Tag: Mo Holkar

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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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2022 Linköping Talks

Burn Out and Fade Away: Larp Organizing Can be Tough – Mo Holkar

Organizing larps and larp-related events can leave people prone to burnout. This talk looks at why this happens, and how participants, and organizers themselves, can try to avoid it.

Mo Holkar is a UK larper, larp designer, and larp organizer. He works within the design collective Larps on Location and was one of the lead organizers of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival, and of The Game Kitchen design workshop. He has experienced his share of burnout, and didn’t like it.

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2019 Odense Talks

Fleshing the Skeleton – How to empower players to make characters their own, without the risk of ‘breaking the larp’ – Mo Holkar

Mo Holkar talks about the fertile middle ground between larpwright-designed and player-designed characters; and how to empower players to make characters their own without the risk of their creativity breaking the larp.

Slides: Fleshing the Skeleton – How to empower players to make characters their own, without the risk of ‘breaking the larp’ – Mo Holkar

Mo Holkar is a UK larp designer and organizer. He is an editor at nordiclarp.org, and an organizer of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival. As well as his own designs, he has written characters for other people’s larps ranging from Fairweather Manor to Suffragette! to Reborn.

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2018 Malmö Talks

On Location: Playing, with Expectations – Laura Wood & Mo Holkar

Larp designers use transparency to make players aware of what might occur and to push the story forward. But how to approach the opposite task: a design that’s based on something that the players know definitely isn’t going to happen — but that is nonetheless the focus of play for the characters. How do we deal with this conflict? Laura Wood and Mo Holkar will talk through the tools that they used to achieve this in On Location, a weekend larp that ran recently in the UK.

Laura Wood has designed and organised several larps which have run in the UK, Sweden, Estonia, Russia and Germany. She is an organiser of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival, is an organiser of The Immersivists Club, a London based group that run chamber larps on a regular basis, a designer and organiser of On Location and has run events and workshops about safety and diversity in the larping and story gaming community.

Mo Holkar is a British larp designer and organizer. He is an organizer of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival; is an editor at nordiclarp.org; and is an organizer of The Game Kitchen, a monthly larp design workshop in London. He has presented programme items at KP/SK’ and written for its books; and his chamber larps have been run all over Europe, and beyond. Most recently he was a designer and organizer of the larp On Location.