nordic larp – Page 2 – Nordic Larp Talks

Ethical Content Management and the Freedom to Create – Shoshana Kessock

2014-05-31

2014 Gothenburg, Talks

How do we create safe spaces that still spur freedom of creation in larps? Shoshana Kessock presents the concepts of responsible spaces.

Shoshana Kessock is a game designer and researcher at the NYU Game Center in New York City, pursuing her MFA in game design. Shoshana serves as the founder of the Living Games Conference in New York and has written, organized or staffed over twenty five larps across the United States. She is also the co-founder of Phoenix Outlaw Productions, an independent game design company specializing in larp and tabletop role-playing games. Her writing credits include the freeform larp SERVICE, the tabletop scenario No Exit for Fate Core, and the upcoming Larp Dangers Untold. She lives in Brooklyn.

Site: shoshanakessok.com
Twitter: @ShoshanaKessock
Bringing larp to a refugee camp …without really knowing how – Martin Nielsen

2014-05-30

2014 Gothenburg, Talks

With the goal to create a more fun and fantastic society, the project driven organisation Fantasiforbundet really has done just that, in many parts of the world. In this talk, Martin Nielsen gives you the story of how the brought roleplaying and larp to kids in a refugee camps.

Martin Nielsen, political scientist of education, has his dayjob in UngOrg, an NGO promoting empowerment of young people in Oslo. He has been larping since 1999 and has been a key contributor to Fantasiforbundet’s projects in Lebanon, Belarus and Palestine as well as meeting places such as Grenselandet, Knutepunkt in Norway and The Larpwriter Summer School. He is also partner in the company Alibier AS that works with participatory methods, including larp.

Site: Fantasiforbundet
Project site: Fantasiforbundet’s project portal
Freeform and larp – Terminology and Strategies – Anna Westerling

2014-05-29

2014 Gothenburg, Talks

In the field of roleplaying terminology can be on of the trickier parts since it’s a constantly evolving movement. During the last decade the freeform scene has come much closer to the larp scene. Anna Westerling put’s some of these terms on the map.

Further reading
Naming the Middle Child in Crossing Habitual Borders (2013)

Anna Westerling is a Swedish organizer and game designer who is part of the Vi åker jeepcollective. She was the designer and producer of En stilla middag med familjen (tr. A nice evening with the family, 2007), and produced Nordic Larp (Book) and Knutpunkt 2006 and Knutpunkt 2010. Since 2013 she organizes the Stockholm Scenario Festival.

Site: Anna Westerling
Twitter: anna_hoppetossa
How Can we Know what Actually Happened in a Larp  – Annika Waern

2013-04-18

2013 Oslo, Talks

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
Bleed: How Emotions Affect Role-Playing Experiences  – Sarah Lynne Bowman

2013-04-18

2013 Oslo, Talks

What happens when roleplayer’s in-game feelings spill into their real lives? How are role player communities affected by what happens in a larp?

This talk will explain the phenomenon of bleed in role-playing games and advocate for greater awareness of the phenomenon and increased discussion surrounding the emotional content of role-playing games.

Sarah Lynne Bowman (Ph.D.) teaches as adjunct faculty in English and Communication for several institutions including The University of Texas at Dallas. McFarland Press published her dissertation in 2010 as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Together with Aaron Vanek, Bowman co-edited The Wyrd Con Companion 2012, a collection of essays on larp and related phenomena. Her current researchinterests include examining social conflict and bleed within role-playing communities, applying Jungian theory to role-playing studies, studying the benefits of edu-larp, and comparing the enactment of role-playing characters with other creative phenomena such as drag performance.

Site: Sarah Lynne Bowman
No Training can Replace Experience, or Can it? –  Stefan Deutsch

2013-04-18

2013 Oslo, Talks

Larp is great in building strange realities, far-away worlds and fantasies unheard of. But can it also be used to recreate authentic situations from real life to enable development workers to not only know about intercultural competence, but maybe even develop it before really coming in touch with a foreign culture?

