Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

Welcome to Larp. Let’s Play – 
Jana Pouchlá

Larp is cool and fun. And it is a great experience to try it out. Or it should be a great experience if your organizers are prepared to deal with newcomers.

In this talk Jana Pouchlá describes some basic arrangements that make new larpers feel safe and enjoy the game. She also argues why newbies sometimes are better larpers than super experienced players.

Jana Pouchlá is a professional lecturer of larp and soft skills. Her favourite challenge is to connect these two worlds as larp is a great way to guide adults towards participation and active learning.  Pouchla has an education from theatre university and currently works in the larp company Court of Moravia.

Here is the movie Jana shows in her presentation. Make sure to turn on the English captions if you don’t speak Czech.

Site: Court of Moravia

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Categories
2013 Oslo Talks

What does Nordic Larp mean? – 
Jaakko Stenros

What is a “Nordic Larp”? What does that expression mean? A few years ago these questions were academic or trivil. That was before the term acquired recognition and brand value.

Now there is something at stake. In this talk one of the editors of the Nordic Larp book explains what he thinks the term means, where it came from, who gets to define it, and what is so damn special about it anyway.

Read the full keynote transcript

Resources
Nordic Larp Wiki
Nordiclarp.org

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, Jaakkohas 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).

Site: Jaakko Stenros
Twitter: @lizardenigma

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Categories
News

Nordic Larp Talks Oslo 2013

LIVE FEED

Not in Oslo? Follow it live here at 20:00. Join us in the chat or at #nordiclarp on twitter.

20:00 CEST (UTC+2 hours)

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany

21:00 EEST (UTC+3 hours)
Finland, Palestine, Israel

22:00 MSK (UTC+4 hours)
Russia – Moscow

19:00 BST (UTC+1 hour)
United Kingdom

14:00 EDT (UTC-4 hours)
U.S.A. – New York

11:00 PDT (UTC-7 hours)
U.S.A. – California

Welcome to Nordic Larp Talks Oslo 2013 – an evening of entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects and ideas from the Nordic tradition of live action roleplaying games.

The evening is hosted by writer and radio & television host Johanna Koljonen.

Free admission.

20.00 – 21.30 Wednesday April 17 at Litteraturhuset Wergelandsveien 29.
The programme will start at 20.00 sharp.

Facebook event: Nordic Larp Talks Oslo 2013

For questions contact: Trine Lise Lindahl trine.l.lindahl@gmail.com +47 920 65 145

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PROGRAM

Release of Four Anthologies that together forms the Knutepunkt 2013 book project


Another 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. You can download the books as pdfs.

 

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.

What does ‘Nordic Larp’ mean? – 
Jaakko Stenros
What is a “Nordic Larp”? What does that expression mean? A few years ago these questions were academic or trivil. That was before the term acquired recognition and brand value. Now there is something at stake. In this talk one of the editors of the Nordic Larp book explains what he thinks the term means, where it came from, who gets to define it, and what is so damn special about it anyway.

Jakko 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, Jaakkohas 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).

Welcome to Larp. Let’s Play
Jana Pouchlá
Larp is cool and fun. And it is a great experience to try it out. Or it should be a great experience if your organizers are prepared to deal with newcomers. In this talk Jana Pouchlá describes some basic arrangements that make new larpers feel safe and enjoy the game. She also argues why newbies sometimes are better larpers than super experienced players.

Jana Pouchlá is a professional lecturer of larp and soft skills. Her favourite challenge is to connect these two worlds as larp is a great way to guide adults towards participation and active learning.  Pouchla has an education from theatre university and currently works in the larp company Court of Moravia.

Three Ways to Make Games More Inclusive – 
Lars Nerback
How do you, as a game designer, work to get a diverse group of participants to feel welcome and included? Lars Nerback talks from his experience in working with educational larps in schools, and gives three examples for making inclusive games.

Lars Nerback is one of the owners of LajvVerkstaden (”The Larp Workshop” directly translated), a Swedish company that designs and runs educational larps for children, teenagers and adults. Apart from his work as game designer and project manager, Lars is deeply involved in issues of social justice and equality.

The Mixing Desk of Larp – Martin Eckhoff Andresen
How do you teach the complexity of larp design to beginners? This was the question that triggered The Mixing Desk of Larp – a framework for thinking about larp design. Like the sound or light technician adjusting faders to achieve the desired effect, the larp designer adjusts the faders of the Mixing Desk of Larp to change his or her game. This talk explores how this can make larp design easier to teach as a game design discipline. It also helps designers become more aware of the default positions of their larp design.

