I’m not really up on computer games anymore, but I get the impression that games with more sandbox qualities are being created and interesting player activity emerging. DayZ is one which has interesting emergent behaviour despite or sometimes even because of the griefers and cheaters.
Having done a bit of reading, I think what I’m describing is closer to the GNS model, except that there are slightly different conflicts in LARP and I also don’t agree (as is pretty obvious) that the individual drives are mutually exclusive. It can simplify game development to concentrate on one or two areas, certainly - but I believe that a well-constructed game can deliver on all three styles of play in such a way that they mutually support and benefit each other. For instance, a simple, clear, and self-determinable rule system can reduce ambiguity of event outcomes and need for referee interventions, such that dramatic roleplay becomes more meaningful and reactions to events more natural/less stagey, as well as interrupting dramatic play less. A well-conceived game world with lots of opportunities for character ideas and causes for conflict or cooperation, can drive interactions and contextualise character progression. And a clear vision of character development with fair access to new abilities and suchlike helps to create opportunities for a simple rule system to deliver unpredictable results (especially in somewhat mitigating differences in actual player ability), which supports gamist play and dramatic play (making both more interesting) while satisfying the desire of progress (leveling up) players.
I’d again note that LARP has differences from Tabletop RPGs in terms of the mix that works, because the circumstances are different; LARP games that derive their rules systems fairly directly from tabletop systems (even simple ones) are virtually unworkable with more than a few players because tabletop is designed to have a gamesmaster - that is, to be reffed full-time. This is not possible in LARP. Therefore, while rules are necessary to resolve many situations, they have to be simple enough in application that all players can determine the outcome of a situation, even if they don’t know the precise rule that has been invoked. For example, say I was poisoned using a potion made by an apothecary from a concoction of various plants. I don’t need to know what the poison is (in fact my character often ought not to know, unless he is an apothecary too!), and I don’t need to know where it came from, what skills produced it, how it can be cured, or how the components can be sourced. All I need to know is that it is a genuine in-game item, that I have consumed it, and what the effect will be upon my character’s health and abilities.
Similarly progress trees - these have fallen out of fashion in many areas of tabletop but if handled badly can totally cripple LARP, as new skills heap modifer after modifier upon the initially simple system.
Having now read a bit about the Big Model, I’m not sure I understand it at all, so far! I have some reading to do to determine whether every idea I’ve had has been presaged by someone else!
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[In passing I would note that I don’t consider myself a “dramatic” player at all; I’m a puzzle-solver. Indeed, I find it slightly weird that I do LARPing/freeforming at all since I’m generally an asocial introvert (somewhere on the Asperger’s scale.)
Yours is not an unusual personality for LARP - something about people with a rich internal world seeking a safe environment to practise social skills, perhaps?
Yes, I suspect that may definitely be part of it. Especially as the genre does a great job of providing a purpose for folk like me which something like normal “abstract improvisational theatre” categorically does not, whilst also allowing us to interact in a much safer space with those from whom we would normally run a mile… Sure, it doesn’t always work, but it’s really nice when it does.
I think that by so thoroughly rejecting LARP as a game with competitive elements, rules to govern this, and representative methods/substitute implements for activities like combat, Dogme99 allowed the discussion to begin around why we needed these elements and what characteristics these elements had to have in order to work.
As I noted, I wouldn’t necessarily mind except that the freeform subculture had already been pretty much doing that for at least a decade or so, so the status accorded to Nordic LARP strikes me as being (and forgive me for being rather impolite here) the genre’s Apple moment - it’s acclaimed for doing something radical and new when other people had been happily doing it before, but not in such a showy (and, admittedly impressive) way, and, as a result, everyone now automatically gives it the status of innovator. 
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I think the reasons for this are twofold - firstly Scandinavian LARP has successfully entered academic study, which exposes it to a much wider audience, broadcasts the seriousness with which ideas are being generated, and permits a higher degree of cross-pollination with existing, mature areas of liberal arts study. Other LARPers might have had similar ideas (like I’ve experienced in this thread) but without formalising their theory via academic forms of discourse, they maybe don’t communicate them effectively to the LARP world at large. Secondly, the Dogme99 guys wrote a manifesto. It has functioned exactly as manifestos ideally should; galvanising support and opposition, and kickstarting debate and theorising.
Whether or not some groups as you say have been experimenting with alternative ways of playing, without a clear manifesto or mission statement, old school LARPers (not reflecting that there may be other ways of playing since they haven’t examine the way they’re playing now) are likely to just think that those are games for people who don’t like pagga or don’t like competitive elements - and there are a lot of people in LARP who fit either description.
I was under the impression that the article photo represented ordinary quotidian Scandinavian activity having nothing to do with LARPing.
If that were the case, the skull mask worn by the person centre-right in the photo would have been a real skull - possibly the wearer’s own…
Oh I don’t deny that you are correct on both counts - that the “manifesto” made them visible, and that the resulting attention broke them out of what, for want of a better word, was the LARP ghetto. (I’m still constantly surprised when I run into groups who have “invented” freeform/LARPing because they had no idea it already existed. And then watching them reinvent the wheel as a result. But also coming up with things that I’d never seen before, because they didn’t have any preconceptions.)
That’s why I called it an Apple moment - I’m not sure it’s necessarily so much a lack of academic rigour elsewhere, but merely the appearance of cohesion that makes it easier for the journalistic approach to comprehend without needing to research further. Made more difficult, naturally, by the lack of resources to research at all - there are occasional requests on freeform lists from academics looking for data, and it’s always hard to source it.
Now, I’d better to get back to this weekend freeform game that I am supposed to be co-writing… 
There’s always been a clash between “battle” LARPs and freeform/plot-driven LARPs. It’s the former that gets depicted in movies and TV shows as the stereotype: guys in cheesy RenFest costumes and foam swords, fighting in the woods – which I’ve done, and can be a lot of fun. But LARP is as variable as any kind of game. I help run a yearly Lovecraft-inspired survival horror game that involves very little foam weaponry, a rule system that has nothing to do with World of Warcraft, and is deeply psychological. A major element of the game involves research: we have a library of hundreds of books we stock the buildings with, each one ‘gaffed’ with clues that can be gathered by taking time to ‘read’ them, helping to solve the big mysteries. In a recent game, the players entered the mind of a dying man to interact with a flashback to his time in the trenches of Verdun. LARPs are as creative as you want to be.
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Human existence in a nutshell, right there.
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