Author: Petter Karlsson

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2024 Tampere News

Nordic Larp Talks Tampere 2024

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

For the third time, we had the pleasure to have the Nordic Larp Talks in Finland. This time in Tampere with 9 great presentations. You can find them all in this article. Please do, the are really worth watching.

All the talks

Also don’t miss these great photos from the event by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr

Nordic Larp Talks Tampere 2024 was held on April 10th at Paidia – Living Lab of Play during A Week in Finland, which in part was connected to the Solmukohta 2024 conference.

It was hosted by Johanna Koljonen and produced by Petter Karlsson in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University and Tracon ry, with economic support from Participation Design Agency
& Lajvverkstaden,

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

Nordic Larp Talks is a series of short, entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects and ideas from the tradition of Nordic Larp.

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2024 Tampere Talks

Playing to Live Elsewise – Maiju Tarpila

In her talk Maiju Tarpila presents the Manifesto of Playing to Live Elsewise, a collection of principles that suggest a starting point for practising larp in the times of the ecocrisis.

Maiju Tarpila is a Finnish artist and pedagogue who’s larp practise is embedded in questions of community, resilience and living within the ecocrisis. Her previous work includes larps such as Projekti X, Viimeiset and the Kaski-trilogy. At the moment she teaches larp at the University of Arts Helsinki and is working on a two year grant on larps that imagine and embody experience beyond fossil capitalism. For there to be a future filled with play, there needs to be huge shift in how we live and play.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Silently Patching the Magic Circle – Mo Holkar

We talk about larp as taking place within a ‘magic circle’ that separates ‘larp reality’ from the ‘real reality’ outside in the real world. And if everyone larps as intended, then the circle can be maintained smoothly — right? Mo Holkar is here to talk about ways in which participants — and perhaps some types of role especially — can find themselves unexpectedly doing unacknowledged work to patch holes in the magic circle. And to ask: should we be recognizing and planning for this need?

Mo Holkar is a UK larper, designer and organizer. His recent projects include working on Reunion; Bubbles: a hot-tub larp anthology; and the upcoming A Place of Greater Safety. He is part of the Larps on Location design collective, and is an editor at nordiclarp.org. Mo’s articles about larp have appeared in many KP-books and elsewhere; and a bunch of his chamber larps are available to download from holkar.net

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Inclusion in larp: Between challenge and the experience of limits – Björn Butzen

Björn Butzen is talking about the fact that “Diversity is a reality. Inclusion is a choice!” and why we struggle with this. We as a community cannot deny it: there is still a lack of disabled larpers and we have to improve our actions in order to be more inclusive. With this talk Björn wants to share some thoughts, what larp designers and organisers could do to change that.

Björn Butzen is an educational consultant for volunteer services. He is playing larps since 2014 and mostly co-organises events related to minilarps. As a participant in workshops on the topic of safety in larp, he contributes the perspective of disabled people, especially with regard to the tension between personal responsibility and heteronomy. Among other things, he also advises larp organisers on design documents and concrete implementation in order to find inclusive ways of enabling disabled or restricted people to participate in events.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Re-designing a ready larp – Laura Kröger

More and more larps are being rerun. Laura Kröger talks about redesigning a larp before running it again. When should an existing larp be redesigned and when it shouldn’t. Case example in her talk is Odysseus 2024.

Laura Kröger is a Finnish producer and narrative designer with over 20 years of experience for creating larps. During the past decade she has been especially active on rerunning larps. Laura has been a narrative lead in larps such as Pyhävuoren perilliset – Heirs of Saint Hill (run 7 times) and Shadows in Time (run 15 times). For international audiences she is best known as lead producer and narrative designer in Odysseus. An epic space drama that was run 3 times in summer 2019 and will return with 3 more runs in summer 2024.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Nukes, Pandemics and Teenagers – Martin Nielsen

Since 2018, humanist confirmants have played the larp The Outpost as part of their education on ethics and philosophy. The larp, created by Alibier on a commission basis from the Humanist society in Norway, gives the teenagers tough dilemmas in a post-apocalyptic setting. Martin Nielsen, lead designer in Alibier, tells the story of how they haven taken thousands of confirmants into a world of nukes and pandemics the past seven years.

