Nordic Larp

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  • Learning from Bleed

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    Learning from Bleed

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    Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.

    Kai, photo by Prison Escape
    Kai, photo by Prison Escape

    This is Kai. Kai taught me how to overcome my fear of heights. Or rather, by playing the character of Kai, I was able to find a new part of myself. And later, that new part enabled me to face my fears. I learned from bleed.

    I didn’t play Kai with this intention. But Kai inspired me to develop ways to intentionally learn from bleed and that lead to the formation of our company, Live Action Learning. In this article we’ll write about 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.

    This article is based on the workshop “Learning from bleed” at the 2024 Edu-Larp Conference by Gijs van Bilsen and Kjell Hedgaard Hugaas, and all participants of that workshop, who discussed the topic together. It’s also based on the professional development training “Live Action Leadership” that we, Anne van Barlingen & Gijs van Bilsen with our company Live Action Learning, ran in April 2023 and November 2024, and the keynote speech “Summon your talent”.

    What happened with Kai

    Kai wasn’t a kind man. But Kai possessed an unshakable inner strength, grounded in a calm conviction that nothing could sway him. This kind of inner strength and resilience was new to me, and playing Kai had given me access to this. In other words: I learned something through bleed.

    First, let’s define bleed. According to Hugaas (2024) “Bleed occurs when feelings, thoughts, emotions, physical states, cognitive constructs, aspects of personality and similar ‘bleed over’ from player to character or vice versa.” There are several types of bleed, as presented by Hugaas:

    • Emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015), in which emotional states and feelings bleed between player and character.
    • Ego bleed (Beltrán 2012), in which fragments of personality and archetypal qualities bleed between player and character.
    • Procedural bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which physical abilities, perceptual experience, motor skills, traits, habits, and other bodily states bleed between player and character.
    • Memetic bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which ideas, thoughts, opinions, convictions, ideologies and similar cognitive constructs bleed between player and character;
    • Relationship bleed, in which aspects of social relationships bleed between player and character. Romantic bleed (Waern 2010; Harder 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021) is the most frequently discussed subtype.
    • Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2017, 2020), in which players from marginalized backgrounds experience liberation from that marginalization through their characters.
    • Identity bleed (Hugaas 2024), which deals with the sense of self and with how different parts of the self (“multiplicities of identities”) bleed between character and player.

    In the case of Kai, the bleed can be classified as emotional bleed (the calm emotional state), but also as identity bleed (It did something with the way I think about myself; ‘I’m someone who can stay calm under stressful circumstances’).

    Why is learning from bleed interesting?

    To effectively integrate new behavior in your system, you need a couple of things: Opportunities to experiment with the behavior, feedback to fine-tune it, time to integrate it into your system, and a safe environment that allows for mistakes.

    In a regular training session, you’ll have the opportunity to try new things, but often confined to a few minutes or maybe an hour. Training by practicing new behavior solely in your real life isn’t a safe environment in which you can make multiple mistakes or suddenly behave completely differently. But using larp and bleed… Well, talk about having it all!

    But, of course, there are difficulties. For one, bleed is personal; you can’t make bleed happen. However, you can inspire bleed (Edu-larp conference, 2024). The level at which bleed is present, but also the level of bleed that is noticed, differs per person and even over time. This is called the “bleed perception threshold” (Hugaas 2024). This means you might not notice any bleed at all. Or you can be completely overwhelmed.

    The ingredients: designing for bleed

    So when designing for bleed, whether it is for you personally or for a group of participants, be aware. Random, unfocused bleed can be very unhelpful, to put it mildly. In order to learn from bleed, you need direction, agency, priming, safety, time and space (Edu-larp conference, 2024). Using bleed on purpose, especially to learn, should always be with informed consent of what bleed you are designing for, preferably with agency of a participant to choose their own bleed and learning goals. Direction, agency, and priming shape bleed into something useful, while safety and time enhance immersion.

    In our four-day Live Action Leadership training we’ve made very conscious decisions on these elements. The main theme was very clear: Leadership. The complete setup revolved around situations and scenes which required leadership skills, integrated in an overarching story about a failing management team. The participants were actively involved in formulating their personal learning goals and how those goals were translated into a character. The concept of bleed was clearly explained at the beginning, during the workshops. This made the participants aware of the signs of bleed and what they might experience. Having multiple opt-out options, and very openly discussing them as a safe and viable option to leave the game, made participants comfortable enough to immerse themselves.

    And then, last but not least, the ‘thin alibi’, or ‘playing close to home’. Bleed occurs more quickly when the character you are playing resembles your real-life persona. For example, we might deliberately choose names for the characters that are close to their own. Björn might play a character called Bjarke, or Susanne might play a character called Suzette. We also thinned the border by choosing a realistic and recognizable setting. It is very possible to have bleed and learn from bleed from characters and settings that are further away from you. But the further away you are, the harder it is to find an applicable use in everyday life.

    The timeline: Three phases of integration

    We believe that learning from bleed is not about pretending to be someone else in your everyday life, but about finding a different version of yourself through playing. Therefore, especially in longer experiences, we have three phases for the participant to go through during play:

    1. finding the character
    2. challenging the character, and
    3. integrating to a competent version of the character.

    Finding the character

    How can you help the participant exhibit the traits that they want to learn? Experimentation is key in this phase. When not playing or designing for bleed, we might want to prioritize portraying the character consistently. But if you’re focusing on a specific character trait that is not natural to you, it’s important to experiment with different strategies to find a way that works for you. So if somebody wants to learn to be more outspoken, this phase is about finding multiple ways for them to play that outspoken character.

    Challenging the character

    This phase is about trying to entice the participant to exhibit the opposite behavior of what they want to learn, so that they can notice this and return to the character. Ways to do this can be to introduce a high pressure environment, such as a quest with a specific deadline, or by designing more emotional scenes. If you opt for this approach, it is good to have ways to remind the participant that they are slipping into old behavior. Having them choose one gesture, word or feeling that symbolizes their character is a good way for them to be able to go back to their character again.

    Integration

    The third phase is integrating the character into a competent version: a sort of mix between the character and the participant. Instruct the participants during an offgame calibration, to let go of a negative trait of the character and to replace that with a positive trait of their own. This will bring the character closer to resembling the participant and helps them to associate positively with the character. This can also be described as ‘learning to love the character’. If participants dislike their character, it is harder for them to want to learn from things that the character did. However, if you want to achieve the opposite effect, unlearning unwanted behavior, disliking the character works well.

    After playing: Separation and anchoring

    After de-roling and debriefing, we start the separation and anchoring phase. There are three questions central to this:

    • Separation: What traits do you want to keep, and what will you let go?
    • Anchoring: What anchor will help you summon these traits?
    • Summoning: When do you want to summon these traits?

