Category: Talks

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Ethical Content Management and the Freedom to Create – Shoshana Kessock

How do we create safe spaces that still spur freedom of creation in larps? Shoshana Kessock presents the concepts of responsible spaces.

Shoshana Kessock is a game designer and researcher at the NYU Game Center in New York City, pursuing her MFA in game design. Shoshana serves as the founder of the Living Games Conference in New York and has written, organized or staffed over twenty five larps across the United States. She is also the co-founder of Phoenix Outlaw Productions, an independent game design company specializing in larp and tabletop role-playing games. Her writing credits include the freeform larp SERVICE, the tabletop scenario No Exit for Fate Core, and the upcoming Larp Dangers Untold. She lives in Brooklyn.

Site: shoshanakessok.com
Twitter: @ShoshanaKessock

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Bringing larp to a refugee camp …without really knowing how – Martin Nielsen

With the goal to create a more fun and fantastic society, the project driven organisation Fantasiforbundet really has done just that, in many parts of the world. In this talk, Martin Nielsen gives you the story of how the brought roleplaying and larp to kids in a refugee camps.

Martin Nielsen, political scientist of education, has his dayjob in UngOrg, an NGO promoting empowerment of young people in Oslo. He has been larping since 1999 and has been a key contributor to Fantasiforbundet’s projects in Lebanon, Belarus and Palestine as well as meeting places such as Grenselandet, Knutepunkt in Norway and The Larpwriter Summer School. He is also partner in the company Alibier AS that works with participatory methods, including larp.

Site:  Fantasiforbundet
Project site: Fantasiforbundet’s project portal

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Talks

Freeform and larp – Terminology and Strategies – Anna Westerling

In the field of roleplaying terminology can be on of the trickier parts since it’s a constantly evolving movement. During the last decade the freeform scene has come much closer to the larp scene. Anna Westerling put’s some of these terms on the map.

Further reading
Naming the Middle Child in Crossing Habitual Borders (2013)

Anna Westerling is a Swedish organizer and game designer who is part of the Vi åker jeepcollective. She was the designer and producer of En stilla middag med familjen (tr. A nice evening with the family, 2007), and produced Nordic Larp (Book) and Knutpunkt 2006 and Knutpunkt 2010. Since 2013 she organizes the Stockholm Scenario Festival.

Site: Anna Westerling
Twitter: anna_hoppetossa

Categories
2014 Gothenburg Books Talks

The Knutpunkt 2014 Books – Eleanor Saitta

2014 brings to brand new books to Knutpunkt. The Foundation Stone of Nordic larp is a collection of articles and media as a canon for the Nordic Larp discourse. Accompanying the conference is also the a book of new articles for this year, The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp. Eleanor Saitta from the editorial team presents them here.

Download the books at PDF’s from The Nordic Larp Wiki.
The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp 
The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. She’s new to the Nordic larp community but has had pieces in the past two Kn- ute-books and is looking forward to more. Eleanor is nomadic and lives mostly in airports and occasionally in London, New York, and Stockholm.

Site: Dymaxion.org
Twitter: dymaxionlife​

Categories
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

Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

image

Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

The Mixing Desk of Larp – Martin Eckhoff Andresen

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

image

Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

Three Ways to Make Games More Inclusive – 
Lars Nerback

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

image

Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

Welcome to Larp. Let’s Play – 
Jana Pouchlá

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

image