Often, we analyze larp as an intellectual experience, we describe the acts and tell the war stories of our characters as if they only took place in our mind. But larp is different from almost any other game, we dress up, move and act as someone else, acting out genders, ages and social classes not our own in settings from history, movies and fantasy. We use our body and soul, but what do we see when we look in the mirror? This will not be a talk that gives the final answer, but maybe it can be a beginning to a new way to look at larp.
Inge-Mette is a teacher who until now has worked as a reenactor and education officer at the Danish Open-Air Museum. She started larping in 2016, and has been doing so regularly since then, mostly international larps. She has an MA in Pedagogy and is finishing an MA in Transformative Game Design from Uppsala University.
In this talk, Nór Hernø introduces how metareflections and multiverses intersect: and how designers can initiate player metareflections, as well as establish group consensus, by utilizing different methods of facilitation.
Nór Hernø (they/them) is a Danish larper and larp designer with more than 25 years of experience. Throughout the years, they have lectured in narratology, larp- and workshop design, and worked professionally with process facilitation, larp-, learning- and experience design. On a volunteer basis, Nór organizes community events, teaches and mentors new larp designers, and is dedicated to supporting fellow larp designers and local communities.
The Knutebooks are the embodiment of the longstanding tradition of codifying what, how, and why we as a community play, design, think, and push towards new futures of larp. In this talk you will get to know this year’s book and how to be part of future books.
Simon Brind is a writer, academic, and larp designer from London. His PhD thesis is about the emergent narratology of and moments of narrative crisis in participatory fiction. He is a part of the Avalon Larp Studio collective, as well as author and part of the editorial team of this book.
Anne Serup Grove is a service designer specialising in interactions and communication across both the private and public sectors. She has since the 2019 volume Larp Design been a significant contributor to multiple KP publications. She is lead designer on this book and part of the team of next year’s book.
Frederikke Sofie Bech Høyer is a larp designer who works at Østerskov Efterskole, where she creates, teaches, and facilitates larps. She has a master’s degree in Communication Studies, is an author in this book, and is part of the team for next year’s.
Editors Kaisa Kangas and Jukka Särkijärvi present the two 2016 Solmukohta (Knutepunkt) books: Larp Realia, and Larp Politics (both available as free pdf downloads).
Jukka highlights the varied content of Larp Realia – ranging from an article about a larp buit around actual fistfighting to the first food recipe in the long history of the Knute-books!
Kaisa talks about the new volume – subtitled “Systems, Theory and Gender in Action” – on the political dimension of larp. Among the topics are themes like refugees, fascism, experiences of larping as gay or trans, larp as labour, viewing larps with political science tools, and so on. A big section of the book is about political larps (including educational larps) from a range of countries. To the editor’s surprise, no articles about internal larp community politics were submitted. This is probably a sign of health!
Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer who has been playing and making larps for 20 years. She is the fiction lead for the Palestinian-Finnish political larp Halat hisar (State of Siege) that will be run again in June 2016. She is also involved with designing and running educational larps for University of Arts Helsinki. Her other works include Ghost Express (2001-2002, together with Dare Talvitie), a pioneer of pervasive larp. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and a BA in Japanese Studies.
Jukka Särkijärvi is a writer, editor, translator, game designer, conrunner and Pathfinder Society Venture-Captain Emeritus from Espoo, Finland. He is currently working on his master’s thesis in English language and literature at the University of Tampere. His previous work include translations of the Stalker and Whispering Road role-playing games, game design on Vihan lapset, a great deal of role-playing game journalism for a variety of publications both on- and offline, and Roolipelikirja, a nonfiction book about role-playing games.
Ebba Petrén works as director, script writer and performer in the field of performing arts. Her works in arts collective Nyxxx is participatory and do often use tech to design play.
In this talk she tells about how she larped, became bothered and did something about it. This process opened the gate to a whole new artistic field.
Every year, Miriam and her colleagues from LajvVerkstaden runs more than a hundred days of larping. Most of these larps are done with players who have to participate and have never larped before. In this short talk Miriams shares some of her knowledge of how the running and design is different in these games.
Miriam is the founder and director of LajvVerkstaden. LajvVerkstaden (The Larp Workshop) works with larps as a tool to create interactive educational experiences. The company’s projects are created in collaboration with schools, museums, businesses and NGOs and are designed to give participants learning experiences that reach them on an intellectual, physical and emotional level.
Nordic larp and tools we’ve developed to design and understand games provide a unique toolkit for understanding the cultural and emotional impact of systems that bridge the social and the technical, infrastructural, or political worlds. The 21st century will be defined more than anything by the social impact of infrastructural systems, so let’s look at how larp can interact with other disciplines.
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex, transdisciplinary systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Among other things, Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project, Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute, a member of the advisory boards at the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Geeks Without Bounds, a contributor to the Briar project, and freelance security architecture and strategy consultant. She is nomadic and lives mostly in airports and occasionally in New York, London, and Stockholm.
For Knudepunkt 2015, the books The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 and The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion book were made. Here the editor Claus Raasted explain what they are about.
Can larp design be used for something more than creating stories to live in? Interaction designer and larwright does think so. Going through a cascade of different larp projects one thing stands out, with larp design you can direct human creativity into a shared purpose.
Eirik Fatland is a larpwright and interaction designer from Norway and has has since 1994 been involved in the design of around 10-15 larps. Both for dark of dark, ambitious larps with political themes (Europa, Inside:Outside, and PanoptiCorp) and strongly narrative and occasionally comedic larps (Moirais Vev, Marcellos Kjeller, What Happened at Lanzarote). He was the editor of Larp, the Universe and Everything (2009) and has written several articles for the Knutepunkt books, larp magazines and at his website The larpwright.
How is life under occupation? A team of Finnish and Palestinian organizers created the larp Halat hisar, which took place in a modern day Finland under a fictional occupation.
Halat hisar (State of Siege in English, Piiritystila in Finnish) was held near Parkano, a small town in southern Finland, the 15th – 17th of November 2013. About 70 people participated, coming from Finland, Palestine, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany and the U.K.
The story took place in at the university of Helsinki, in a Finland occupied by the fictional nation of Uralia. At the university there was student council elections and preparations for the Great Literature and Humanities Conference. This as well as other events caused sparks among the students.
Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larpwright. Her most recent game is Ha- lat hisar (2013) in which she was in charge of the fiction. Earlier works include Ghost Express (with Dare Talvitie, 2001-2002), a campaign that pioneered pervasive larp in Finland. She holds a M.Sc. in mathematics and a BA in East Asian Studies, and is currently working on her Ph.D. in mathematical logic.