Martin Eckhoff Andresen is a larper, organizer and game designer from Oslo, Norway. He has been involved with Fantasiforbundet’s “Larpocracy” projects in Belarus, that explore the role of games as a tool for informal education. He has edited Playing the Learning Game – A practical introduction to educational roleplaying (2012). At daytime, he’s finishing a master thesis in economics.

No Training can Replace Experience, or Can it? – 
Stefan Deutsch
Larp is great in building strange realities, far-away worlds and fantasies unheard of. But can it also be used to recreate authentic situations from real life to enable development workers to not only know about intercultural competence, but maybe even develop it before really coming in touch with a foreign culture?

Stefan Deutsch plays and facilitates larps for nearly 20 years, co-wrote one of Germany’s most controversial larp rules system and was one of the organizers of the MittelPunkt larp conference in Germany. He lives in Germany and Tanzania and works as a consultant for a software company and larp.

Bleed: How Emotions Affect Role-Playing Experiences
Sarah Lynne Bowman 
What happens when roleplayer’s in-game feelings spill into their real lives? How are role player communities affected by what happens in a larp? This talk will explain the phenomenon of bleed in role-playing games and advocate for greater awareness of the phenomenon and increased discussion surrounding the emotional content of role-playing games.

Sarah Lynne Bowman (Ph.D.) teaches as adjunct faculty in English and Communication for several institutions including The University of Texas at Dallas. McFarland Press published her dissertation in 2010 as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Together with Aaron Vanek, Bowman co-edited The Wyrd Con Companion 2012, a collection of essays on larp and related phenomena. Her current research interests include examining social conflict and bleed within role-playing communities, applying Jungian theory to role-playing studies, studying the benefits of edu-larp, and comparing the enactment of role-playing characters with other creative phenomena such as drag performance.

How Can we Know what Actually Happened in a Larp
 – Annika Waern
The stories people tell about larps they have attended, lie very far from what they actually experienced in the game. Also, everyone tells a different story, and this is particularly true for players and organizers. Is there a way to understand what actually happened in a larp, and can we tell a single more coherent story about how a larp played out? This talk is about techniques to study larp.

Annika Waern (Ph.D) is a professor and game researcher at the department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has a long-standing experience of studying games that play out in the physical world, including but not limited to larp. Together with Markus Montola, and Jaakko Stenros she is author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009).

Watch this space for updated information about the speakers.

Nordic Larp Talks is Oslo 2013 is organized in connection with Knutepunkt 2013 and A Week in Norway.

Categories
News

NLT 2012 in Helsinki

All presentations from Nordic Larps Talks Helsinki 2012 are now available on the site.

Watch the presentations

How to become a god – Mike Pohjola

From preforming arts to larp – Johanna MacDonald

Larpification – Claus Raasted 

The interplay between player and man in the street – JP Kaljonen

Getting A Haircut And A Real Job – Interview with Mikko Rautalahti (Remedy) & Andie Nordgren (CCP Games)

Experimental Larp Design – Jesper Bruun

Playing in Graveyards: Terror collides with larp – Lizzie Stark

Bonus: States of Play – Solmukohta 2012 book presentation – Juhana Petterson

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2012 Helsinki Talks

Experimental Larp Design – Jesper Bruun

Jesper Bruun (Cand. Scient) is a science education researcher who has made contributions to the Nordic larp scene by writing academic articles and developing innovative games. His current interest in larp revolves around using non-traditional ways of communication in larps and using pre-larp workshops for teaching participants to play games. Both interests are represented in the tango roleplay In Fair Verona.

Site: Jesper Bruun at University of Copenhagen
Twitter: @jbruun

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2012 Helsinki Talks

Getting A Haircut And A Real Job – Interview with Mikko Rautalahti (Remedy) & Andie Nordgren (CCP Games)

Played around with larp and roleplaying all your life? Want to make so good use of all the experience gained after entering all kinds of strange worlds? Well, at least Mikko Rautalahti and Andie Nordgren has done just that and are now employed at the video game studios Remedy Entertainmet (Alan Wake, Max Payne) and CCP Games (Eve Online, World of Darkness). Here interviewed by Johanna Koljonen about their thoughts about their work today and it’s connections to their roleplaying background.

Mikko Rautalahti plays role-playing games because they’re awesome. When he’s not pretending to be somebody very interesting, or enabling others to do the same, he writes. Turns out that can be a real job! He’s currently employed at Remedy Entertainment as a senior writer, where he makes video games like Alan Wake. To the best of your knowledge, he has never punched a baby.
Andie Nordgren produced the Interactive Emmy Award winning game The Truth About Marika and is currently working as a technical producer at CCP Games. She is one of the co-founders of the Geek Girl Meetup, a member of the change-through-participation think tank Interacting Arts, and was recently chosen one of ten people whose advice the next Swedish prime minister should heed by Internetworld magazine.