    Separation:

    We want our participants to take a ‘version of themselves’ home, not the complete character, because characters have negative traits as well, traits that we don’t want to keep. Kai, the example from the beginning of the article, was a very powerful character with a deep source of inner strength and resilience. But, as you can see from the photo, he was also a criminal. So after playing that character, I separated the useful characteristics (inner strength and resilience) from the rest of the character. I found a way to access that inner strength by playing Kai, but now I needed only that part.

    Anchoring:

    After separating comes anchoring. Here we build on the word, gesture or feeling that participants already have chosen to symbolize their character (see: Challenging the character). It can be a simple thing that helps you find this version of yourself. And from that thing, more of the behavior you associate with that version will follow. Besides a gesture, word or feeling, other possible anchors are:

    • A name: the characters name, a nickname (‘the professor’) or an adjective, coupled with your own name (‘curious Gijs’)
    • Music, from a short tune you can hum/whistle to an entire playlist which helps you find the character
    • An object, preferably one that you can carry with you
    • A smell, such as a perfume, that differs from your normal one
    • A piece of clothing that you can put on in special circumstances
    • A location where you want to have access to the character.
    • A posture you adopt when you need it.

    Summoning:

    It is important to think about when you want to have access to the talents you learned from bleed. There are three ways to determine when to summon your characters:

    1. Triggers. Think of a sudden situation where you might need it, and identify a trigger that will remind you. For example, I played Kai, who was calm and resilient. Traits I can use when I start to feel my fear of heights taking over. When I feel my knees getting weak, that’s the trigger to summon that calm, focused part of myself.
    2. On purpose beforehand. If you know you will go into a situation where that version of yourself might help you, you summon your character on purpose just before going in. For example, just before an important meeting or social event.
    3. Integrating it into yourself. Finally, you can integrate this version of yourself into yourself, meaning that it becomes an unconscious part of you. This takes time and practice. It generally goes from noticing well after the fact that you would’ve wanted to use what you’ve learned, to noticing it shortly after the fact, to adjusting your behavior during the situation and finally to before the situation. The final step is that it has become something you do without thinking about it.

    Learning from regular larp experiences

    The above steps detail how to design for others. But you can easily use these at a larp that is not designed for learning, even if you’re only using it after the larp. Kai was not intended as a character for self-learning, but by separating and anchoring aspects of him, I found playing him highly valuable.
    In short, the steps to take if you want to learn from the larp as a player, are:

    • Decide what you want to learn.
    • Decide where you want to make the border between you and your character thinner.
    • Take some time to reflect on your learning experience so far.
    • If possible, use the three phases (finding, challenging and integrating your character).
    • Afterwards, separate and anchor what you want to keep/learn.
    • Finally, summon the new version of yourself whenever you need it.

    We hope this article inspires you to learn more from larp and learn more from bleed yourself and, if you’re a larp designer, introduce parts of the design process into your larps so you give your participants the option of learning from it.

    References

    Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2012. “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 89-96. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2021. “Magic is Real: How Role-playing Can Transform Our Identities, Our Communities, and Our Lives.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, 52-74. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.

    Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org, March 28.

    Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019a. “Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic.” Nordiclarp.org, January 25

    Hugaas, K. H. (2024). Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self. International Journal of Role-Playing, (15), 9–35.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org, June 21.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Mia Makkonen, Pauliina Männistö, Anne Serup Grove, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta.

    Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.

    Waern, Annika. 2010. “‘I’m in Love With Someone That Doesn’t Exist!!’ Bleed in the Context of a Computer Game.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.

    This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
    van Bilsen, Gijs and van Barlingen, Anne. 2025. “‘Learning from Bleed.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.

    Cover image: Photo by Jenna Hamra on Pexels.

  • Innovations in the Drama Classroom with Larp

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    Innovations in the Drama Classroom with Larp

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    In September 2022, I began a new job as the middle school drama teacher at a school in upper Manhattan, New York City. In the months before, I had been picturing a dream job in which I was teaching both theatre and larp. When I accepted this position I imagined that after a year or two, I could create an after-school larp club.

    To my surprise, during orientation, my principal, Rinaldo Lumumba Murray, told me that he had complete trust in me as an artist. He said I was free to design my curriculum however I saw fit. What a gift that turned out to be!  

    New Heights Academy Charter School has about 100 students per grade, split into four sections. I taught ages eleven to fourteen, and had a different section of children each quarter. This meant I had opportunities to start fresh, adjust my curriculum, and ultimately, experiment with utilizing larp.

    The first larp emerged as a result of unexpected behavior from one of my 7th grade students (age thirteen), whom I’ll call J. He walked into class with a sweatshirt stuffed in his shirt, making him appear pregnant. He walked slowly holding his big belly, modeling the exact gait and posture of someone close to giving birth. I complimented his physical acting and asked how he was able to portray that so realistically.  

    “Is someone in your family pregnant?” I questioned. “No”, he said simply, and gave no further explanation.  

    The next day, he did the same thing with his sweatshirt as he entered. “So when is the baby due?” I asked.  

    “Soon”, J said, and I commented in front of the class that someone should really be helping carry J’s heavy backpack.  

    This continued (but never disrupted class), and by the fourth day I laughed and said, “I think we need to throw you a baby shower or something!” 

    A lightbulb went off in my head. I hadn’t yet assigned this class’s final project, and realized J had inadvertently created the perfect inspiration for a larp.

    The larp lasted one period, and followed the format of a baby shower. Students could choose to play J’s family, friends, or co-workers. As their final project grade, everyone had to participate in the larp. However, there were a number of ways to achieve this. The goal was that the students would be in character throughout the class and interact with others. For my introverted students, I also offered credit for creating costumes, making a gift for J, bringing snacks/supplies, being the DJ or creating a song list, serving snacks during the party (in character) etc. There were hilarious speeches, different kinds of snacks, and dancing. 

    The Baby Shower was a huge success, and the halls were abuzz in the days that followed with talk of the party. Over the course of the year, I created two more larps with other classes. One was a birthday party for a 47 year old man named Theodore who had moved to Europe, and the other was called Leprechaun Academy, about a group of preteen Leprechauns who went to the same school.  

    All of these larps were born out of my focus on emergence. This is a tenet of devised theatre, which I was exposed to during my time in a conservatory theatre university program at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The Oxford dictionary defines emergence as “the process of coming into existence or prominence”.  

    I will next explain some of my methods used to create these larps.

