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.
In this talk, the editor-in-chief of this year’s Solmukohta book, Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic-inspired Larp. In this talk, she tells you why you should read the book.
Kaisa Kangas is the editor-in-chief of this year’s Solmukohta book, Liminal Encounters, and the 2016 book Larp Politics. Currently, she is writing a non-fiction book about larp for a general audience. Kaisa is also a larp creator with nearly 30 years of experience. She is most known for the larps Halat hisar and Seaside Prison. Kaisa is presently working together with the Amos Rex art museum in Helsinki to create the larp Hyvät museovieraat (Dear Museum Visitors) that will be run in May. She is also the artistic producer of the upcoming Immersion Larp Festival that will be held in Turku in August. She holds a PhD in mathematics and a MA in East Asian Studies.
Editors Kaisa Kangas and Jukka Särkijärvi present the two 2016 Solmukohta (Knutepunkt) books: Larp Realia, and Larp Politics (both available as free pdf downloads).
Jukka highlights the varied content of Larp Realia – ranging from an article about a larp buit around actual fistfighting to the first food recipe in the long history of the Knute-books!
Kaisa talks about the new volume – subtitled “Systems, Theory and Gender in Action” – on the political dimension of larp. Among the topics are themes like refugees, fascism, experiences of larping as gay or trans, larp as labour, viewing larps with political science tools, and so on. A big section of the book is about political larps (including educational larps) from a range of countries. To the editor’s surprise, no articles about internal larp community politics were submitted. This is probably a sign of health!
Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer who has been playing and making larps for 20 years. She is the fiction lead for the Palestinian-Finnish political larp Halat hisar (State of Siege) that will be run again in June 2016. She is also involved with designing and running educational larps for University of Arts Helsinki. Her other works include Ghost Express (2001-2002, together with Dare Talvitie), a pioneer of pervasive larp. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and a BA in Japanese Studies.
Jukka Särkijärvi is a writer, editor, translator, game designer, conrunner and Pathfinder Society Venture-Captain Emeritus from Espoo, Finland. He is currently working on his master’s thesis in English language and literature at the University of Tampere. His previous work include translations of the Stalker and Whispering Road role-playing games, game design on Vihan lapset, a great deal of role-playing game journalism for a variety of publications both on- and offline, and Roolipelikirja, a nonfiction book about role-playing games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Jaakko has 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).
