Category: 2018 Malmö

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2018 Malmö Talks

The Good, the Bad & the Internalized: Searching for Self Liberation in Conscience – Jonaya Kemper

Conscience was a Westworld inspired larp made by the NotOnlyLarp collective in the Southern Way style. It attempted to explore humanity, and what it means to be human, while providing an intense and realistic experience to its players which included playing heavily on violence, sexism, capitalism, and dehumanization. Exploring challenging themes in larp is nothing new, but what happens when even larp-tivism cannot stop internalized biases from impacting play in ways in which they are unintended? What can we do to challenge the internalized biases that stop us from playing the way we want, and how can we deal with the internalized biases of others that bleed into our play?

Jonaya Kemper is an American academic, writer, designer, and activist who believes that larp is a medium that can revolutionize the world by allowing us to work towards personal liberation from oppression. In addition to being a world builder and story member of the American boffer Undying, Jonaya is one of the organizers of the upcoming larp The Forbidden History, a freelance narrative writer for tabletops rpgs like John Wick Presents: 7th Seas, and is a part of the #feminism collection. Currently studying larp as a tool for self liberation in marginalized communities at New York University’s Gallatin Graduate School, Her work focuses heavily on the intersectional identities and providing diverse stories for those who rarely see themselves represented.

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2018 Malmö Talks

5 Things About Larping on a Sailing Ship – Stefan Deutsch

Stefan Deutsch is a larp game designer. For ¼ of a century he creates worlds for people to explore and to meet each other, be it development aid workers, tax accountants or experts and management. Participants in his games become Pirates in the Baltic Sea, aspects of a person committing adultery hiding naked in a cupboard or patients in a secret government lab. He mixes methods from sociodrama, Nordic Larp, freeform and other roleplaying games. In his previous role he was an IT consultant emigrating to East Africa. His newest exploit is a company specializing in larps on sailing ships. His favourite pastimes are wall climbing and board games and lives in Hamburg with his wife and two kids.

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2018 Malmö Talks

On Location: Playing, with Expectations – Laura Wood & Mo Holkar

Larp designers use transparency to make players aware of what might occur and to push the story forward. But how to approach the opposite task: a design that’s based on something that the players know definitely isn’t going to happen — but that is nonetheless the focus of play for the characters. How do we deal with this conflict? Laura Wood and Mo Holkar will talk through the tools that they used to achieve this in On Location, a weekend larp that ran recently in the UK.

Laura Wood has designed and organised several larps which have run in the UK, Sweden, Estonia, Russia and Germany. She is an organiser of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival, is an organiser of The Immersivists Club, a London based group that run chamber larps on a regular basis, a designer and organiser of On Location and has run events and workshops about safety and diversity in the larping and story gaming community.

Mo Holkar is a British larp designer and organizer. He is an organizer of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival; is an editor at nordiclarp.org; and is an organizer of The Game Kitchen, a monthly larp design workshop in London. He has presented programme items at KP/SK’ and written for its books; and his chamber larps have been run all over Europe, and beyond. Most recently he was a designer and organizer of the larp On Location.

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2018 Malmö Talks

Larping in the Political Heart of Europe – Maria Pettersson

Parliament of Shadows was a Vampire larp was organized in the European Parliament, the heart of European Union. How to take larp to prestigious, high-security institutions and how to make high-level politicians to larp?

Maria Pettersson is a Finnish writer and larp organizer, best known for Halat hisar (2013 and 2016). She currently works as a political advisor at the European Parliament, Brussels.

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2018 Malmö Talks

Routes of Inheritance – Will Osmond

Can process philosophy help us find new ways to design and play larps? In this talk, Will Osmond explores how Alfred North Whitehead’s notions of ‘routes of inheritance’ and ‘givenness’ might be applied in larping.

Will Osmond is a larper, playwright and researcher. He is co-designer of Life of a House, and has helped to organize and run On Location. He is currently working on larp scenario about invasions which mashes up concepts from Twin Peaks, The X Files and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. He is researching for a PhD in performance philosophy.

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2018 Malmö Talks

Emergence in Larp – Evan Torner

The structured chaos of larp is difficult to parse, especially when such unpredictability is precisely the point. In this talk, Evan Torner discusses how emergence works as an aesthetic principle in larp, and suggests a rubric for how to understand our incredibly complicated larp experiences in retrospect.

Evan Torner is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he also directs the UC Game Lab. Though his primary research focus is East German cinema and science fiction, he has maintained an active presence in the role-playing game scene as a player, designer, and researcher. He co-edited Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing with William J. White, and is currently an editor for Analog Game Studies, which he co-founded. He also co-founded the Golden Cobra contest, and has written numerous freeform larp scenarios.

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2018 Malmö Talks

Under 25: We’re Here to Take Your Place – Agata Świstak

During her talk, Agata Swistak would like to encourage established larp organisers and community leaders to change their style of management and open themselves to something new. Equipped with a number of tips and advice, she would like to inspire people to discussion on how to be more inclusive and supportive towards young folks in our communities – and why it will make the larp better.

Agata Swistak is a community leader and a professional project manager working with larp and event design. In her work, she puts an effort to create safe and empowering spaces. In 2013 she was part of the group creating one of the loudest larps in the world – College of Wizardry, and later became a main coordinator of the entire event. She believes that empathy and inclusion create not only strong communities, but also unforgettable and transformative experiences.

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2018 Malmö Talks

Same Role, Different Life – Karijn van der Heij

Karijn wants us to start thinking about the way we relate to the people who have played the same character as us in another larp-run. Much attention has been given to the things our co-players can add to our experience but are these ‘other selves’ also co-players in a way, that can add something to the way we look at the character?

Karijn van der Heij has been a very active participant in the Dutch larp scene for fifteen years, where she has co-writing credits on over 30 larps in different genres. In the past five years, she has shifted much of her attention to the international games and strives to pilfer as many ideas as she can to bring into her local scene.

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2018 Malmö Talks

The Wayfinder Experience – Ben Books Schwartz

Despite being entirely isolated from the Nordic world, the Wayfinder Experience of New York has evolved a style of larping far more similar to many Nordic larps than the majority of its geographic compatriots. This talk traces the influences and impacts of that parallel evolution, from Wayfinder’s birth as the Adventure Game Theater in the 1980s up through present day, and explores the idea that the community around the game is just as important as anything about the game itself.

Ben “Books” Schwartz is a professional larp organizer specializing in larps for kids and teens, and has been designing and running their own larps since 2006. They have worked as an organizer and event director for the Wayfinder Experience, Trackers Earth, New World Magischola, and now Dziobak Larp Studios. Their focus is on exploration, empowerment, and empathy development through play.

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2018 Malmö Talks

White Knighting and Why It’s Problematic But Not Necessarily In the Sense You Might Think – Aina Skjønsfjell

White Knighting is a phenomenon Aina only recently has heard about. Fear of White Knighting is currently potentially holding back allies, and in her talk, Aina Sivsdatter addresses the unseen issues with the white Knight phenomenon.

Aina D Skjønsfjell has been larping since she was 15, and has organised a shy dozen of larps in her life. However, it was only in 2014 that she learned that there are several strikes of larps and that her style is called Nordic. In her spare time, when she isn’t larping , writing larps, prepping for larps or playing D&D, Aina works as a translator and is unnecessarily overfond of how languages work.