    There are many benefits to using the setting of a party for larps. Kids know how to act at a party and alibi is already present, since the guests are there for a reason. Relationship ties are already partly established, meaning that my students knew exactly how a grandmother would greet her grandson when she walked through the door. Two boys instinctively knew that if they played cousins who were the same age, they could get into trouble during the family function, until they were caught by the girl who played their Tia (Aunt in Spanish). Another benefit to this setting is that school higher-ups are familiar with classroom parties. My principal and deans knew they could expect to hear some music and extra noise coming from my room, just for that one period. 

    Over the course of the year, I found a method that allowed students to quickly co-create the details of the larp in a fun way. In the U.S., lessons often begin with a “Do-Now”, a quick, five-minute activity to get students sitting, quiet, and focused. I always assign my Do-Nows on Google Classroom. Students respond to prompts on their laptops, and once they click submit, I can show all of their answers in a list on the Smartboard in my room. For those without Google Classroom, this can be accomplished using other programs, such as Google Sheets.

    For my second larp, I had my students brainstorm the details of a birthday party we were going to throw in class on Google Classroom. Students came up with who the birthday child was, where the party was taking place, who the guests were, and many more details. It is very fun to read the different answers aloud, and I would choose my top three favorites. The class would vote, and voila! We had designed all of the details around the larp setting. We even co-created plot points that would occur during the party.  

    Creating larps specifically for certain classes was highly enjoyable for me, and I loved the challenge of finding inspiration from the students themselves. Children are full of idiosyncrasies and love to make jokes. In the case of the baby shower, I would consider J’s behavior a bit, which is a repeated joke. Rather than shutting him down, I deemed this silly “bit” the seed of something special, and J became the center of the larp. I am guessing that him acting pregnant was attention-seeking behavior. It was very special to funnel that into something creative, and he got a chance to be the center of a larp. More than that, he experienced having a baby shower thrown for him, which he described as a once in a lifetime experience. 

    I found that I was able to bring role-playing into classes, even when we did not co-create a full larp. My most successful and well-received activity was called “The Drama Club Podcast”. We recreated the recording of a podcast in class, where I played a host who would invite students up to play guests. The secret benefit to this setting is that it requires everyone in the “audience” to be quiet, since we were “recording”. This detail is crucial with classes that fall on the chatty end of the spectrum. We didn’t actually record a podcast, though due to the hilarity that would often ensue, I began to record videos on my phone. I said we were “creating behind-the-scenes content for the podcast’s Youtube channel”. 

    This is a very scalable activity, because students can play characters close to themselves or not, they can impersonate celebrities etc. The topics discussed and characters can also be connected to content being covered in class. The podcast can run for a few minutes or a whole period. I found that the possibilities are endless! Even more reserved students could participate as callers from the audience, who would pretend to phone in and ask questions of the interviewees. I also enlisted volunteers to come up with Tweets that our “listeners” were tweeting in response to our episode.  

    I realized that my discoveries from this past year could be helpful in the overall mission of bringing larp into classrooms in America. While there are numerous individuals and organizations achieving this in Scandinavia, it is much less common in the U.S., especially at this age level. Some schools offer Drama/theatre classes where larp could be utilized, but not all.

    An obstacle to bringing larp into the general classroom is that core subject teachers have so much material to cover, and must prepare students for state exams and standardized testing. However, I found that by using only five minutes or so at the beginning of class over a few days to flesh out their characters, students were able to successfully larp, with no workshop other than practicing safety mechanics. Even my eleven year-olds, who had never taken drama before, successfully larped from the beginning.  

    My next steps will be to continue to iterate using these methods to create not only larps, but edularp with specific learning outcomes in mind (cf. Westborg 2023). In the coming year, I hope to use my methods of co-creation with my students to create larps that directly correlate with what they are learning in other subjects, with specific learning outcomes. I hope to collaborate with my students’ other teachers, and I look forward to seeing what we will discover.

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read so far, you can head to Nordiclarp.org and search my  name or “Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1”. There you can watch the talk I gave at the Knudepunkt 2023 conference on this exact subject! You will find many more details on the topics covered here, as well as a live demonstration of my Drama Club Podcast Activity.

    References

    Josefin Westborg (2023): The Educational Role-Playing Game Design Matrix: Mapping Design Components onto Types of Education. In International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 13, 2023, pp. 18–30, https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi13.306. 

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Wolgel, Lindsay. 2024. “Innovations in the Drama Classroom with Larp.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash.

  • Larp: the Colonist

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    Larp: the Colonist

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    The fact that there is a separate term for larp shows that it is quite a peculiar type of role-playing. It has its own history, culture, and audience. At their origins, the terms LRP, LARP, and larp already denoted an agglomeration of radically different games with some RPG “DNA” in them (Arjoranta 2010, 10). As the praxis of larps evolved and expanded, the term became increasingly diluted.

    As a consequence, the term larp is often used in larp circles as an all-encompassing category that includes every kind of embodied role-playing (Hyltoft 2010; Kot 2012; Bowman 2014). It is weird because, before the late 70s, the basic assumption of any role-playing activity was that it was (at least partially) embodied. The popularity of tabletop and computer role-playing games changed this assumption. A need arose for specific terms for the “live” or “live-action” versions. Originally, larp was a specific thing, but it soon became a blanket term: and, for some, a synonym for the general phenomenon of (embodied) role-playing.

    This usage sometimes extends in time and space to include activities that have never considered themselves as larps. Drama in Education, process drama, sociodrama, simulation gaming, improv theater games, and some other traditions all include elements of embodied role-playing. Larpers, larp theorists, and even larp academics recurrently label these activities as larp or larping.

    Each one of these activities has a longer history and older social institutions than larp, which emerged in the late ‘80s (Harviainen & al. 2018). Although larp as a term is younger than them, it is not necessarily more marginal. None of the aforementioned fields are truly mainstream right now, neither in academic research nor in daily practice. Similar to larp, their meaning and content are often obscure to outsiders. 

    Labeling things as larp might originate from the fact that it is easy to separate the role-playing activity from its game framing (Harviainen 2011, 185). The former is a “behavioral-psychological mode of engagement” (Deterding 2016, 104), a way of doing things that can be experienced and identified in non-larp activities. J. Tuomas Harviainen (2011, 176) attempted to capture this phenomenon with his famous criteria of “larping”:

    • “Role-playing in which a character, not just a social role, is played.
    • The activity takes place in a fictional reality shared with others. Breaking that fictional reality is seen as a breach in the play itself.
    • The physical presence of at least some of the players as their characters.”

    In this sense, “larping” happens at most larp events, while it can also exist at non-larp events (Harviainen cites re-enactment, bibliodrama, and other activities). It is unfortunate that instead of choosing a neutral name for this universal behavior, we call it larping. This use of language subtly undermines identity: “Sure, your events are not larps. But you are still larping.”

