Nordic Larp Talks

Videos

  • Role-Playing as a Teaching Method

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    Sanne Harder is a Danish scenario writer, who has more than 15 productions behind her, both LARP and tabletop, among which the most prominent are Agerlund (2009) and Felicia’s Story (2008). Her work has been published several times, both as part of antologies and as stand alone scenarios. Sanne has many year’s experience as a judge at the Danish scenario convention Fastaval. Here she has also been awarded prizes for her work. She has been a contributing writer and editor of several Danish (and international) magazines about roleplaying. In her professional life, Sanne is a teacher. She has studied theory of teaching at the Danish University of Education, where her work has focussed on competencies as an alternative approach to modern teaching. She has worked professionally with roleplaying in education for several years.

    Site: The Role-Playing Teacher

    Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

  • Fabricating Madness

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    Delirium is a larp about couples in a mental institution, a story about revolution and desire in a deconstructed universe. The larp uses ensemble play and workshops to develop a 50 hour experience for 38 players; played in a huge black box with theatrical set lights to break time flow and switch between scenes. It is designed as a high resolution larp involving many diegetic game devices to bring forth the feeling of insanity in the players.

    Peter Schønnemann Andreasen is a Danish organizer, game designer, proponent of the pre-larp workshop and co-creator of the Ars Ordo mechanic. He helped organize the “A Week” activities for Knudepunkt 2007, served as the Ropecon guest of honor in 2008, and was nominated for an honorary Otto at Fastaval 2011. Peter was one of the organizers of the larp Delirum in 2010.

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    Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

  • Playing With Personal Development

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    Bjarke Pedersen runs the Copenhagen based company Odyssé which focuses on interactive storytelling, larping and participatory events. He also works together International artist Brody Condon on interactive performances in Europe and the States. He has played, designed and organised larps since the late nineties. He has made everything from children-larps for the Royal Danish Theatre to an elaborate simulation of life aboard a Soviet submarine.

    Site: Odyssé
    Twitter: bjarcore

  • On Games: Painting Life With Rules

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    Johanna Koljonen is a writer, Radio and TV host, critic, and a popular lecturer on larp and related topics. Her groundbreaking larp criticism, in essays like “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: The Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing” and “The Dragon Was the Least of it: Larp As Ephemera and Ruin” are widely quoted in the field. She is a co-founder of the TV, radio and web production company Rundfunk Media AB and has a BA in literature. She has hosted several popular radio shows such as “P3 Kultur – Nördorama med Johanna Koljonen” and “Jättestora frågor med Johanna Koljonen” on Swedish national radio and writes columns for Dagens Nyheter and Fokus. She is the scriptwriter of the Oblivion High series of graphic novels and the co-author of the book-length larp autopsy Dragonbane – The Legacy.

    Site: johannakoljonen.com
    Twitter: jocxy

    Photo by: Jacob la Cour

  • Critical Strategies of Larp

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    Live action roleplaying games are the art of experience. Renowned game researchers Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros go through a wide range of live action roleplaying games, explaining how the games can be understood as escaping, exposing, exploring or imposing a certain world view. 

    Markus Montola (M.Soc.Sc.) has worked as a researcher both at University of Tampere and at Nokia Research Center, with role-playing and pervasive games as main research interests. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Tampere with a 3-year grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Together with Jaakko Stenros, Montola has edited two books on larp, Playground Worlds (2008) and Beyond Role and Play (2004). They are also authors of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009). They are currently editing a coffee table book called Nordic Larp, forthcoming in 2010.

    Jaakko Stenros (M.Soc.Sc.) is a game researcher at the Game Research Lab at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently he studies larps and social games, and is working on a dissertation on games as an activity. Together with Markus Montola, Stenros has edited two books on larp, Playground Worlds (2008) and Beyond Role and Play (2004). They are also authors of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009). They are currently editing a coffee table book called Nordic Larp, forthcoming in 2010.

    Further reading

    Anthologies on larp edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, electronic editions:

    Beyond Role and Play (2004)

    Playground Worlds (2008)

  • High Resolution Larping

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    Bringing both love and violence into a game can take players to a high resolution game experience. Andie Nordgren talks about ways to give players power to express conflicts and intimacy inside the game fiction rather than simulating them through abstract rules, and shares some of the mechanics used in the tribal larp Totem.

    Andie Nordgren produced the Interactive Emmy Award winning game The Truth About Marika and is currently working as a technical producer at CCP Games. She is one of the co-founders of the Geek Girl Meetup, a member of the change-through-participation think tank Interacting Arts, and was recently chosen one of ten people whose advice the next Swedish prime minister should heed by Internetworld magazine.

    Further reading

    High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond by Andie Nordgren in Playground Worlds.

