Category: 2013 Oslo

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2013 Oslo Talks

How Can we Know what Actually Happened in a Larp
 – Annika Waern

The stories people tell about larps they have attended, lie very far from what they actually experienced in the game. Also, everyone tells a different story, and this is particularly true for players and organizers.

Is there a way to understand what actually happened in a larp, and can we tell a single more coherent story about how a larp played out? This talk is about techniques to study larp.

Annika Waern (Ph.D) is a professor and game researcher at the department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has a long-standing experience of studying games that play out in the physical world, including but not limited to larp. Together with Markus Montola, and Jaakko Stenros she is author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009).

Site: Annika Waern

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2013 Oslo Talks

Bleed: How Emotions Affect Role-Playing Experiences
 – Sarah Lynne Bowman

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What happens when roleplayer’s in-game feelings spill into their real lives? How are role player communities affected by what happens in a larp?

This talk will explain the phenomenon of bleed in role-playing games and advocate for greater awareness of the phenomenon and increased discussion surrounding the emotional content of role-playing games.

Sarah Lynne Bowman (Ph.D.) teaches as adjunct faculty in English and Communication for several institutions including The University of Texas at Dallas. McFarland Press published her dissertation in 2010 as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Together with Aaron Vanek, Bowman co-edited The Wyrd Con Companion 2012, a collection of essays on larp and related phenomena. Her current researchinterests include examining social conflict and bleed within role-playing communities, applying Jungian theory to role-playing studies, studying the benefits of edu-larp, and comparing the enactment of role-playing characters with other creative phenomena such as drag performance.

Site: Sarah Lynne Bowman

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2013 Oslo Talks

No Training can Replace Experience, or Can it? – 
Stefan Deutsch

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Larp is great in building strange realities, far-away worlds and fantasies unheard of. But can it also be used to recreate authentic situations from real life to enable development workers to not only know about intercultural competence, but maybe even develop it before really coming in touch with a foreign culture?

Stefan Deutsch plays and facilitates larps for nearly 20 years, co-wrote one of Germany’s most controversial larp rules system and was one of the organizers of the MittelPunkt larp conference in Germany. He lives in Germany and Tanzania and works as a consultant for a software company and larp.

Site: Reality check

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2013 Oslo Talks

The Mixing Desk of Larp – Martin Eckhoff Andresen

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How do you teach the complexity of larp design to beginners? This was the question that triggered The Mixing Desk of Larp – a framework for thinking about larp design. Like the sound or light technician adjusting faders to achieve the desired effect, the larp designer adjusts the faders of the Mixing Desk of Larp to change his or her game.

This talk explores how this can make larp design easier to teach as a game design discipline. It also helps designers become more aware of the default positions of their larp design.

There are plenty of people who contributed to the Mixing Desk of Larp. All the organizers and lecturers of the Larpwriter Summer School 2012 are to be credited as well as Swedish pedagogic larp company LajvVerkstaden. And also the community at large for developing the tools and terms used.

Read more about the Larpwriter Summer School and find resources and videos at www.larpschool.org.

And read the Knutepunkt book of 2013 and at the Mixing desk article at The Nordic Larp Wiki.

Martin Eckhoff Andresen is a larper, organizer and game designer from Oslo, Norway. He has been involved with Fantasiforbundet’s “Larpocracy” projects in Belarus, that explore the role of games as a tool for informal education. He has edited Playing the Learning Game – A practical introduction to educational roleplaying (2012). At daytime, he’s finishing a master thesis in economics.

Site: Nordic Larp Wiki – The Mixing Desk of Larp

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2013 Oslo Talks

Three Ways to Make Games More Inclusive – 
Lars Nerback

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How do you, as a game designer, work to get a diverse group of participants to feel welcome and included? Lars Nerback talks from his experience in working with educational larps in schools, and gives three examples for making inclusive games.

Lars Nerback is one of the owners of LajvVerkstaden (”The Larp Workshop” directly translated), a Swedish company that designs and runs educational larps for children, teenagers and adults. Apart from his work as game designer and project manager, Lars is deeply involved in issues of social justice and equality.

Site: LajvVerkstaden

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2013 Oslo Talks

Welcome to Larp. Let’s Play – 
Jana Pouchlá

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Larp is cool and fun. And it is a great experience to try it out. Or it should be a great experience if your organizers are prepared to deal with newcomers.

In this talk Jana Pouchlá describes some basic arrangements that make new larpers feel safe and enjoy the game. She also argues why newbies sometimes are better larpers than super experienced players.

Jana Pouchlá is a professional lecturer of larp and soft skills. Her favourite challenge is to connect these two worlds as larp is a great way to guide adults towards participation and active learning.  Pouchla has an education from theatre university and currently works in the larp company Court of Moravia.

Here is the movie Jana shows in her presentation. Make sure to turn on the English captions if you don’t speak Czech.

Site: Court of Moravia

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2013 Oslo Talks

What does Nordic Larp mean? – 
Jaakko Stenros

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What is a “Nordic Larp”? What does that expression mean? A few years ago these questions were academic or trivil. That was before the term acquired recognition and brand value.

Now there is something at stake. In this talk one of the editors of the Nordic Larp book explains what he thinks the term means, where it came from, who gets to define it, and what is so damn special about it anyway.

Read the full keynote transcript

Resources
Nordic Larp Wiki
Nordiclarp.org

Jaakko Stenros (M.Soc.Sc.) is a game researcher at the Game Research Lab at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently he is working on a dissertation on the limits of games. Together with Markus Montola, Jaakkohas edited three books on larp, Playground Worlds (2008), Beyond Role and Play (2004) Nordic Larp (2010). They are also authors of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009).

Site: Jaakko Stenros
Twitter: @lizardenigma

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2013 Oslo Books Talks

Knutepunkt 2013 Book Project Presentation – Karete Jacobsen Meland & Katrine Øverlie Svela

Another year of Knutepunkt, another of book! This year, they come as a compilation of four, each book (hopefully) giving a glimpse of what is working its way around in the now oh-so-wide larp community.

Larps, people, theories and ideas are crossing international borders, and we want to know what it’s like! In what ways is it encouraging us to explore our own, personal preconceptions and habits? What does it all look like? The two editors will be interviewed by Johanna Koljonen, explaining what kind of book they set out to do – and showing what it has become.

You can download the books as pdfs.

Karete Jacobsen Meland is a larper, organizer and now editor, from Oslo. Currently living in Trondheim, she is supposed to be studying towards becoming a clinical psychologist, while being a part of “the gaffa” (organizer crew) at the Larp Factory in Trondheim, an actress at the students’ theatre and writing a play for the student festival UKA-13.

Katrine Øverlie Svela is the other editor and the graphic designer of this year’s book. She comes from Oslo, but studies industrial design in Trondheim, where she also is one of the organizers at the Larp Factory. Currently Katti writes a children’s play for the student festival UKA-13, organizes seks:førti about design and architecture, and dreams of a larpful summer.

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