    As we identify more and more activities as larps, and create a new category for “those larps that are not aware that they are larps,” we are imposing our language and terminology on these independently established fields. History shows that this could lead to the suppression, undermining, and erasure of their origin, tradition, and identity. And this is not just an unconscious bias, it is a decade-old open agenda, called larpification: “Call it larp and others will follow” (Raasted 2012).

    Larp as a super-umbrella term has caused confusion and mental harm. At least to me, a role-player with multiple backgrounds in the above-mentioned activities. Larpers often behave like embodied personality-playing had been an uninhabited virgin soil discovered first by them. I find it profoundly unjust that they trample over other traditions while attempting to emancipate the meaning of larp in the public discourse. This is why I always find myself on the defensive at larp theory events, if I dare to speak: which is frustrating. 

    While I do not suggest that changing our insider language usage is the most pressing issue in the process of furthering equity, diversity, and inclusion, I propose that cross-activity umbrella terms should be as neutral and analytic as possible to minimize linguistic and cultural oppression. Simply speaking, we should not use larp or larping to describe things outside of our domain.

    It’s good that the larp scene is constantly pushing its own boundaries, but it should not try to do so by conquering or colonizing its neighbors.

    Bibliography

    Sebastian Deterding (2016): Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design. In Digital Make-Believe: Human-Computer Interaction edited by Phil Turner and J. Tuomas Harviainen, 101–124. Springer.

    Claus Raasted (2012): Larpification. Nordic Larp Talks, Helsinki. https://nordiclarptalks.org/larpification-claus-raasted/ Accessed: 08.13.2023

    Jonne Arjoranta (2011): Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games. International Journal of Role-playing, 3–17.

    J. Tuomas Harviainen (2011): The Larping that is not Larp. In Think Larp. Academic Writings from KP2011, edited by Thomas Duus Henriksen. Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle, 172–193. Rollespilsakademiet.

    J. Tuomas, Harviainen, Rafael Bienia, Simon Brind, Michael Hitchens, Yaraslau I. Kot, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, David W. Simkins, Jaakko Stenros and Ian Sturrock (2018): Live-action Role-playing Games. In Role-playing Game Studies. A Transmedia Approach, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, 87–106. Routledge.

    Malik Hyltoft (2010): Four Reasons Why Edu-larp Works. In LARP – Einblicke – Aufsatzsammlungzum MittelPunkt 2010, edited by Karsten Dombrowski. Zauberfeder.

    Sarah Lynne Bowman (2014): Educational Live Action Role-playing Games: A Secondary Literature Review. The Wyrd Con Companion Book 3: 112–131.

    Yaraslau I. Kot (2012): Educational Larp – Topics for Consideration. In The Wyrd Con Companion Book, edited by Aaron Vanek and Sarah Lynne Bowman, 118–27. 

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2024. “Larp: the Colonist.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Breizh Clichés on Pexels.

  • Serious Larp at the United Nations in Geneva

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    Serious Larp at the United Nations in Geneva

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    “Gijs, they’re plotting a coup against you,” Anne said on day two of the Serious Larp we organized for 30 managers of the United Nations in Geneva.

    A few months earlier, a director at the UN had asked us to design a training with the learning objectives of ‘showing more creativity’, ‘taking risks’, and ‘thinking from the end user’s perspective’. To achieve those goals, we created a Serious Larp. In other words, a larp where the first question you ask as an organizer is: “How do we ensure that the participants learn something from it?”

    Serious Larps are one of the types of Serious Games that we design as ‘Live Action Learning’ (www.liveactionlearning.com). Larp is a form particularly suited for learning in social situations; about teamwork, navigating complex organizations, or as leadership training. Essentially, anything where a group of people tries to achieve something together. For some forms of training, larp is a better method than other methods of (role) playing because:

    • All participants are involved simultaneously instead of watching.
      • Making it safer and easier to participate
    • You can mimic an entire organization or social system
    • The learning effect is greater because your body is also involved, not just your mind
    • Participants have much more influence on the story
    • People can experiment more with learning points because they have an ‘alibi’ as they are playing a character.

    Back to the United Nations: We started with an empty primary school and 30 heads of department from the Geneva office. Two days later, we ended up with 30 actively engaged ‘parents’, a coup, and an innovative new school. And the participants had come up with the coup entirely by themselves. How did we get there?

    Setting up the playground and hiring teachers

    In that empty primary school, with two acres of playground around it, we created a new reality. A reality in which 30 parents were opening a new, innovative school. The fictional parents were tired of the current system and wanted the ideal school for their children. We set a clear metaphor for their work and also chose a setting that is light-hearted & recognizable.

    Teambuilding for the parents, while designing their own school. Photo by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen
    Teambuilding for the parents, while designing their own school. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen

    In the story, the parents had to make difficult choices together about the new school they envisioned. Hiring teachers, deciding on a grading system, and the layout of the school and playground. All with the children’s interests in mind. Of course, the school inspection has requirements before the school can open. But how do you, as a parent, deal with those requirements if they don’t necessarily contribute to your child’s happiness?

    30 children, specially designed for this scenario

    Because ‘thinking from the end user’s perspective’ was the main learning objective, we wanted a compelling metaphor for that end user. So, we ‘designed’ 30 children. Of course, there were no real children present. We wrote 30 profiles, with photos and children’s drawings made by Artificial Intelligence. These fictional children were very different from each other. From clever inventors to mindful philosophers, from eco-warriors to new peace negotiators. In this way, we ensured different interests, symbolizing the interests in their work, without burdening the fiction with the real-life problems of the participants themselves.

    One of the children (left) that we created, displayed on large posters throughout the building, photo by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen
    One of the children (left) that we created, displayed on large posters throughout the building. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen

    Everyone can participate in their own way

    When we create such a Serious Game, especially if it’s a Serious Larp, we ensure that participants feel comfortable and can easily participate. We also always provide space to step out of the game and have roles in which people contribute to the training but play less of a character. So, we create a two-day event in which everyone can participate in their own way. You can dive in deep, but even if you don’t, you’ll still grasp the learning objective.

    In extensive workshops, the participants got to know the fictional children we had prepared. The characters the participants played were the parents of those children. This means that the participants created their own character, deciding for themselves whether they wanted to resemble their child or play something else. We gave the participants a lot of freedom to decide how they want to participate. If you wanted to play a more extreme type, you could. If you wanted to play a character you could learn something from, that was possible and if you just wanted to be yourself with a different name, that was fine too.

