Larp as artistic research is a small but exciting field. This talk offers insights from such work and makes some sugestions about what the field of art as research can offer larp. In addition to existing structures to guide larp documentation and collaboration with other fields, artistic research proposes frameworks for thinking about what kind of knowledge is created when we larp, and how larp can ask questions.
Jamie MacDonald is a larper, comedian, and PhD student from Canada but firmly planted in Helsinki. He curates queer performance spaces, especially in performance genres that are not part of the museum and institutional culture. His thesis concerns emotional labour and affective labour in transgender stand-up comedy, and also takes the form of a stand-up show. He has written several articles about crossovers between larp and theatre and the aesthetics of larp, and in general enjoys poking at ideas and their boundaries.
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How to make larp at the end of the world – Jamie Macdonald
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How Can we Know what Actually Happened in a Larp – Annika Waern
The stories people tell about larps they have attended, lie very far from what they actually experienced in the game. Also, everyone tells a different story, and this is particularly true for players and organizers.
Is there a way to understand what actually happened in a larp, and can we tell a single more coherent story about how a larp played out? This talk is about techniques to study larp.
Annika Waern (Ph.D) is a professor and game researcher at the department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has a long-standing experience of studying games that play out in the physical world, including but not limited to larp. Together with Markus Montola, and Jaakko Stenros she is author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009).
Site: Annika Waern