Tag: larp

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2024 Tampere Talks

Playing to Live Elsewise – Maiju Tarpila

In her talk Maiju Tarpila presents the Manifesto of Playing to Live Elsewise, a collection of principles that suggest a starting point for practising larp in the times of the ecocrisis.

Maiju Tarpila is a Finnish artist and pedagogue who’s larp practise is embedded in questions of community, resilience and living within the ecocrisis. Her previous work includes larps such as Projekti X, Viimeiset and the Kaski-trilogy. At the moment she teaches larp at the University of Arts Helsinki and is working on a two year grant on larps that imagine and embody experience beyond fossil capitalism. For there to be a future filled with play, there needs to be huge shift in how we live and play.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Silently Patching the Magic Circle – Mo Holkar

We talk about larp as taking place within a ‘magic circle’ that separates ‘larp reality’ from the ‘real reality’ outside in the real world. And if everyone larps as intended, then the circle can be maintained smoothly — right? Mo Holkar is here to talk about ways in which participants — and perhaps some types of role especially — can find themselves unexpectedly doing unacknowledged work to patch holes in the magic circle. And to ask: should we be recognizing and planning for this need?

Mo Holkar is a UK larper, designer and organizer. His recent projects include working on Reunion; Bubbles: a hot-tub larp anthology; and the upcoming A Place of Greater Safety. He is part of the Larps on Location design collective, and is an editor at nordiclarp.org. Mo’s articles about larp have appeared in many KP-books and elsewhere; and a bunch of his chamber larps are available to download from holkar.net

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Inclusion in larp: Between challenge and the experience of limits – Björn Butzen

Björn Butzen is talking about the fact that “Diversity is a reality. Inclusion is a choice!” and why we struggle with this. We as a community cannot deny it: there is still a lack of disabled larpers and we have to improve our actions in order to be more inclusive. With this talk Björn wants to share some thoughts, what larp designers and organisers could do to change that.

Björn Butzen is an educational consultant for volunteer services. He is playing larps since 2014 and mostly co-organises events related to minilarps. As a participant in workshops on the topic of safety in larp, he contributes the perspective of disabled people, especially with regard to the tension between personal responsibility and heteronomy. Among other things, he also advises larp organisers on design documents and concrete implementation in order to find inclusive ways of enabling disabled or restricted people to participate in events.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Re-designing a ready larp – Laura Kröger

More and more larps are being rerun. Laura Kröger talks about redesigning a larp before running it again. When should an existing larp be redesigned and when it shouldn’t. Case example in her talk is Odysseus 2024.

Laura Kröger is a Finnish producer and narrative designer with over 20 years of experience for creating larps. During the past decade she has been especially active on rerunning larps. Laura has been a narrative lead in larps such as Pyhävuoren perilliset – Heirs of Saint Hill (run 7 times) and Shadows in Time (run 15 times). For international audiences she is best known as lead producer and narrative designer in Odysseus. An epic space drama that was run 3 times in summer 2019 and will return with 3 more runs in summer 2024.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Nukes, Pandemics and Teenagers – Martin Nielsen

Since 2018, humanist confirmants have played the larp The Outpost as part of their education on ethics and philosophy. The larp, created by Alibier on a commission basis from the Humanist society in Norway, gives the teenagers tough dilemmas in a post-apocalyptic setting. Martin Nielsen, lead designer in Alibier, tells the story of how they haven taken thousands of confirmants into a world of nukes and pandemics the past seven years.

Martin Nielsen is a Norwegian larpmaker and event organizer. His works include larps such as Allegiance, To The Wonder and Fallen Stars, as well as events such as Grenselandet, Knutepunkt and the Larpwriter Summer School. Except for two years when he was in politics, Martin has been the manager of the Oslo-based roleplaying company Alibier since 2015.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Permission to play: How to design for non-larpers – Gijs van Bilsen

What if…your boss tells you to Larp? That’s the challenge we have when designing serious larps for companies and schools. We played a 2 day serious larp at the United Nations in Geneva with 30 chiefs of staff. Because their boss asked them to do it. So how do you design your larp in such a way that people (who have never played before and might have misconceptions) give themselves permission to play?

Gijs van Bilsen is a speaker on the use of imagination, a Serious Larp designer, and an organizational development expert. He is currently collaborating with his partner, Anne, and together they design creative interventions based on Live Action Learning. His current passion project is their leadership training, where participants immerse themselves in a role specially written for them for four days. When he’s not designing interactive training, he’s on stage, explaining to his audience how to actively use imagination to discover and enhance empathy and personal qualities.

Don’t miss the talk Gijs mention:
Making Mandatory Larps for non players – Miriam Lundqvist

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2024 Tampere Talks

Kitsch, Netflix, and the recuperation of larp – Jamie Macdonald

Jamie MacDonald is here to declare that contemporary Nordic larps and larpers often do things that render them incapable of political efficacy or personal change, wasting the potential of this art form.

Jamie MacDonald is a stand-up comedian, queer performance maker, and PhD candidate in performance studies. He has for over a decade been a curious voice in Nordic larp, often writing about larp’s encounters with art and theatre. This year he is one of the Solmukohta programme team members, and is co-hosting Sublime Pretense, the inaugural art and larp symposium held here tomorrow morning.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen
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2023 Copenhagen Talks

The Wisdom of the Community – Juhana Pettersson

In 22 years, the Knudepunkt community has published 29 books that together form the greatest collection of larp writing in the world. This talk explores that legacy, the current situation of the KP book and its future.

Juhana Pettersson is a Finnish writer, novelist and roleplaying game and larp designer, who has edited two Knudepunkt books – Knudepunkt books are also his topic today. His larps include Luminescence, Halat hisar, End of the Line, Enlightenment in Blood, Parliament of Shadows, Redemption and Saturnalia. He’s currently working at Renegade Games Studios as the Lead Developer for the World of Darkness series of roleplaying game releases.

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2023 Copenhagen Talks

The Great Larp Swindle – Steve Deutsch & Larson Kasper

You also hate having to decide if you’d rather talk to wonderful people or listen to amazing talks instead of playing a 5 hour larp during KP? What if we just spent the whole weekend playing larps instead? This is the idea we had 12 years ago when organising our first IFOL.

Steve Deutsch is a German larp wright, facilitator and event manager. He was part of the team creating the German larp conference, Mittelpunkt, and is guilty of coauthoring one of Germany’s most complex and loathed Boffer Larp Rules Systems. Nowadays, he mostly runs larps on sailing ships and for companies who want to understand their power dynamics, communication and unwritten rules.

Larson Kasper is a professional Educator and Coach. He uses Edu-Larp as a method in his work with troubled kids as well as in the field of political education. Over the last 25 years he wrote, orgnised and facilitated multiple Larps and related events. Nowerdays he sudies “Counseling in the Workplace” and hopes to use the skills and overall experiance he gained as a larpwright, organiser and facilitator in his new area of work.

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2023 Copenhagen Talks

Learning to love the larp – Burnout culture in larp organisation – Sandy Bailly

Organizer burnout is an issue in our larp community, but have we stopped to think about how it might not be an individual, but a cultural problem we’re facing here? In this talk, Sandy Bailly will touch on the issue of burnout culture in larp organization, and she will equally argue how we already have the tools to do better, as we are already using them in how we educate our players.

Sandy Bailly is a Belgian larper who occasionally also crews, writes, designs and organises larps. She is interested in small, collaborative and altruistic play in larp, and she believes in re-imagining reality through play and building communities of care.