    Feel free to have fun with this

    It’s important for people to give themselves permission to play. One of the most fun ways we help people with this is the prologue. In the prologue, we play out a piece of the game that the participants only need to watch while they are already in their role. The facilitators, actors, or a few pre-informed participants ensure that something interesting happens.

    At the UN, we asked a few participants beforehand to actively participate in the prologue. In this case, we asked them to, in their role, put pressure on the ‘director’ (played by Gijs) during the opening speech. Suddenly, the rest of the room sees participants standing up and actively participating. It’s incredibly fun, especially when these participants also start ‘arguing’ among themselves. This gave a wonderful signal: ‘This is the level of participation that is completely okay. Feel free to have fun with this.’ In larp, some people use the term ‘herd competence’ for this.

    What did it yield?

    This scenario was created to challenge the participants in a fun and accessible way to be creative, take risks, and think from the end user’s perspective. During the extensive debrief at the end, it turned out that the participants had indeed picked up on these learning objectives. Other results we received from the participants were:

    • They had a shared experience that they won’t forget quickly (they even organized an ingame reunion a few months later).
    • They connected with each other on a much deeper level, making them more supportive of each other.
    • They had fun playing out conflicts between characters. They said they learned that they could see a business conflict more as something you ‘play from your role or function’, while being able to see the person behind the role as more sympathetic.
    • By playing innovative parents, they learned that they were more creative than they thought.
    • They simply had a lot of fun together.

    And what about that coup?

    And what about that coup? Well, on day 2, the school inspection was scheduled to come. That meant there was still a lot to be done. On day 1, we, as facilitators, still helped to make it easy for people to get into the story. We did this as NPCs: the school principal and the gym teacher. On day 2, we wanted to put as much responsibility as possible on the participants by having the ‘director’ say, ‘I don’t see how we’re going to make it, I’m at my wit’s end.’

    That worked well; the participants had already had fun in their roles and felt so involved with the school and the children. And as those parents, they were soon whispering amongst themselves, ‘Why is he even the director? Shouldn’t we hire a capable person for that?’. And so it happened that we, as game masters, found an organized coup in the coffee room, where Gijs was deposed as the fictional director, and the parents of the primary school ‘International School De Genève’ took matters into their own hands.

     Of course, all with a big wink and a lot of laughter. Because nothing binds people together as much as having fun together.

    We really want to promote larp further, also as a serious learning method. For more information about our activities, please contact: www.liveactionlearning.com

    Cover photo: The main entrance of the school we were allowed to use. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen

  • Designing Power Dynamics Between Adults and Children in Larps

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    Designing Power Dynamics Between Adults and Children in Larps

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    When every part of a larp is a designable surface, we as designers are faced with both the opportunities and the responsibilities that this implies (Koljonen, 2019). As a wide age range exists in the larp community, it is essential to design for softening up the impacts that off-game power dynamics born from participants’ age and experience level can have on the interactions. This article deals with why and how you design balanced power dynamics between adult and child participants. This design approach is practice-based, utilized at the mythical fantasy larp campaign Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga) as well as the edu-larps and leisure larps I have run at Østerskov Efterskole in 2023.

    Why design spaces that allow children to influence the larp?

    As a co-creative, collaborative medium, larp becomes breathtaking when its participants experience co-ownership as the larp unfolds. In larp, different age-groups’ perceived areas of agency and social legitimation to participate in the activities of the larp are formed by our design choices – absence of design maintains status quo and ensures that those with the off-game social power to define acceptable social behavior will do so in-game as well; in this context, adults will define the larp’s social frame for children. Counteracting this requires conscious design of in-game spaces in which the children have agency and power to influence the larp, without alienating the adults. I recognize that there are differences between adults and children, and that adults ultimately bear off-game responsibility for everyone’s safety and experience throughout the larp. I argue, however, that we can create a framework in which children can be allowed to explore, lead, mentalize and be taken seriously, to let them expand their social skill set and experience being a part of the associated community.

    A framework for designing balanced power dynamics

    The following section reviews the design strategies I use to create balanced power dynamics in larp. Each design step describes how, and is followed by an example, marked with an arrow, from the player-group Umbrafalkene (Eng. The Umbra Falcons) at Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga):

    • The participants play former soldiers and children of former soldiers, who try to make a new life for themselves in a troubled area. Throughout their storylines and plots, the players face situations wherein they learn to deal with anger, sorrow, loss and a craving for revenge. The themes were selected because our young players find it difficult to recognize and deal with the associated feelings in their own lives.
    Photo of three people of various ages in fantasy clothes huddles closely together.
    The author (left) at Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman.

    1) Set concrete design goals for the power dynamics and social interactions in the larp. Define and formulate the intention, so you can communicate, measure, and test your choices.

    • The goal was to create a dynamic in which the children address the team’s difficulties through collaboration, their courage to be honest and their willingness to act together, while the adults escalate the problems through their old habits and stubborn beliefs.

    2) Designate a coordinator that knows how to work with children. The person needs to be introduced early and be readily available, so that the children know where to find them in case they need help. It is advantageous if the person discreetly checks in on the children during the larp, asks about their experience and offers to help them reflect on their experiences.

    • We usually have multiple coordinators who share the responsibility. When we have the resources, we divide the children into smaller groups so we can interact with them on their terms and facilitate play accordingly: one of us has the youngest players (4-8 years), one has the slightly older children (9-12), and one has the teenagers (13-15 years).

    3) Then, design the overall narratives and dynamics. The narrative reasoning and legitimation for the dynamics must be experienced as meaningful and authentic to play on for both the adults and the children. Significant design areas that you can focus on are, among others, defined standards for social interactions that grant both agency and alibi, rites of passage, easily usable safety measures, and formed spaces. Within these spaces the players can explore their chosen themes by themselves or with each other, without excluding or invalidating the focus of other players. Design who wields the social power, as well as when and how the characters handle in-game conflicts across age groups so it doesn’t break immersion nor default to the off-game power dynamics. Remember both groups’ needs.

    • The children are staged as experts in how to live peacefully as a part of a community, while the adults are staged as experts in conflicts and making tough choices. The children wield the social power to de-escalate situations, while adults steadily escalate scenes towards the point where weapons must be drawn. Furthermore, the children are the only ones who can handle the mythical creatures living in the nearby dangerous magical forest, while the adults are the only ones that can carry titles and be punished by law.
    Photo of children in fantasy clothes with black robed figures in the forest
    Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman. Image has been cropped.

