Category: Talks

Categories
2015 Copenhagen Talks

Experimental Anthropology – Kaisa Kangas

Can larp be used to test and explore anthropological ideas? In her talk, Kaisa Kangas takes a look at the question.

Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer. She has been making and playing larps since 1995. Her latest work was creating the fictional world for the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar, where she was in charge of fiction and character design related to Finland. Kaisa is currently involved with designing educational larps for University of the Arts Helsinki. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese studies and a Licentiate’s degree in mathematics, and will defend her Ph.D. thesis in mathematical logic this year.

Categories
2015 Copenhagen Talks

Practical Applications of Lovecraftian Horror – Olle Nyman

There are more adaptions of Lovecraft stories and his horror mythis than there are originals. Olle Nyman will talk about a how they tried to bring some of them alive in different larp-settings.

Olle Nyman is a Swedish organiser and gamer. Active since late the late 90-ies he´s been part of Scandinavia’s oldest gaming-convention GothCon, as well as organised a slew of larger and smaller larps together with the Storytellers, often with focus on social issues and dilemmas, or horror.

Categories
2015 Copenhagen Talks

Wizardry 101 – Agata Świstak

Wizardry 101 is a talk devoted to all who treated larp scenography as a nuisance or something that happens by accident. Agata “Świstak” Lubańska will try to destroy some of those stereotypes and also provide you with some hints on how it worked at Czocha College of Wizardry.

Agata “Świstak” Lubańska – one of the founders of Polish NGO called Liveform. She is organising projects for local community since her first Knudepunkt at 2011, and global – since 2014, when she became head scenographer at College of Wizardry. Despite her short romances with game design (which flourished with Distinction Award for short scenario ‘SNOW’ at Golden Cobra contest) her true loves are project management and working with people.

Website of organisation: Liveform
Larp website: College of Wizardry / @cowlarp on Twitter
Larp website: Fairweather Manor –

Categories
2015 Copenhagen Talks

Larp as Adaptation – Evan Torner

We have only begun to test all the possibilities of expression made available to us through larp. While adapting material from other media appear ‘unoriginal’ to some, it expands the range of voices expressed in our medium. Evan Torner’s talk focuses on how we seek inspiration from film, novels and the human archive for our future larp work.

Evan Torner (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, USA, as well as a larpwright and game event organiser. He has published on a variety of topics, including East German cinema, science fiction, genre cinema and live-action role-playing. His work has been supported by Fulbright, the DAAD, the DEFA Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Together with William J. White he co-edited the book Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media (McFarland, 2012). He is co-editor of the journal Analog Game Studies.

Categories
2015 Copenhagen Books Talks

The Knudepunkt 2015 Books – Claus Raasted

For Knudepunkt 2015, the books The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 and The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion book were made. Here the editor Claus Raasted explain what they are about.

Download the books at PDF’s from The Nordic Larp Wiki.
Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014
The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book

Claus Raasted has been a professional larper since 2002 and has done 17 books on larping.

From Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen 2015.

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Does larp design matter? – Eirik Fatland

Can larp design be used for something more than creating stories to live in? Interaction designer and larwright does think so. Going through a cascade of different larp projects one thing stands out, with larp design you can direct human creativity into a shared purpose.

Full transcript of the talk.

Eirik Fatland is a larpwright and interaction designer from Norway and has has since 1994 been involved in the design of around 10-15 larps. Both for dark of dark, ambitious larps with political themes (Europa, Inside:Outside, and PanoptiCorp) and strongly narrative and occasionally comedic larps (Moirais Vev, Marcellos Kjeller, What Happened at Lanzarote). He was the editor of Larp, the Universe and Everything (2009) and has written several articles for the Knutepunkt books, larp magazines and at his website The larpwright.

Site: The larpwright

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Halat hisar – State of Siege – Kaisa Kangas

How is life under occupation? A team of Finnish and Palestinian organizers created the larp Halat hisar, which took place in a modern day Finland under a fictional occupation.

Halat hisar (State of Siege in English, Piiritystila in Finnish) was held near Parkano, a small town in southern Finland, the 15th – 17th of November 2013. About 70 people participated, coming from Finland, Palestine, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany and the U.K.

The story took place in at the university of Helsinki, in a Finland occupied by the fictional nation of Uralia. At the university there was student council elections and preparations for the Great Literature and Humanities Conference. This as well as other events caused sparks among the students.

Halat hisar in the Nordic Larp Wiki
Halat hisar webiste

Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larpwright. Her most recent game is Ha- lat hisar (2013) in which she was in charge of the fiction. Earlier works include Ghost Express (with Dare Talvitie, 2001-2002), a campaign that pioneered pervasive larp in Finland. She holds a M.Sc. in mathematics and a BA in East Asian Studies, and is currently working on her Ph.D. in mathematical logic.

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Sketching larp – Bjarke Pedersen

How can we simplify the way larps are designed? In this talk Bjarke wants to inspire designers not only to create more great larps by working with sketching as a method. “Why in the larp community do you not sketch?”

Bjarke Pedersen has played, designed and organised larps since the late nineties. He runs the Copenhagen-base company Odyssé which focuses interactive storytelling, larping and participatory events.  He is one of the founders of Denmark’s largest larp-organization Rollespilsfabrikken. His work spans everything fro

m children’s larps to interactive performance pieces at major international art museums in Europe and USA.

Site: bjarkep.com
Twitter: @bjarcore

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Political larping – Strategies to make a larp accessible to non-larpers – Siri Sandquist

Suffragett was a larp about the Suffragette movement that fought for womens right to vote in the early 20th century. The vision of the larp was to be both political by educating the participants about history but also in how the put inclusiveness on top of their agenda. Siri Sandquist from the organizing teams explains their thoughts. 

Siri Sandquist holds two master degrees in archaeology specializing in gender theory and contextual archaeology. In 2014 she took part in organizing her first larp together with Susanne Vejdemo, Daniel Armyr and Cecilia Billskog. Suffragett! was a larp aimed at nonlarpers as well as already active larpers focused around the feminist movement for vote in the beginning of the 20th century where Siri was in charge of roles and fiction. 

Twitter: @sillysiri

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Playing as human or robot – Carl Heath

Is it possible to roleplay together with a robot with artificial intelligence? Human and Machine is a psycho-technological theater experiment at the crossroads between man and machine, where the aim is to explore the encounter between man and machine in a context where they are fully engaged on stage, acting, in real time. In this early experiment, Carl Heath talks about the possibilities of the project together with Robert Bolin and Michael Schade.

Human and Machine is a collabortation between Scenlaboratioret, The Collaboratory and Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

Carl Heath focuses on research and development projects regarding ICT and learning and learning perspectives in game studies. Prior to his current position at the Interactive Institute, Carl has worked for the Swedish Armed Forces, National Theatre Company, Sverok (The Swedish Gaming Federation), The National Council of Swedish Youth Organisations (LSU), the IT consultancy firm Technohuman, and GR (The Gothenburg Region of Local Authorities). Carl is the founder of GR Experiential Learning (now a part of The GR Pedagogical Centre) and the last two years, between 2010 and 2012, he was the Director of the Division of Educational Cooperation, as well as the Director of the GR Upper Secondary School Admissions Office. He has designed numerous larps and educational games. Carl has an educational background at the University of Gothenburg, where he studied political science, social science, pedagogy and ICT.

Twitter: @carlheath