Nordic Larp Talks is a series of short, entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects, ideas and design practice from the Nordic and collaborative traditions of live action roleplaying.
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist and author of the narrative nonfiction book Leaving Mundania, which explores larp from a variety of angles in the US and Nordic countries. Her writing has appeared on The Today Show website, io9. and in The Daily Beast. She holds a masters journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in fiction writing from Emerson College and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary journal Fringe, which is dedicated to political and experimental literature.
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.
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.
Mikko Rautalahti plays role-playing games because they’re awesome. When he’s not pretending to be somebody very interesting, or enabling others to do the same, he writes. Turns out that can be a real job! He’s currently employed at Remedy Entertainment as a senior writer, where he makes video games like Alan Wake. To the best of your knowledge, he has never punched a baby.
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.
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.
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.
The term gamification has been a buzzword the latest years in the sense that games are slowly making their way into new parts of society. That is now happening with larp and Claus calls it larpification.
Claus Raasted has been a professional larper for a decade, is the author of 8 books on larp and splits his time between being editor-in-chief of the national Danish roleplaying magazine ROLLE|SPIL and doing larp stuff for a variety of different institutions and people. He also has his own weapons factory, but who hasn’t, these days?
Jamie MacDonald is a transnational Finnish-Canadian artist in theatre, performance art, stand-up comedy, drag performance, punk music, writing, video, and larp. He started out in Toronto with a fairly traditional education in drama-based theatre as an actor and director, but then moved to Finland, where he couldn’t make heads or tails of the language. This move catalyzed an interest in physical theatre and dance, which is where Jamie 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, Jamie is the creator of Walkabout, a long-term crossover project between larp, theatre, and performance art. Their latest project, The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, ran in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki in the summer of 2012.
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.
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
Prior to the Nordic Larp Talks Helsinki 2012, Juhana Petterson the editor of States of Play, the Solmukohta book of the year held a very convincing argument this years book are completely different compared to its predecessors. You can download the book as pdf at the site nordicrpg.fi.
Juhana Pettersson is the producer of the videogame tv-show Tilt and the director of publishing at Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Nordic roleplaying culture.
He has written a book called Roolipelimanifesti (Like, 2005) and a roleplaying game called Ikuisuuden laakso (Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, 2009). He edited a collection of roleplaying games called Unelma Keltaisesta kuninkaasta ja muita tanskalaisia roolipelejä with Kristoffer Apollo and Tobias Wrigstad (Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, 2011). He lives in Helsinki, Finland.