    4) Create character development, plots, and tasks that support, maintain, and necessitate the chosen dynamic in basic routines, keeping both adults and children in mind. Players need meaningful activities during the larp that serve a purpose in the larp as a whole (Kangas 2019). Here, you shape the children’s areas of agency; their plots and actions must be important for the overall larp with consequences they can take responsibility for and react to during the runtime. It is essential to prioritize explanation of the context and consequences of a scene, so the children understand their agency and choices, for example through a narrative voice where the facilitator meta-communicates what will happen if they follow through with their actions. This teaches the children how they can navigate and decode a scene. Creating an alibi for making the choices together and sharing the responsibility, connected to an explanation of why the adults cannot help, is beneficial.

    • The Umbra Falcons had been asked to help in a nearby battle. The children were in doubt. Before they made a decision, one of the adults, who was their facilitator and knew that there would be fighting in that plotline, said: “If we go to battle, it will be dangerous. Maybe, there will be fighting, in which case we could die. But our help is needed, and we do not have time to find others instead. What should we do?” Here, the theme and the impending actions were meta-communicated to the children, so they knew what they were getting into if they chose to follow through with the plot.
    • Plotlines created specifically to our teenagers and adults are played on when there are no children around. When a child joins a scene, everyone will adjust their playstyle to make room for the child’s perspective, rather than forcing the child to adopt a grown-up perspective on matters. In-game, the narrative explanation is that the adults try to protect the children from the darker aspects of the world – they will get to know it in time. This clearly marks the space for adult plots. 
    Photo of people of various ages in fantasy clothes, some raising their hands.
    Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman.

    5) Communicate the design before, during, and after the larp through both shared and divided briefings, workshops, intro-scenes, and debriefings. This makes it easier to form consensus and calibrate collectively, while ensuring safe spaces wherein both adults and children can express their thoughts and difficulties and practice the dynamics among peers while supervised by a facilitator. Debriefings and post-play activities, in which everyone can reconnect, reflect and recuperate their experience together (Brown, 2019) and establish a narrativized tale are essential factors in building a sense of community afterwards.

    • We have a collective briefing for all players and a briefing for The Umbra Falcons in which we coordinate the day together. Sometimes, rules are mentioned again (for example that children, who don’t understand that game masters dressed in black are invisible, can interact with them as their “imaginary fantasy friends”, while the invisible spirits are ignored by the rest of us). After the play, we do a follow up talk with the children individually or together with their parents.

    The most important thing you can do when you design these larps is to focus on building a trusting culture in which your participants can play and explore together. It requires respect, patience, and curiosity from everyone involved, but if we as designers design a safe space, adults and children will conjure up larp magic together.

    Bibliography

    Kangas, Kaisa. 2019. “Functional Design.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Koljonen, Johanna. 2019. “An Introduction to Bespoke Larp.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Brown, Maury Elizabeth. 2019. “Post-Play Activities.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Ludography

    Fladlandssagaen (2023): Denmark. The organizer team of Fladlandssagaen.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Høyer, Frederikke Sofie Bech. 2024. “Designing Power Dynamics Between Adults and Children in Larps.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman. Image has been cropped.

  • Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

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    Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

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    Lindsay Wolgel is a professional actor and edu-larp enthusiast. She is currently the middle school drama teacher at a charter school in NYC. Learn about the ways she incorporated larp into her curriculum this past year, via in-class parties, a classroom podcast, creative writing prompts and more!

    Here’s a pdf of the slides: 1-Year-As-a-Drama-Teacher-Slideshow

  • Pandemic Larp Improvisation

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    Pandemic Larp Improvisation

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    Larp organizers have learned a thing or two about organizing scenarios. How have we applied those skills during the COVID-19 pandemic?

    If nothing else, larping means engagement. Players invest themselves in bringing made-up characters to life, mapping a fictional world onto our real world. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of the past several years, engagement became a scarce commodity.

    Every organization, be it schools or businesses or governments, wanted to re-engage with its constituency who, through pandemic isolation and general neoliberal precarity, had understandably become detached from society and lacked the necessary motivation to do most activities of institutional benefit. You know: all of us.

    Ironically, just as we ourselves as larpers could no longer gather – since our events are natural super-spreaders of any number of diseases, including COVID-19 – my own larp expertise began to be called upon as an asset and skillset. I started getting messages from Fortune 500 companies and major news outlets about this thing called “larp,” which could then be leveraged to win back – you guessed it – engagement from their customers, students, and volunteers.

    My tales of pandemic-era collaborations in non-larp and larp-adjacent contexts highlight both the very special medium (of larp) with which we work, as well as the limitations of such collaborations.

    Image of players in costume in an online video conference
    Screenshot of the crucial Zoom call in which University of Cincinnati students role-played cardinals electing a pope.

    Temptemus Papam

    The 1492 Papal Election was an absolute shitshow, and I ran it as an online larp for a history class at my university.

    The conversation began in fall 2020 when Dr. Susan Longfield-Karr in the History department at the University of Cincinnati reached out to me as Director of the UC Game Lab about running a “papal election larp” called Temptemus Papam that famous SF author and historian Ada Palmer ran at University of Chicago in 2018. I took one look at the materials as a larpwright and was overwhelmed: over 50 character sheets 6-12 pages in length, with many different overlapping subsystems for combat, intrigue, religious favors, economics, and inheritance. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages lay before me, all during a time when my own patience for this much reading was stretched to its natural limits. I agreed to do the project on one condition: I would need to substantively pare down the material and scope of the game, in addition to adapting it to a remote experience rather than an in-person one. Dr. Longfield-Karr agreed. The UC Papal Election Game was born.

    We transformed Temptemus Papam into a correspondence game, like the old play-by-mail Diplomacy runs. Over the course of 8 weeks, player-characters would exchange virtual letters with each other while sending “orders” for any character action to me. Every week, a video would be posted online with updates and the results of the previous week’s orders, giving the players a sense of agency and impact. All of these videos and the letters would be stored in a shared online folder, from which the passive players taking on the roles of historians could assemble the history of this particular election based on player-generated “primary documents.”

    Dr. Longfield-Karr and I tapped into 2 different funds available to us and hired ourselves a larp team: history student Matthew Photides made hundreds upon hundreds of shared folders to deposit letter correspondence, Erich Pfingstag made the videos, and Felicity Moran assisted with student communication. We had intrigue, kidnapping attempts, and even a few cat-and-mouse murders as letters flew.

    Several faculty playing NPCs got very involved in their characters, leading me to believe that participant safety is equally important for non-players. Two Zoom meetings let us first conduct the papal election, and then inaugurate the new pope, who turned out to be Rodrigo Borgia, the very person actually elected pope in 1492.

    Image of a computer directory with character names
    One of the many shared online folders containing letter correspondence in the UC Papal Election Game.

