Category: Knutepunkt 2025
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Larp Critique: Why We Need It and How To Write One
At the moment, there isn’t much in terms of culture of larp critique. There is no structured reflection on how to write a critique that is analytical, constructive and well documented. There are some very good examples, but nothing systematic or with a recurring format. However, there are a lot of discussions, because organizers and…
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The Prosocial Act of Larp Crime, and Some Thoughts on Odysseus
Author’s Note: The essay below is a design thinkpiece that contains many evidence-free assertions about player behavior. This anecdotal information has been gathered from a lifetime of gamemastering and larp organizing. Your own experience and data may vary, and I welcome rebuttals with those differences in hand. Larp is a medium of relation. We invent…
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Performance and Audience in Larp
“When we larp, some of the time we are in a performing role, and some of the time in an audience role. And that is ok! It’s the same in real life, after all. We shouldn’t see this as larp falling short of an aesthetic ideal in which such concepts don’t apply. Larp doesn’t have…
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Emotionally Pacing for Larps – How To Get the Best Rollercoaster Ride
“Pace yourself and pace your design. Intense emotional experiences become more available to you and more sustainable if you have variety to the intensity of your play, both as a designer and as an individual player.”
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The Art-Larp Paradox
“In adapting larp practices to be suitable for artistic spaces and audiences, embodiment, and player agency is susceptible to compromise – potentially sacrificing the artistic essence of larp itself,” says Alex Brown.
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Games Never Played: or Composting ‘The Antarcticans’
“If larp is a co-creative practice, one that cannot exist without its players, what do we call larps that were never played? And what do we do with them? Can we still give them a life outside of ourselves, and enjoy their unpredictability?”
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Chronicle: “Daddy, tell me a story?”
“I went to the place where the larp would take place. And now I had a new story in my head, one that carried a lot of meaning. I had reconnected with my father. And on top of that, I had received a very valuable gift, one of those that cannot be bought.”
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Christianity is an Immersion Closet
“Never, before the recent re-run of the larp Snapphaneland, had I had religious play as deeply immersive and moving.”
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Learning from Bleed
How you can learn from bleed yourself, and how you design a larp in such a way that your participants can learn from their bleed, if they want to.
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Bleed Before it was Cool: Early descriptions of dissimulative pretense, their unintended effects, and their impact on the evolution of roleplaying
European sources from the 18th and 19th centuries describe phenomena occurring during, or as a result of roleplaying, that we might now recognize as bleed.