Nordic Larp Talks is a series of short, entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects and ideas from the Nordic tradition of live action roleplaying games.
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For questions, contact Petter Karlsson at petter.karlsson@gmail.com or Andie Nordgren at andie.nordgren@gmail.com
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
The interplay between player and man in the street - JP Kaljonen
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
Jesper Bruun (Cand. Scient) is a science education researcher who has made contributions to the Nordic larp scene by writing academic articles and developing innovative games. His current interest in larp revolves around using non-traditional ways of communication in larps and using pre-larp workshops for teaching participants to play games. Both interests are represented in the tango roleplay In Fair Verona.
Site: Jesper Bruun at University of Copenhagen
Twitter: @jbruun
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Played around with larp and roleplaying all your life? Want to make so good use of all the experience gained after entering all kinds of strange worlds? Well, at least Mikko Rautalahti and Andie Nordgren has done just that and are now employed at the video game studios Remedy Entertainmet (Alan Wake, Max Payne) and CCP Games (Eve Online, World of Darkness). Here interviewed by Johanna Koljonen about their thoughts about their work today and it’s connections to their roleplaying background.
Site: funpastimes.com
Twitter: @MikkiRMD
Site: log.andie.se
Twitter: @nordgren
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. She also won the innovator category of the The Swedish Grand Journalism Prize of 2011.
Site: johannakoljonen.com
Twitter: @jocxy
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
JP Kaljonen is a Helsinki based visual artist. He works in the fields of social- and participatory art dealing with themes related to cultural interaction. His works are based on societal grounds and vary from video or photography to projects in public space. Kaljonen has realized his projects in different parts of Asia and Europe, and his works have been presented in group- and solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Recent shows include Backlight International Photo Festival, Finland 2011, Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma URB11-Festival, Finland 2011 and Porapara Art Space Public Art Exhibition at Patenga Sea Beach, Bangladesh 2012. He organized and developed the larp Dublin2 (Helsinki, 2011) together with artists Johanna Raekallio and Haidi Motola. The second production of the larp is organized together with Johanna Raekallio and Nordic cooperatives in Stockholm 2012.
Site: kaljonen.com
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Johanna MacDonald is a transnational Finnish-Canadian artist in theatre, performance art, stand-up comedy, drag performance, punk music, writing, video, and larp. She started out in Toronto with a fairly traditional education in drama-based theatre as an actor and director, but then moved to Finland, where she couldn’t make heads or tails of the language. This move catalyzed an interest in physical theatre and dance, which is where Johanna focused intensively for the next half-decade, training in about half a dozen well-known theatrical methodologies from butoh to biomechanics. Together with Aarni Korpela, Johanna is the creator of Walkabout, a long-term crossover project between larp, theatre, and performance art. Their latest project, The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, will be run in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki in the summer of 2012.
Site: walkabout.happeningfish.com
Twitter: @happeningfish
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Mike Pohjola is a writer, a game designer, an entrepeneur and an activist. He has written two novels, three table-top roleplaying games, a manifesto, several theatre plays, larps at art festivals and for fun, some short films, digital games, interactive projects, and lots of other stuff. He has founded two award-winning companies, that together have won an International Emmy Award for Best Interactive TV Service (The Truth About Marika), two Interactive Rockies (Conspiracy For Good) and a Prix Europa (The Forest of Babel). He’s currently working on his third novel 1827 – Inferno about the Great Fire of Turku.
Site: mikepohjola.com
Blog: mikepohjola.wordpress.com
Twitter: @mikepohjola
My presentation, How To Become A God, deals with the history of drama from Dionysian rituals to reality television, and beyond, and how all of this relates to roleplaying. While doing that, I’ll also answer a puzzling point in Aristotle’s Poetics that’s been bugging theatre scholars for three thousand years.
Nordic Larp Talks and State of Play
Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk
Last night a packed room at Huset in Copenhagen and vibrant a crowd on the live-stream watched Nordic Larp Talks 2011.
Photo: Larson Kasper
We would like to give a final big hand of applause to our fantastic speakers. Your speeches were awesome and we salute you.
Also we are so grateful for the production team from Knudepunkt 2011; Nynne Søs Rasmussen, Anders Berner, Jens Niros, Juliane Mikkelsen, Kristoffer Thurøe, the people at Huset i Magstræde, SocialVideo Production for the live-streaming and all others who made this event possible!
You can watch the stream in full in the player below for now, but in the following weeks will will post the individual speaks here at the Nordic Larp Talks site complete with links and references.
On Games: Painting Life With Rules (starts at 02:15)
Johanna Koljonen
Playing With Personal Development(starts at 12:00)
Bjarke Pedersen
Fabricating Madness(starts at 22:00)
Peter Schønnemann Andreasen
Role-Playing as a Teaching Method(starts at 34:55)
Sanne Harder
Horror and Tragedy in Nordic Role-Playing (starts at 45:55)
Markus Montola
Not Another Story About Boy Meets Girl(starts at 54:15)
Tor Ketil Edland
Can Playing Games Teach Us About War?(starts at 1:05:25)
Eirik Fatland
Documenting the Nordic Larp Scene(starts at 1:20:42)
Panel: Johanna Koljonen & Jaakko Stenros
Johanna Koljonen introduces Nordic larp by talking about her bodily experience of a fallout shelter outside Tulsa during an alternate past Cuban Missile Crisis. She explains how you can understand what goes in to creating ambitious larps by comparing the process with a birthday party, and goes on to answer the question of wether these games are games at all. Watch this Nordic Larp Talk for a brief introduction to Nordic Larp and why it’s an art form worth knowing more about.
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. Read more: johannakoljonen.com
Further reading
Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay of the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing
by Johanna Koljonen, in the 2007 Knudepunkt anthology Lifelike.
One of the dominant design ideals in Nordic larp is the 360° illusion, the ambition to create a physically realized virtual reality in which “what you see is what you get” – everything in the game area representing its fictional counterparts exactly. In this essay, Koljonen traces the development of this ideal, charts the experience of interacting with such an environment, compares it with real-life role-playing situations and challenges the assumption that a complete physical illusion will always bolster the experience of being “in character”. The essay includes descriptions of the larps Föreningen Visionära Vetenskapsmäns Årliga Kongress (a conference of mad scientists), Carolus Rex (retro-futuristic space pulp staged on a Russian submarine), Knappnålshuvudet (a combined lunatic asylum and therapy centre watched over by guardian angels).
The Dragon Was the Least of it: Larp As Ephemera and Ruin by Johanna Koljonen, in the 2008 Solmukohta anthology Playground Worlds.
Dragonbane – The Legacy by Johanna Koljonen, Tiina Kuustie and Tiinaliisa Multamäki
This book-length post-mortem and the theoretical essay that preceded it describe the design, production and outcome of the fantasy larp Dragonbane, in which an enormous international team of volunteers created a fully-functional fantasy village in the remote forests of Swedish Älvdalen. The game had functional magic, special effects and pyrotechnics and an animatronic dragon the size of a building.
24 Hours in a Bomb Shelter: Player, Character and Immersion in Ground Zero
by Heidi Hopeametsä, in the 2008 Solmukohta anthology Playground Worlds.