    D&D Speed Dating

    Shared-folder correspondence was only one form of online larping I organized. Another was in the long-standing virtual community Second Life, as part of the event SLarpFest organized by Celia Pearce and Jenn Frank in 2021 at the IndieCade island. The game I ran was Marc Majcher’s First Impressions, a Dungeons & Dragons-style speed-dating larp from his book Twenty-Four Game Poems.

    The premise of the game is simple: a group of fantasy adventurers go on a series of “dates” to determine whom they’d like to include in their questing party. Players get to embody fairly basic fantasy stereotypes while also deepening their own relationships with each other –– often role-players whom they’ve just met. In-person at conventions, I can run the game for 8 people in about an hour. The reason why I run it at conventions is also the reason why it worked well in Second Life: it’s short and it helps people navigate an awkward social situation. Most of our players knew either Second Life or larp, but almost no one knew both well. They’d switch partners maybe 3 or 4 times, with me calling them back to the tavern each time.

    Players felt safe enough to experiment with their avatars and their roleplay without too much worry about the stakes or consequences. First Impressions in fact served as a “warm-up” larp for other, more intimate and serious SLarpFest games: Angel Falls, a funeral larp inspired by Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) by Pearce, Frank, and Annika Waern, Athena Peters’ Regency matchmaking game Romancing Jan, and The Sleepover by Julia B. Ellingboe and Kat Jones from the Honey and Hot Wax anthology, which deals with teen queerness and sexuality.

    All of us at SLarpFest were veteran larp organizers, and thus understood the relationship of comfort, safety, and community-building even in an online space: seemingly “silly” games like First Impressions build the trust necessary to take further role-play risks. Many of us have been running games on Discord, Zoom, and now Second Life for several pandemic rules, and our previous in-person larp experience directly applies to building necessary trust and competence in online spheres.

    Ongoing and Upwards

    Organizing continues! Jones and I have joined the writing team for JEWEL, a 2-day interactive experience for Jewish teens in Cincinnati. We’re using the larp design toolbox to help plan an event in which the participants experience Moses’ teachings and then mourn at his funeral. JEWEL is intended to reconnect Jewish youth with the social-justice meanings and embodied nature of their beliefs. But it is also an opportunity. JEWEL lets us take part in an exciting new world of event planning, in which larp activities can be integrated into broader community events with large constituencies and deeper pockets.

    “Larping exists in various other activities besides larps,” wrote J. Tuomas Harviainen in his 2011 article “The Larping that is Not Larp.” This persistent fact is solace during a time in which we’ve all become radically separated from one another and larps themselves are endangered by logistical and pandemic-level uncertainties. Our own generation of larpwrights are now, voluntarily or not, performing what Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions”: the incorporation of larping into whatever organizations we serve, with whomever will take a chance on our vibrant and evolving form.

    These organizations have, at last, discovered that engagement isn’t to be taken for granted. We as larpwrights can now choose to engage, too.

    References

    Harviainen, J. Tuomas. 2011. ”The Larping that is Not Larp.” In Think Larp: Academic Writings from KP2011, edited by Thomas D. Henriksen, Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet.

    Cover photo: SLarpFest attendees hang out in the tavern on the IndieCade island in Second Life. Photo by Celia Pearce. Image has been cropped.

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Torner, Evan. 2022. “Pandemic Larp Improvisation.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 78-82. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

     

  • Larp in Leadership Development at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNNA)

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    Larp in Leadership Development at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNNA)

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    Abstract

    Can the use of live action role plays (larps) be beneficial in the leadership training at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNNA)? This is the question I asked myself the autumn of 2019, as I began the work with my bachelor thesis in Military Studies, Operational Branch. Having played and designed larps since the summer of 2010, personal experience told me that larps hold great potential for personal development. At the same time, I missed more opportunities for practising leadership skills in my own education at the RNNA. To find an answer to the question above, I designed five larp sessions and ran them with the class of 2019-2022 at the RNNA. This article seeks to present what I found in my bachelor’s degree with a main focus on the larps.

    Cadets on board the tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl participating in a larp session. Photo: author
    Cadets on board the tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl participating in a larp session. Photo by the author.

    Introduction

    Military personnel are required to perform in times of crisis and war. These situations are characterized by complexity and uncertainty (Boe, 2016). Because the situations are too vast for one person to grasp alone, teams become necessary. For a team to function under such circumstances, the teamwork has to be robust (Sjøvold, 2006). This requires the team members to be capable of showing role flexibility. In this context, role flexibility refers to 1) the ability to read a situation and choose the appropriate behaviour to move the team towards their goal and 2) the range of behaviours one can comfortably choose from (Sjøvold, 2007). In order for a team to reach its full potential, four functions – nurture, control, opposition and dependence – must all be in harmony. Every team member should ideally be able to exercise behaviour that supports each function (Sjøvold, 2014).

    Figure 1: The Balance of the Basic Group Functions in the Systematizing Person-Group Relations Model. Figure 1: The Balance of the Basic Group Functions in the Systematizing Person-Group Relations Model.

    Educating officers who are capable of being role flexible, is however not a given. The natural tendency for members of newly formed groups is to fall back on roles they are comfortable and familiar with and staying there (Sjøvold, 2006). In this context, a role refers to Endre Sjøvold’s explanation of the word: “In an interaction, we have certain expectations regarding how others should behave. Such expectations of behaviour is called a role when they fulfil certain basic functions in a group” (Sjøvold, 2006). The pressure to succeed during training at the RNNA is great. This leads the cadets to fall back on behaviours and leadership styles with which they have previously had success, as opposed to trying new angles. This social pressure and the fear of failing hold the team members back from going outside their comfort zones, and thus hinders them from widening their behavioural spectrum. When this happens, a team’s success will consequently usually depend on one or a few strong team members who keep the team together (Sjøvold, 2006). I hypothesised that larps could be a solution to the challenge of developing role flexibility, as it offers a way to remove the barriers that hold team members back.

    In a larp, the participants play out fictitious characters. The characters might inhabit traits that the participants want to practise or explore (Waade, 2006). By giving the cadets the alibi of a character within a fictitious context, the social pressures connected to the cadets’ personas can be removed. The responsibility for any failures within the larp falls on the characters. This can offer the cadets a safe arena to practise in, and adds a framework for direct feedback. When the social pressures that normally hold the cadets back were removed through larp, I hypothesised that they would dare to challenge themselves in roles with which they were uncomfortable. This in turn, could lead to them developing their role flexibility and make them robust members of their teams.
    I worked with three hypotheses:

    1. The cadets will become more role flexible after completing five larp sessions.
    2. The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions and choose to play characters that challenge them will have the greatest development in their spectrum of behaviours.
    3. The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions will have the greatest development in their ability to observe situations and select an appropriate behaviour.