Stefan Deutsch plays and facilitates larps for nearly 20 years, co-wrote one of Germany’s most controversial larp rules system and was one of the organizers of the MittelPunkt larp conference in Germany. He lives in Germany and Tanzania and works as a consultant for a software company and larp.

Site: Reality check
The Mixing Desk of Larp – Martin Eckhoff Andresen

2013-04-18

2013 Oslo, Talks

How do you teach the complexity of larp design to beginners? This was the question that triggered The Mixing Desk of Larp – a framework for thinking about larp design. Like the sound or light technician adjusting faders to achieve the desired effect, the larp designer adjusts the faders of the Mixing Desk of Larp to change his or her game.

This talk explores how this can make larp design easier to teach as a game design discipline. It also helps designers become more aware of the default positions of their larp design.

There are plenty of people who contributed to the Mixing Desk of Larp. All the organizers and lecturers of the Larpwriter Summer School 2012 are to be credited as well as Swedish pedagogic larp company LajvVerkstaden. And also the community at large for developing the tools and terms used.

Read more about the Larpwriter Summer School and find resources and videos at www.larpschool.org.

And read the Knutepunkt book of 2013 and at the Mixing desk article at The Nordic Larp Wiki.

Martin Eckhoff Andresen is a larper, organizer and game designer from Oslo, Norway. He has been involved with Fantasiforbundet’s “Larpocracy” projects in Belarus, that explore the role of games as a tool for informal education. He has edited Playing the Learning Game – A practical introduction to educational roleplaying (2012). At daytime, he’s finishing a master thesis in economics.

Site: Nordic Larp Wiki – The Mixing Desk of Larp
Welcome to Larp. Let’s Play –  Jana Pouchlá

2013-04-18

2013 Oslo, Talks

Larp is cool and fun. And it is a great experience to try it out. Or it should be a great experience if your organizers are prepared to deal with newcomers.

In this talk Jana Pouchlá describes some basic arrangements that make new larpers feel safe and enjoy the game. She also argues why newbies sometimes are better larpers than super experienced players.

Jana Pouchlá is a professional lecturer of larp and soft skills. Her favourite challenge is to connect these two worlds as larp is a great way to guide adults towards participation and active learning. Pouchla has an education from theatre university and currently works in the larp company Court of Moravia.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0mJyjbMfw]

Here is the movie Jana shows in her presentation. Make sure to turn on the English captions if you don’t speak Czech.

Site: Court of Moravia
What does Nordic Larp mean? –  Jaakko Stenros

2013-04-17

2013 Oslo, Talks

What is a “Nordic Larp”? What does that expression mean? A few years ago these questions were academic or trivil. That was before the term acquired recognition and brand value.

Now there is something at stake. In this talk one of the editors of the Nordic Larp book explains what he thinks the term means, where it came from, who gets to define it, and what is so damn special about it anyway.

Read the full keynote transcript

Resources
Nordic Larp Wiki
Nordiclarp.org

Jaakko Stenros (M.Soc.Sc.) is a game researcher at the Game Research Lab at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently he is working on a dissertation on the limits of games. Together with Markus Montola, Jaakkohas edited three books on larp, Playground Worlds (2008), Beyond Role and Play (2004) Nordic Larp (2010). They are also authors of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009).

Site: Jaakko Stenros
Twitter: @lizardenigma
NLT 2012 in Helsinki

2012-04-16

News

All presentations from Nordic Larps Talks Helsinki 2012 are now available on the site.

Watch the presentations

How to become a god – Mike Pohjola

From preforming arts to larp – Johanna MacDonald

Larpification – Claus Raasted

The interplay between player and man in the street – JP Kaljonen

Getting A Haircut And A Real Job – Interview with Mikko Rautalahti (Remedy) & Andie Nordgren (CCP Games)

Experimental Larp Design – Jesper Bruun

Playing in Graveyards: Terror collides with larp – Lizzie Stark

Bonus: States of Play – Solmukohta 2012 book presentation – Juhana Petterson

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Tag: nordic larp