Site: log.andie.se
Twitter: @nordgren

Johanna Koljonen is a writer, Radio and TV host, critic, and a popular lecturer on larp and related topics. Her groundbreaking larp criticism, in essays like “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: The Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing” and “The Dragon Was the Least of it: Larp As Ephemera and Ruin” are widely quoted in the field. She is a co-founder of the TV, radio and web production company Rundfunk Media AB and has a BA in literature. She has hosted several popular radio shows such as “P3 Kultur – Nördorama med Johanna Koljonen” and “Jättestora frågor med Johanna Koljonen” on Swedish national radio and writes columns for Dagens Nyheter and Fokus. She is the scriptwriter of the Oblivion High series of graphic novels and the co-author of the book-length larp autopsy Dragonbane – The Legacy. She also won the innovator category of the The Swedish Grand Journalism Prize of 2011.

Site: johannakoljonen.com
Twitter: @jocxy

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2012 Helsinki Talks

JP Kaljonen – The interplay between player and man in the street

JP Kaljonen is a Helsinki based visual artist. He works in the fields of social- and participatory art dealing with themes related to cultural interaction. His works are based on societal grounds and vary from video or photography to projects in public space. Kaljonen has realized his projects in different parts of Asia and Europe, and his works have been presented in group- and solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Recent shows include Backlight International Photo Festival, Finland 2011, Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma URB11-Festival, Finland 2011 and Porapara Art Space Public Art Exhibition at Patenga Sea Beach, Bangladesh 2012. He organized and developed the larp Dublin2 (Helsinki, 2011) together with artists Johanna Raekallio and Haidi Motola. The second production of the larp is organized together with Johanna Raekallio and Nordic cooperatives in Stockholm 2012.

Site: kaljonen.com

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2012 Helsinki Talks

From preforming arts to larp – Jamie MacDonald

Jamie MacDonald is a transnational Finnish-Canadian artist in theatre, performance art, stand-up comedy, drag performance, punk music, writing, video, and larp. He started out in Toronto with a fairly traditional education in drama-based theatre as an actor and director, but then moved to Finland, where he couldn’t make heads or tails of the language. This move catalyzed an interest in physical theatre and dance, which is where Jamie focused intensively for the next half-decade, training in about half a dozen well-known theatrical methodologies from butoh to biomechanics. Together with Aarni Korpela, Jamie is the creator of Walkabout, a long-term crossover project between larp, theatre, and performance art. Their latest project, The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, ran in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki in the summer of 2012.

Site: walkabout.happeningfish.com
Twitter: @happeningfish

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2012 Helsinki Talks

How to become a god – Mike Pohjola

Mike Pohjola is a writer, a game designer, an entrepeneur and an activist. He has written two novels, three table-top roleplaying games, a manifesto, several theatre plays, larps at art festivals and for fun, some short films, digital games, interactive projects, and lots of other stuff. He has founded two award-winning companies, that together have won an International Emmy Award for Best Interactive TV Service (The Truth About Marika), two Interactive Rockies (Conspiracy For Good) and a Prix Europa (The Forest of Babel). He’s currently working on his third novel 1827 – Inferno about the Great Fire of Turku.

Site: mikepohjola.com
Blog: mikepohjola.wordpress.com
Twitter: @mikepohjola

My presentation, How To Become A God, deals with the history of drama from Dionysian rituals to reality television, and beyond, and how all of this relates to roleplaying. While doing that, I’ll also answer a puzzling point in Aristotle’s Poetics that’s been bugging theatre scholars for three thousand years.
Nordic Larp Talks and State of Play 

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk

Categories
2011 Copenhagen Talks

Role-Playing as a Teaching Method

Sanne Harder is a Danish scenario writer, who has more than 15 productions behind her, both LARP and tabletop, among which the most prominent are Agerlund (2009) and Felicia’s Story (2008). Her work has been published several times, both as part of antologies and as stand alone scenarios. Sanne has many year’s experience as a judge at the Danish scenario convention Fastaval. Here she has also been awarded prizes for her work. She has been a contributing writer and editor of several Danish (and international) magazines about roleplaying. In her professional life, Sanne is a teacher. She has studied theory of teaching at the Danish University of Education, where her work has focussed on competencies as an alternative approach to modern teaching. She has worked professionally with roleplaying in education for several years.

Site: The Role-Playing Teacher

Photo: Jakob la Cour www.jakoblacour.dk