-based 1942, a group of soldiers was meant to execute a prisoner, but the plan was derailed. “They were meant to feel what it was like to look her in the eye and shoot her.” Their commander, however, “wanted to spare his soldiers their feelings, so he did it himself. That’s bullshit,” she adds.

In some cases, though, this turns out well, even if it started with a failure on the organizers’ part. Finnish war larp Valokaari was meant to feel cramped and filled with interpersonal conflict, but due to a misunderstanding, participants decided to play it as a hyper-realistic military enactment. “The characters who we expected to get on each others’ nerves never did,” the organizers wrote in larp anthology States of Play, “because most of them spent all their time either patrolling, eating or sleeping.” At the end, the players considered the game a success, even if the game hadn’t worked out remotely how the organizers intended.