An archive comes alive when someone does something with it

I was invited to talk about games as a teaching method at a Nordic and Baltic folklore network in Bergen. I came home with a full notebook and a sketch of something new.

Last week I spent two days in a seminar room at Øysteins gate 1 in Bergen, together with a group of fantastic archivists, folklore researchers, a singer, a novelist, a screenwriter and a researcher on artificial intelligence and creativity.

The occasion was Folklore and Creative Industries, a network meeting of the Forum for Digital Folklore Archives and Creative Industries, hosted by the University of Bergen and SAMLA. I was there to give the talk Learning by Doing: Games as a Method for Teaching, but most of the time I sat as a student with a pen in my hand.

What the others brought

Professor Kyrre Kverndokk opened with a short tour of the digital folklore archives across the Nordic and Baltic countries, from Latvia and Iceland to Finland and Sweden. It felt like a gift to learn that tens of thousands of legends, witchcraft trials and folk ballads can be searched from a laptop.

Gunnhild Sundli, vocalist in the band Gåte, talked about tradition as raw material. She grew up with folk music at home and later went looking for it on purpose. What stayed with me was her point that the ballads survive because the themes are timeless: jealousy, love, grief, hope and joy. She described the shift from performing to the tradition to performing from it, interpreting and interpreting again. That is close to what I am trying to do with games.

The novelist Therese Tungen, from Kvam in Gudbrandsdalen, talked about how she uses local legends and dialect in her novel Den andre sida av elva. A story that belongs to a particular place has to borrow that place's own language and folklore. The legends show how people in the valley explain what they do not understand, and give the characters words for fear and longing. The dialect tells the reader where a person belongs. Tungen described the work as listening her way into a place before she could write out from it. I recognized that from Silverheart, where the sources from Kongsberg provide both the facts and the tone. I have not read her book yet, but I am looking forward to it.

Agnes Brudvik Engeset from the Vestland county archive gave us the tourism perspective, and it was an eye-opener. Tourists in Vestland are mostly over 50, travel without children, often with friends, and are willing to pay. Nature is the main attraction, no question. So the county layers cultural experiences on top of what the tourists are already doing, for example a visit to a mountain farm for those who are out hiking anyway. That is how culture finds its way into tourism, and heritage becomes what gives the trip its meaning. A brilliant move, in my opinion.

On day two, Taive Särg from the Estonian Folklore Archives presented the exhibition Enter Woodland Spirits, and Espen Aukan explained how he and his team turned Norwegian legends into the Troll films on Netflix. Hearing a screenwriter talk about Saint Olav, church bells and kaiju monsters in the same breath was a good reminder that folklore still has a strong place in modern media. The viewing figures and records he showed said the same thing.

After lunch, Sanita Reinsone from the University of Latvia showed digital legend journeys, a map where you follow a thread from one recorded legend to the next, with the source one click away. Her model was simple. Memory leads to association, and association leads to a new story. Arnulf Mattes closed the academic part with MishMash, the new center for AI and creativity, drawn as an overlap between people, machines, science and art.

What I tried to say

I opened with an old quote: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." That is the core of the whole talk, and it felt like the right place to start in a room full of folklore researchers.

Games have taught us faith, history, war and diplomacy for five thousand years, from Senet to Minecraft. My expertise is in analog role-playing games, where you learn by living inside a story.

The main example was Silverheart, the role-playing game about Kongsberg at the end of the 1700s, made together with Kongsberg municipality and the Norwegian Mining Museum. Students play a laid-off miner or a widow in debt, in a town where the Silver Works is about to close. I told them how I worked with the sources, and how the game went from idea to every lower secondary school in town in a year and a half. I also told them about Berger historical society, where forty minutes of play turned into a conversation about stolen silver in the buttons of their own relatives.

The second example was Kvad, my Norwegian Viking role-playing game. At Kvinnherad upper secondary school, two classes learned the old verse forms by writing their own verses after each session. During an Erasmus week at Kongsberg upper secondary, students from rich families rolled two dice and added them, while the poor rolled the same dice and subtracted. The students felt the unfairness in their bodies.

The response was generous, both during the talk and in the breaks afterwards. Several people were curious about how you turn folklore into something people actually sit down and play.

What I take home

The thread running through all eight talks was that an archive only comes alive when someone does something with it. A singer sings from it, a novelist writes from it, a screenwriter builds a monster out of it, a tourist plans a trip around it.

A game is one way in, and it has one advantage and one disadvantage the others do not: the audience has to take part.

My notebook from those two days filled up, and it ends with a rough sketch of an interactive folklore map for Kongsberg, with legends, music, places and stories pinned to the landscape along the Numedalslågen river. For now it is only a sketch, but it would not exist without these two days.

Thank you to Kyrre Kverndokk and everyone at SAMLA for the invitation, and for two wonderful days in Bergen.

Best,

Karl Otto