A Russian larp theory that aims to help larpwriters structure and focus the players’ storyline. It helps to understand what kind of experiences the players take out of the larp and how they are affected by it.
Maria Raczynska is a Russian larpwriter currently working with edu-larps. She has organized the talks programme at Russia’s biggest roleplaying convention, Comcon, in 2014 and 2015. She is one of the bridge-builders between the Knudepunkt community and its Russian-langauge equivalent.
Larp in Palestine is young but the movement is quickly growing, and not only within the country. In this talk Riad Walid Mustafa talks about what happended in 2014, where they went and what plans lies ahead.
Riad Mustafa has been working with organising, planning and implementing Larp projects since 2012. Organizer for larps such as Halat Hisar, a larp about modern-day occupied ‘Finland’ and the Beit Byout festival. He was one of the writers for “So you think you can dance”, about the political parties in Palestine, “Royal Picture” a larp about royal family conflicts.
Read more about The Larpwriter Summer School and watch Martin Eckhoff Andresens presentation of The Mixing Desk of Larp.
Ebba Petrén works as director, script writer and performer in the field of performing arts. Her works in arts collective Nyxxx is participatory and do often use tech to design play.
In this talk she tells about how she larped, became bothered and did something about it. This process opened the gate to a whole new artistic field.
Every year, Miriam and her colleagues from LajvVerkstaden runs more than a hundred days of larping. Most of these larps are done with players who have to participate and have never larped before. In this short talk Miriams shares some of her knowledge of how the running and design is different in these games.
Miriam is the founder and director of LajvVerkstaden. LajvVerkstaden (The Larp Workshop) works with larps as a tool to create interactive educational experiences. The company’s projects are created in collaboration with schools, museums, businesses and NGOs and are designed to give participants learning experiences that reach them on an intellectual, physical and emotional level.
Nordic larp and tools we’ve developed to design and understand games provide a unique toolkit for understanding the cultural and emotional impact of systems that bridge the social and the technical, infrastructural, or political worlds. The 21st century will be defined more than anything by the social impact of infrastructural systems, so let’s look at how larp can interact with other disciplines.
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex, transdisciplinary systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Among other things, Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project, Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute, a member of the advisory boards at the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Geeks Without Bounds, a contributor to the Briar project, and freelance security architecture and strategy consultant. She is nomadic and lives mostly in airports and occasionally in New York, London, and Stockholm.
Can larp be used to test and explore anthropological ideas? In her talk, Kaisa Kangas takes a look at the question.
Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer. She has been making and playing larps since 1995. Her latest work was creating the fictional world for the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar, where she was in charge of fiction and character design related to Finland. Kaisa is currently involved with designing educational larps for University of the Arts Helsinki. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese studies and a Licentiate’s degree in mathematics, and will defend her Ph.D. thesis in mathematical logic this year.
There are more adaptions of Lovecraft stories and his horror mythis than there are originals. Olle Nyman will talk about a how they tried to bring some of them alive in different larp-settings.
Olle Nyman is a Swedish organiser and gamer. Active since late the late 90-ies he´s been part of Scandinavia’s oldest gaming-convention GothCon, as well as organised a slew of larger and smaller larps together with the Storytellers, often with focus on social issues and dilemmas, or horror.
Wizardry 101 is a talk devoted to all who treated larp scenography as a nuisance or something that happens by accident. Agata “Świstak” Lubańska will try to destroy some of those stereotypes and also provide you with some hints on how it worked at Czocha College of Wizardry.
Agata “Świstak” Lubańska – one of the founders of Polish NGO called Liveform. She is organising projects for local community since her first Knudepunkt at 2011, and global – since 2014, when she became head scenographer at College of Wizardry. Despite her short romances with game design (which flourished with Distinction Award for short scenario ‘SNOW’ at Golden Cobra contest) her true loves are project management and working with people.
Website of organisation: Liveform
Larp website: College of Wizardry / @cowlarp on Twitter
Larp website: Fairweather Manor –
We have only begun to test all the possibilities of expression made available to us through larp. While adapting material from other media appear ‘unoriginal’ to some, it expands the range of voices expressed in our medium. Evan Torner’s talk focuses on how we seek inspiration from film, novels and the human archive for our future larp work.
Evan Torner (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, USA, as well as a larpwright and game event organiser. He has published on a variety of topics, including East German cinema, science fiction, genre cinema and live-action role-playing. His work has been supported by Fulbright, the DAAD, the DEFA Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Together with William J. White he co-edited the book Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media (McFarland, 2012). He is co-editor of the journal Analog Game Studies.
For Knudepunkt 2015, the books The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 and The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion book were made. Here the editor Claus Raasted explain what they are about.
Download the books at PDF’s from The Nordic Larp Wiki.
Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014
The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book
Claus Raasted has been a professional larper since 2002 and has done 17 books on larping.
From Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen 2015.