Tag: Nordic Larp Talks

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2015 Copenhagen Talks

Larp and – Eleanor Saitta

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.

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2015 Copenhagen Talks

Practical Applications of Lovecraftian Horror – Olle Nyman

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.

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2015 Copenhagen Talks

Larp as Adaptation – Evan Torner

We have only begun to test all the possibilities of expression made available to us through larp. While adapting material from other media appear ‘unoriginal’ to some, it expands the range of voices expressed in our medium. Evan Torner’s talk focuses on how we seek inspiration from film, novels and the human archive for our future larp work.

Evan Torner (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, USA, as well as a larpwright and game event organiser. He has published on a variety of topics, including East German cinema, science fiction, genre cinema and live-action role-playing. His work has been supported by Fulbright, the DAAD, the DEFA Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Together with William J. White he co-edited the book Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media (McFarland, 2012). He is co-editor of the journal Analog Game Studies.

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2015 Copenhagen Books Talks

The Knudepunkt 2015 Books – Claus Raasted

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.

Download the books at PDF’s from The Nordic Larp Wiki.
Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014
The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book

Claus Raasted has been a professional larper since 2002 and has done 17 books on larping.

From Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen 2015.

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2014 Gothenburg Talks

Does larp design matter? – Eirik Fatland

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.

Full transcript of the talk.

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.

Site: The larpwright

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2014 Gothenburg Talks

Halat hisar – State of Siege – Kaisa Kangas

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.

Halat hisar in the Nordic Larp Wiki
Halat hisar webiste

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.

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2014 Gothenburg Talks

Playing as human or robot – Carl Heath

Is it possible to roleplay together with a robot with artificial intelligence? Human and Machine is a psycho-technological theater experiment at the crossroads between man and machine, where the aim is to explore the encounter between man and machine in a context where they are fully engaged on stage, acting, in real time. In this early experiment, Carl Heath talks about the possibilities of the project together with Robert Bolin and Michael Schade.

Human and Machine is a collabortation between Scenlaboratioret, The Collaboratory and Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

Carl Heath focuses on research and development projects regarding ICT and learning and learning perspectives in game studies. Prior to his current position at the Interactive Institute, Carl has worked for the Swedish Armed Forces, National Theatre Company, Sverok (The Swedish Gaming Federation), The National Council of Swedish Youth Organisations (LSU), the IT consultancy firm Technohuman, and GR (The Gothenburg Region of Local Authorities). Carl is the founder of GR Experiential Learning (now a part of The GR Pedagogical Centre) and the last two years, between 2010 and 2012, he was the Director of the Division of Educational Cooperation, as well as the Director of the GR Upper Secondary School Admissions Office. He has designed numerous larps and educational games. Carl has an educational background at the University of Gothenburg, where he studied political science, social science, pedagogy and ICT.

Twitter: @carlheath

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2014 Gothenburg Talks

Ethical Content Management and the Freedom to Create – Shoshana Kessock

How do we create safe spaces that still spur freedom of creation in larps? Shoshana Kessock presents the concepts of responsible spaces.

Shoshana Kessock is a game designer and researcher at the NYU Game Center in New York City, pursuing her MFA in game design. Shoshana serves as the founder of the Living Games Conference in New York and has written, organized or staffed over twenty five larps across the United States. She is also the co-founder of Phoenix Outlaw Productions, an independent game design company specializing in larp and tabletop role-playing games. Her writing credits include the freeform larp SERVICE, the tabletop scenario No Exit for Fate Core, and the upcoming Larp Dangers Untold. She lives in Brooklyn.

Site: shoshanakessok.com
Twitter: @ShoshanaKessock

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News

Nordic Larp Talks Oslo 2013

Thank you all that joined us in the livestream or at Litteraturshuset in Olso!

All the talks from Nordic Larp Talks Oslo 2013 are now available at the site:
Watch the talks

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2013 Oslo Talks

Bleed: How Emotions Affect Role-Playing Experiences
 – Sarah Lynne Bowman

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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 researchinterests 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.

Site: Sarah Lynne Bowman

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