  • Larp as Borderland Festivals

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    If you don’t party day and night, you get arrested! Massive art project Futuredrome built a Mad Max style city in an old quarry, and invited 1000 people to join the neverending party, live action roleplaying game, festival and movie-in-the-making. Mathias Gullbrandsson talks about lessons from the project and introduces Borderland – a new project in the same vein.

    Mathias Gullbrandson is a film-maker and games producer with 13 years of experience in storytelling, game and service design, and innovation processes. He has produced or been highly involved in games like Futuredrome, Knappnålshuvudet, Hamlet and Virtual Galileo. Gullbrandson is co-founder and CEO of The Story Lab.

  • Portraying Love and Trying New Genders

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    The story of a small village marriage on a desert planet was the canvas for an exploration of how to portray gender, relationships and sexuality in roleplaying games. While fighting uses large and bold gestures, love is a glance across the room. Emma Wieslander explains how the game Mellan Himmel och Hav (Between Heaven and Sea) had the ambition to let people out of stereotypes they might not even be aware of.

    Emma Wieslander works with development of organizational management and leadership in social economy and non-profit organizations. Much of these theories has evolved from her years as a chair person of Sverok, the Swedish organization for role-playing, LARP, computer-gaming etc. She was the conceptual designer of the multi art production Mellan himmel och Hav (Between heaven and sea) that combined roleplay with light art and modern art music at Swedens national theater. The game was highly political and deconstructed the idea of gender as we know it. She is currently working on a new political vision focusing on environment issues among other things.gen

    Further reading

    The 2004 Solmukohta anthology Beyond Role and Play has 3 articles concerning the game:

    Positive Power Drama: A Theoretical and Practical Approach on Emotive Larping
    by Emma Wieslander. Download article pdf

    Rules of Engagement by Emma Wielander, in the 2004 Solmukohta anthology Beyond Role and Play. Download article pdf

    Infinite Possibilities: Mellan Himmel och Hav From a Science Fiction Point of View by Karin Tidbeck, in the 2004 Solmukohta anthology Beyond Role and Play. Download arcticle pdf

    You can also have a look at the pre game website:

    Mellan Himmel och Hav webpage
    Swedish http://www.ars-amandi.nu/mhoh/
    Translated with Google Translate

  • The Quest for the Perfect Manifestation of a Dream

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    Martin Ericsson explains why live action roleplaying totally beats computer games when it comes to immersion. He goes on to talk about his use of 360° immersive aesthetics in the games Hamlet, a decadent 1930’s version of the Shakespeare play, and Carolus Rex, a Swedish space drama staged in a submarine.

    Martin Ericsson is senior designer. Over the past fifteen years he has instigated, written and designed more than twenty pieces of participative art ranging from reality games and Shakespeare adaptations to massive sci-fi and fantasy larps. Ericsson’s recent work includes four years of pervasive games research at the Interactive Institute’s Game Studio, culminating in the creation of the Interactive Emmy Award winning The Truth About Marika, the worlds first fully integrated participation drama. Through work at The Company P, Ericsson has collaborated with some of the world’s most respected showrunners, like Joss Whedon and Tim Kring.

    Further reading

    Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing
    by Johanna Koljonen, in the 2007 Knudepunkt anthology Lifelike.

    Five Weeks of Rebellion: Designing Momentum
    by Staffan Jonnson, Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Emil Boss, in the 2007 Knudepunkt anthology Lifelike.

    “I Could a Tale Unfold Whose Lightest Word Would Harrow up Thy Soul”:
    Lessons from Hamlet
    by Johanna Koljonen, in the 2004 Solmukohta anthology Beyond Role and Play.

  • Transmitting a political vision through larp

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    Peter Munthe-Kaas tells the story of how the game System Danmarc used a cyberpunk setting full of excitements like drugs, violence, gangs, hyperslum and cool parties to make a point about how welfare societies today treat people who have fallen off the ladder of success. Hear how the game makers built a small city from freight containers on a square in central Copenhagen, and how players reacted to the documentary about the situation today for homeless people in Denmark that ended the game.

    Peter Munthe-Kaas was one of the creators of the political larp experiment System Danmarc. His educational background is in sociology and performance design and he has participated in the making of several political, cultural and artistic projects in Copenhagen. Munthe-Kaas is currently working with facilitation of creativity and user driven innovation at the Danish Technical University and co-creating a larp about personal and political upheavals called Delirium, forthcoming in 2010.

    Further reading

    Watch a 32 min behind the scenes documentary of the production, where players and organizers talk about why they made the game and the impact it had.

    Watch the game trailer that was produced to get players interested before the game.

    Watch the documentary that was shown at the end of the game to make the connection between the game experience and society today.