Tag: larp design

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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

We’re Here, We’re Queer and We’re Ready to Feel Good – Eva Wei

Not all queer narratives have to be about death, despair or being hidden away from the public eye. In her talk, Eva Wei will delve into the things she learned while organising Perfect Match, a feel good-larp about a reality dating show for disaster queers.

Eva Wei is a Swedish lawyer, sword fighter and larpwright. She has been one of the main organisers of Knutpunkt and delights in making close-knit larps about current subjects. She is currently the chairman of the larp collective Bread and Games and has a thing for interacting with new larp cultures and genres.

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2023 Copenhagen Talks

Aesthetics of Randomness – Kaisa Kangas

The international larp scene has gone more and more to the direction where players are in control of their character’s fate and story arc. In her talk, Kaisa Kangas argues that this does not always lead to the best larp experience. She talks about the aesthetics that random outcomes can bring to larp, drawing on the experience of running Seaside Prison several times a row.

Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer who has been making larps for more than 20 years; her best-known larps are probably Halat hisar and Seaside Prison. Kaisa is also a regular contributor in KP books and has edited the book Larp Politics. She will also be the editor in chief for the 2024 Solmubook. She is currently writing a non-fiction book about larp for a general audience.

Categories
2023 Copenhagen Talks

Designing the Apocalypse – Avoiding that Big Plot crushes the character’s journey – Janusz Maxe

Most large starts with an interesting setting. A vampire court, spaceship at the edge of the galaxy, a village in a time and place that is very different from ours. But then we go “What should happen during this larp?” and thus add the plot. That in itself is all fine, but when the plot becomes THE BIG PLOT there’s a danger it will crush the setting like a sledgehammer to an eggshell. This talk focuses on this. The warning signs that this might happen, the problems with that, and how to mitigate those problems, both as a designer and a player.

Janusz Maxe is from Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been role-playing since the mid 80ies, but did only get into larping 30 years later. What made him take the step was the larp The Monitor Celestra, since that was run in his hometown AND provided costumes. It turned out well since he promptly attended two of the runs, and a decade later he is still here as part of our community. He’s of the designers behind the larp The Devil You Know; and one of the creators of the character-memorising tool Ensemble.