Author: Petter Karlsson

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2022 Linköping Talks

Larp Chemistry – Laura Wood

Larp Chemistry is difficult to define and means different things to different people. This talk attempts to look at what it could be, and whether we can create it.

Laura Wood (she/they) has designed several larps which have run in several countries throughout Europe, including Here Comes a Candle, and Inside. She is an organizer for the Larps on Location collective. She is a strong proponent of creating a safety culture within larps and larp festivals, and has written articles on body positivity within larp.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Napping with Purpose – Frida Lindegren

The world and the larp community have been through a lot lately. In her talk, Frida Lindegren talks about how we can slow down and explore how we can play and design for rest.

Frida Lindegren is a Swedish psychologist, experience designer, and larper.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Burn Out and Fade Away: Larp Organizing Can be Tough – Mo Holkar

Organizing larps and larp-related events can leave people prone to burnout. This talk looks at why this happens, and how participants, and organizers themselves, can try to avoid it.

Mo Holkar is a UK larper, larp designer, and larp organizer. He works within the design collective Larps on Location and was one of the lead organizers of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival, and of The Game Kitchen design workshop. He has experienced his share of burnout, and didn’t like it.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Only Larp can save VR! – Josephine Rydberg

VR and the Metaverse aren’t as nice places as they could be. Let’s use some larp designer skills for some DIY improvements.

Josephine Rydberg is a larper who does artistic research at Stockholm University of the Arts, cross-media development at Region Gävleborg & lots of dog walking.

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2022 Linköping Talks

The Ethics of Storytelling – Chris Bergstresser

As larpers, we have an intimate control over the stories we choose to tell. In this talk, Chris Bergstresser asks what responsibility we bear for the stories we end up telling.

Chris Bergstresser has been a larper and larp designer for decades. They’ve been active in the Nordic Larp community since 2015. Their next project is Triumph, a Hunger Games-inspired larp running in Zagreb in late November. Their subsequent project will be a very long nap.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Reading Larps – Hanne Grasmo

Larps exist outside the ephemeral reality of the activity of larping. Larps are published as books and archived as PDFs. In these formats, larps can be read, without playing them, if you have the literacy.

In the spring of 2022, Hanne Grasmo browsed through 2303 documented larps in search of European larp scripts published in English or Nordic languages. In this talk she discusses the importance of the larp script, rants about archiving larps, and ponders what features are needed for a larp to be published.

Hanne Grasmo is a Norwegian larp designer, sociologist, educator, and writer. She published the first popular science book about Nordic Larp in 1998, co-founded the Knutepunkt conferences, and is well-known for the world-touring larp Just a Little Lovin’; last year the full larp script of 630 pages was published as a book. Hanne is currently employed as a Doctoral researcher in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University, researching Role-play and Sexual Arousal.

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2022 Linköping Talks

The Lion, the Witch and the Workshop – Olivia Fischer

Workshop design is an essential part of larp design. In her talk, Olivia Fischer shares some thoughts on workshop design from the perspective of an education specialist.

Olivia Fischer is an Austrian larp designer, lecturer, and researcher at the University College Of Teacher Education Vienna. She has been designing larps for more than 20 years and she has given workshops and talks on larp and edularp for larpers and larp designers and also for teachers, university lecturers, and other interested persons.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Pimp My Magic School – Mike Pohjola

In magic school larps, kids play young witches and wizards who go to school to study alchemy, telepathy, healing, runes, and other supernatural subjects. In his talk, Mike Pohjola talks about how his local magic school works – and how last Saturday, they tried something a little different.

Mike Pohjola is a Finnish novelist, playwright, entrepreneur, activist, and game designer. He has written several published tabletop roleplaying games, designed and organized dozens of larps, wrote the Manifesto of the Turku School when he was 21, and in his thesis argued that Aristotle really missed out on larping on account of living in Ancient Greece. Mike stopped being a goth idol to explore the life of a middle-aged dad.

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2021 Oslo Talks

What Knutepedia Actually Taught Us – Jamie Macdonald

During the pandemic, Jamie MacDonald and Jaakko Stenros ran a series of Zoom-based Nordic larp virtual pub quizzes, called Knutepedia. We ended up learning some things about our community in the process.

Jamie MacDonald arrived at Nordic larp through the theater and performance route, and over the last decade has written extensively on the potentials and pitfalls of that field’s crossovers with larp. He is also the co-creator of a series of theater/larp pieces, like Walkabout and The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, along with Aarni Korpela. He is Canadian and lives in Finland, where he is pursuing a PhD on stand-up comedy performance.

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2021 Oslo Talks

I Was Dangerous Player and I’m Really Sorry – Ria Böök

We all make mistakes. But what to do when you are the one who puts people in real physical danger. Ria Böök tells about she being the dangerous player and what she learned from it.

Ria Böök is a Finnish player and organizer. She organized her first larp in 2002. Sine then, she has been responsible of ie. design and character writing (Tartuntavaara / State of Infection with Jae Takala), Empty epsilon scenarios and coding (Odysseus), kitchen (Pyhävuoren perilliset x 5) and safety (Merirosvopoukama / The Pirate Cove). Ria’s special interest is accessibility, especially for visually impaired.