Mirka Oinonen is an educational studies student who has been writing and organizing larps since 2014. She is one of the five main organizers of the Life Beyond- campaign.
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Life Beyond – Mirka Oinonen
Tag: larp
Martin Ericsson has spent 25 years designing, writing and running participatory art ranging from MMOs, interactive TV series, transmedia games and participatory Shakespeare adaptations to massive Sci-Fi and Fantasy larps. He was Senior Content Designer for CCP’s World of Darkness MMO and is currently Lead Storyteller and Brand Architect for White Wolf Publishing. His work on The Truth About Marika was awarded in Interactive Emmy®.
Martin Nielsen runs Alibier, an Oslo-based company that makes educational larps. He is an enthusiastic member of the black box larp scene, and is the head organizer of Grenselandet chamberlarp festival and the Blackbox Deichman chamberlarp series in Oslo.
Site: Alibier.no
Twitter: @mart_nielsen
Jamie MacDonald is a stand-up comedian, writer, and player of many larps, who has written frequently on the subject of performativity and performance in larp. Usually stand-up comedians don’t use words like performativity, so it’s worth mentioning that he’s also a performance and theatre artist, and has also recently lectured in Art Larp at SADA in Stockholm. He’s been coming to KP/SK since 2009 and is the co-creator of the Walkabout series of performance games, as well as The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency.
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Larp Bouldering – Maury Brown
Larp Bouldering: the courage to take your own path over the wall
At the start of a larp, players are often standing at the bottom of the bouldering wall, looking for viable paths up and across it, for places to solidly and safely put their hands and feet on their journey (there is more small talk and diverse costuming of course, but you get the idea). But unlike the recent idea of Herd Competence for larp design, Bouldering considers each player as the unique combination of physical, emotional, psychological, and intellectual skills they are, rather than as a more generic idea of “player.” The theory of affordances and constraints can be applied to larp design, as you consider designing to create appropriate handholds, footholds, and belay support systems to assist any participant in finding a viable, accessible, and engaging journey up and across the wall that this the game. No two journeys will be the same, and the player travels the wall alone, though in the company and support of others, each of whose experience is unique, though similar, to others.
Maury Brown is the co-founder and president of Learn Larp, a US-based larp production and edularp consulting firm dedicated to showcasing the power of larp to build community, trust, and empathy. She is also the co-lead organizer, writer, and producer of New World Magischola, an immersive wizard school larp set in a new magical universe based on North American history, culture, folklore, and geography. She and her partner, Ben Morrow, hosted four 4-day Magischola events in summer 2016, introducing around 600 people to the rules-light, consent-based, character-driven style of larp. She is dedicated to using storytelling and deliberate design principles to open larp to a wider variety of participants by creating safe and accessible play spaces for all identities and abilities.
Maury Brown’s keynote on “People-Centered Design” at the Living Games Conference in Austin, Texas, May 19-22, 2016.
Tina Leipoldt and Larson Kasper introduce a project where they together with Palestinian larp designer colleagues taught larp design to Syrian refugees in Turkey.
They talk about lessons learned (like “war stories” being a really inappropriate term for “larp anecdotes”) and introduce three of the larps designed by the students, the feminist Fairies and Frogs; Death of a Martyr, about dealing with grief without enlisting to fight; and Damascus 2025, about a hypothetical peace and feelings around having fled the country. The talk ends with a greeting from Basem, a Syrian larprunner.
(There is a joke in the talk which makes more sense if you know it was recorded on March 8, International Women’s Day).
Kristina (Tina) Leipoldt has been doing larp as long as she is a professional humanitarian. Combining these two interests became a logical thing once she realized that Edu-larping found more and more prospects. Besides designing and (co-) producing social-critical larps and mini-larps – initially only for the German audience – such as Kommissar Schmidt (2005), The Living Dead (2010), Welcome to Wandaland (2010) and KNB109M (2012), Tina stuck her nose also into training scenarios. She convinced her employer to use larp as a tool to train Syrian peace activists and social workers as well as promoting it as an “in house” technique to train multi-ethnic teams, working in complex humanitarian and crisis settings, in diversity and other funky stuff.
Larson Kasper is German larper and educator. Whenever possible he combines passion and profession into Edu-Larp. He has been part of different teams, writing and producing larps from 3 to 300 players such as the Aelm-Arthosia Series (1999-2002) and the KultUr Series (2004-2006), yksi/üç (2009), Welcome to Wandaland (2010) and KNB 109 M (2012). He is one of the founders of the larp-catering-crew ‘KampfKüche’, a jack-ass larp photographer and did different larp projects for both, traumatized kids and those with conduct disorder. He followed Kristina Leipoldt to Gaziantep to find out about the beauty of Syrian larp.
Finnish transmedia developer and larp designer Mike Pohjola talks about Baltic Warriors, a larp campaign of seven games in seven countries about the Baltic sea in the summer of 2015.
The larps were about political meetings on the topics of the eutrification of the Baltic Sea. “What is eutrophication, and how do you make a larp about it, since it’s an abstract concept that you can’t show?” And how do you make a larp about hubris? About the passage of generations? How do you let your players interact with consumerism, pride, nuclear radiation, puberty, or communism? This inspirational and funny talk answers that question! (Hint: the answers involve DEAD ZONES and some pretty awesome monsters).
Mike Pohjola is a Finnish novelist, transmedia developer, game designer and entrepreneur. He has founded two media companies, that together have won an International Emmy Award, two Interactive Rockies, and a Prix Europa. He is a Master of Arts in Screenwriting from Aalto University, where his Master’s Thesis dealt with participatory storytelling in Classical Greece. He is also the designer and author of Age of the Tempest – a tabletop roleplaying game aimed for kids and beginners.
Site: mikepohjola.com
Blog: mikepohjola.wordpress.com
Twitter: @mikepohjola
Age of Tempest: myrskynsankarit.wordpress.com/age-of-the-tempest
In 2009 17 women made an all female regiment for the Danish game Warlarp V. What started as an attempt to fit into a “mans” world ended as serious and important input in the Danish debate about feminism and womens representation. This is the story about what we did, how we did it, the mistakes we made and the succes we had.
Ann Eriksen is Danish larp organiser, scenario writer and feminist. She has been an major part of shaping the Danish larp convention Forum for several years and has helped fundraise over 150.000 DKK (20.000 EUR) for the Danish central role-playing organisation Bifrost. She is an active participant in debates about feminism and women’s rights, both in Larp and her field of study, which is History of Art. Last year she debuted as a scenario writer for the Danish convention Fastaval; her second Fastaval scenario will premier this year.
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.
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.