Martin Nielsen is a Norwegian larpmaker and event organizer. His works include larps such as Allegiance, To The Wonder and Fallen Stars, as well as events such as Grenselandet, Knutepunkt and the Larpwriter Summer School. Except for two years when he was in politics, Martin has been the manager of the Oslo-based roleplaying company Alibier since 2015.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Permission to play: How to design for non-larpers – Gijs van Bilsen

What if…your boss tells you to Larp? That’s the challenge we have when designing serious larps for companies and schools. We played a 2 day serious larp at the United Nations in Geneva with 30 chiefs of staff. Because their boss asked them to do it. So how do you design your larp in such a way that people (who have never played before and might have misconceptions) give themselves permission to play?

Gijs van Bilsen is a speaker on the use of imagination, a Serious Larp designer, and an organizational development expert. He is currently collaborating with his partner, Anne, and together they design creative interventions based on Live Action Learning. His current passion project is their leadership training, where participants immerse themselves in a role specially written for them for four days. When he’s not designing interactive training, he’s on stage, explaining to his audience how to actively use imagination to discover and enhance empathy and personal qualities.

Don’t miss the talk Gijs mention:
Making Mandatory Larps for non players – Miriam Lundqvist

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Kitsch, Netflix, and the recuperation of larp – Jamie Macdonald

Jamie MacDonald is here to declare that contemporary Nordic larps and larpers often do things that render them incapable of political efficacy or personal change, wasting the potential of this art form.

Jamie MacDonald is a stand-up comedian, queer performance maker, and PhD candidate in performance studies. He has for over a decade been a curious voice in Nordic larp, often writing about larp’s encounters with art and theatre. This year he is one of the Solmukohta programme team members, and is co-hosting Sublime Pretense, the inaugural art and larp symposium held here tomorrow morning.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Our black blind spot: A call to climate action – Søren Lyng Ebbehøj

Climate change represents the gravest challenge yet to face mankind. International larping — however progressive and beneficial in other scopes — mostly contributes to the crisis: not the solution. This is a call to action.

The speaker (Søren) has asked to add the following corrections:

The thoughts presented in the video are based on the work and insights of Nór Hernø, Eva Maersk and Søren Ebbehøj – the original KP23 sustainability team – Any conclusions or recommendations presented here or elsewhere do not necessarily reflect the views of the other team members or KP23.

The pie chart and numbers presented in the video are based on calculations by Nór Hernø and Søren Ebbehøj as part of the initial work on Knudepunkt 2023 in Denmark. Also, some of the concepts in the talk (greenhushing in particular) were brought into the larp discourse by Nór Hernø.

Søren apologizes sincerely for leaving that information out of the presentation and recognizes the importance of the work done by Nór and Eva. Søren never intended to ignore the work of the other team members.

Note: In the talk, Søren mentions the emissions from KP22 in Sweden incorrectly. The pie chart shown is based on calculations made for a theoretical KP based on a series of estimates in 2022. The footprint from participant transportation was calculated based on the countries of origins of participants at KP22 in Sweden as a model of the participants of the upcoming KP23 in Denmark. Thus, when Søren talks about KP22, he should have said “the model calculations of a theoretical KP in Denmark with the participant spread of KP22 in Sweden”.

Søren Ebbehøj 2024-04-17

Søren Ebbehøj is a Danish larp organizer and engineer working in climate and energy politics. Søren has been a co-organizer of four large-scale Nordic larps and a handful of conventions including Knudepunkt 2019. From his everyday job, Søren has almost ten years of experience with developing and implementing climate policy — something he utilized in the initial work on Knudepunkt 2023, formulating the sustainability strategy and initial mapping of the KP19 carbon footprint.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Books Talks

The Solmukohta 2024 Book: Liminal Encounters – Kaisa Kangas

In this talk, the editor-in-chief of this year’s Solmukohta book, Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic-inspired Larp. In this talk, she tells you why you should read the book.

Kaisa Kangas is the editor-in-chief of this year’s Solmukohta book, Liminal Encounters, and the 2016 book Larp Politics. Currently, she is writing a non-fiction book about larp for a general audience. Kaisa is also a larp creator with nearly 30 years of experience. She is most known for the larps Halat hisar and Seaside Prison. Kaisa is presently working together with the Amos Rex art museum in Helsinki to create the larp Hyvät museovieraat (Dear Museum Visitors) that will be run in May. She is also the artistic producer of the upcoming Immersion Larp Festival that will be held in Turku in August. She holds a PhD in mathematics and a MA in East Asian Studies.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen