On the Origins of the Finnish Gaming Industry

Finland has a remarkably strong and diverse gaming industry. This is true especially when considering our size as a nation of only about 5 million people. We have many big success stories like Supercell, Rovio, Next Games [NXTGMS], Remedy [REMEDY], Housemarque and so many others. I’m also running a game studio myself.

We often get asked — why is this? What makes Finland a gaming superpower. Usually the credit for this phenomenon is given to the demo scene. Since the early 90s Finland has had a thriving demo scene where people compete on graphics coding skills by making short demonstrable samples. The main event for the demo scene is Assembly that yearly gathers over 5000 people to play games and appreciate the demos. The oldest game companies in Finland have been founded from the demo crews that took part in the early competitions.

While Assembly has a clear and tangible contribution for the Finnish gaming industry I’ve come to realize there is also another event that would likely deserve a little bit of credit for the industry’s success.

I’m talking about the Europe’s largest non-commercial roleplaying convention with more than 3000 visitors each year with the name Ropecon. If the name would be translated to English it would be Rogacon from ROle-GAme-CONvention. First Ropecon was held in 1994 only two years after the first Assembly.

I’ve attended Ropecon roughly every year since 1998 but I haven’t realized before how unique an event it is. Last week Helsinki had the honor of hosting the 75th Worldcon, only the 4th non-native English speaking country to do so. While the event was thought to be a remarkable success (in Finnish) by fans for me it didn’t resonate that much. It took me a while to analyze why I felt that way.

Perhaps visiting Ropecon only two weeks earlier had made me expect an even better world class scifi & fantasy fandom event with multitude of experiences. We Finns are often guilty of underrepresenting our own achievements and thinking that anything international or originating from outside Finland must somehow be greater. I fell prey to this thinking that something called the World’s convention must oust our local productions and be greater and bigger.

My main mistake though was in classification. Worldcon of course is a literary convention for science fiction writers and fans of the books. There is only little embracing of other forms of fandom for imaginary worlds. The Finnish equivalent by no means is Ropecon but Finncon — organized yearly in rotation in Helsinki / Turku / Jyväskylä / Tampere.

I’ve read hundreds of scifi and fantasy books myself, but for me being a fan of these productions has always meant playing games around them as well. The Finnish scifi/fantasy scene has been built with a very open mind. Many people have made a jump from reading about a character into thinking what if I could be that character? What would I do if I were in that situation? And then have gone on to build those extended experiences.

What Ropecon offers is the whole package: lectures, panels, honorary guests, roleplaying games, LARPs, tabletop gaming, collectible card games, miniature wargames, a trade hall, historical dance practices & historical balls, concerts, displays of applicable martial arts like swords & bows, workshops to create your own gear or build your own world, story reading for kids & adults, lots of people dressed up as either characters from their favorite productions or their own self-made characters, a photo booth to take a picture of your outfit and pretty much anything people would find of interest to bring in and talk about. This year there was a mini planetarium where you could listen in on stories around the stars for 20 minutes.

Ropecon is not specially geared towards digital gaming, although there are lectures around the craft of making digital games too, but for me as digital games developer Ropecon is a very inspirational event. There I feel very welcome and accepted as a fan of scifi and fantasy in any form I like.

I mean surely, the Worldcon 75 held some very amazing lectures and many of them have been dealing with subject matters that don’t really dictate the form of the end products. But the ultimate feeling has been that the convention is foremost for writers and readers and my gamer-first-reader-second identity was not fitting in.

I don’t want to judge Worldcon for what it is. There clearly is a huge following for the convention and I did enjoy my time there too. Just that it made me realize what a gem we have in the local scene here with an event like Ropecon.

The success of the Finnish gaming industry has been rising alongside Ropecon and while correlation does not imply causation it must not hurt either to have a world class creative scifi & fantasy games event at your doorstep. Cheers to the organizers of Ropecon!