    Limitations

    Due to the scope of the thesis, it was not possible to examine the long term effects of the larp sessions, which might differ from the short term results. Even though it is likely that the role plays had other effects than those on role flexibility, these are not examined here.

    Research Process

    Timeline showing the research process Table 1: Timeline showing the research process

    The research process began in December 2019. I designed many alternative larps scenarios with the goal of helping the cadets develop their ability to show role flexibility. Due to practical reasons, the sessions had to be run aboard the tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl while it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The sessions were executed with the first year students in the class of 2019-2022, 64 students in total, 9 women and 55 men. They were divided according to their already existing teams of 7-8 members, which they remained part of for the duration of a year. Each team consisted of one woman and the rest men.

    The framework for each session was as follows:

    Goal: increase the participants’ role flexibility
    Purpose: educate capable officers
    Number of participants: 7-9
    Target audience: military cadets with no prior experience with larp or theatre
    Time: 70 minutes
    Location: one room with a table and chairs

     

    The tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl. Photo: author
    The tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl. Photo by the author.

    In the end, the strict time constraint led to a design that focused almost completely on role flexibility, cutting away any elements not contributing to this. On January 27th 2020 two of the scenarios I chose were playtested with 16 students at Metis High School in Bergen. Though the high school students were younger than the cadets and not organized in teams the same way, the playtest still gave a general feel for how a group with no prior experience with larp would react to them. Through a questionnaire filled out by the students and an in-depth interview with one of them, valuable feedback was acquired, and the sessions adjusted accordingly. One of the larp sessions was playtested a second time on February 1st 2020 at the Norwegian larp festival Spillerom. These participants were all experienced larpers. Feedback was also received from this group, and some final adjustments were made.

    The results of all the planning were three scenarios that were played over five larp sessions with each team. Every larp session consisted of a workshop, a larp and a debrief. During the larps half of the team played characters, while the other half trained observation skills. The participants who trained observation skills received an observation form written for one character they were going to pay special attention to, and took notes during the larp. The workshop and debrief were the same for the whole team. I personally ran all of the sessions. I played the role of “supervisor” in the larps, assigning the characters a task at the beginning of the larp and requesting a solution at the end. Sometimes a superior officer would sit in and provide additional feedback during the debrief.

    The structure of the larp sessions Table 2: The structure of the larp sessions

    The characters were written with one of the four base functions – nurture, control, opposition or dependence – at its core. The character sheets were one-pagers containing a character name; a “title” describing the type (for example the grandparent, the analytic, the inspirator, etc); a base function (nurture, control, opposition, etc); three keywords (business-like, effective, conforming, etc); two personal goals (keeping things the way they have always been, become the new boss of the company, etc); relations to the other characters; and finally a list of suggested actions (mimic others, ask how they are feeling, give praise, help and comfort, give a hug, etc).Typical traits from each function were exaggerated.

    The scenarios were set in civilian settings, and were themselves designed to not take too much focus; the main focus was on practising the behaviours connected to the function each character represented. During the workshop, I gave a short presentation of each character. The cadets could then choose which character they wanted to play, and were encouraged to pick characters they thought would challenge them. They also made suggestions for what roles their teammates should practice based on their areas with potential for improvement. However, there were a limited number of characters for each larp, so everyone didn’t get the character they wanted the most every time.

    The debriefs were an important part of the sessions, as a lot of learning happens when we reflect on past experiences (Lindholm, 2006). In this part, the cadets shared reflections from the scenarios and got feedback from the observers on points where they had succeeded in portraying their character. I also shared my own observations, and encouraged discussion around certain situations and topics. We tried to relate what happened in the larp to situations in real life where similar issues could arise, and how these could be handled.

     

    Overview of the five larp sessions each team participated in Table 3: Overview of the five larp sessions each team participated in

    Research Design

    In order to determine the effects of the larp sessions, I used a pre-test post- test comparison-group design. I compared the development of two classes. The class of 2019-2022 participated in the five larp sessions. The class of 2018-2021 was used as a non-equivalent control group. The two classes included 124 cadets in total, and 116 of the students consented to their data being used in the research (including all the cadets from the class of 2019-2022).

    Before the larp sessions, a Systematizing Person- Group Relation (SPGR) test was performed. The SPGR method is an operationalization of the spin theory and can be applied as a tool to illustrate the dynamics in a group. The spin theory perceives group dynamics as a balance phenomenon. It states that there is no one group dynamic that is ideal; the context is what determines which dynamic is useful in any given situation. In order for a team to reach its full potential, four functions – nurture, control, opposition and dependence – must all be in harmony (Sjøvold, 2014). SPGR tests have been used for several years at the RNNA to map the group dynamics within the teams and as a starting point for discussions around the topic. The test itself consists of a form where the team members rate how often they have observed certain behaviours in each other since the last test. Based on these ratings, each team member receives a score. This score can be represented in a coordinate system with an x, y and z-axis. A high z-score is considered desirable, as it signifies influence within the team and an ability to balance the four different functions within the group – nurturing, dependence, control and opposition. Sjøvold describes a high z-score as an indicator of robustness and role flexibility within a group (Sjøvold, 2006). The z-value was used as a measurement for role flexibility in the research.

    The cadets filled in a questionnaire after the larp sessions. This consisted of 23 questions, and was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the training in addition to getting feedback on how to improve the sessions in the future. Some days after the last larp session, a second SPGR-test was performed.

    One of the teams playing a larp. They have their character sheets with suggestions for actions in front of them, most using them actively during the larp. Photo: author
    One of the teams playing a larp. They have their character sheets with suggestions for actions in front of them, most using them actively during the larp. Photo by the author.

    Results and Discussion

    This part presents the most central results from the research, and a short discussion on each hypothesis. If the reader wishes more details, please refer to the bachelor’s thesis this article is based on (Jensen, 2020).

    Hypothesis 1

    “The cadets will become more role flexible after completing five larp sessions.”

    To determine if there had been any significant development in the ability to show role flexibility in the class of 2019-2022 – the class which took part in the larp sessions – as a whole, a paired samples t-test was carried out. The mean score on the z-axis was higher on the second SPGR-test (M= 0,88, SD = 3,124) than the first SPGR-test(M=0,27, SD=3,497). The difference was statistically significant***, with a mean increase of 0,609 of the z-score, CI[0,263, 0,956], t(63)=3,514, p<0,001, d=0,44. This means that a statistically significant development in the ability to show role flexibility had taken place in the class of 2019-2022 as a whole.

    Figure 2: Visual representation of the mean z-scores of the class of 2019-2022 before and after the larp sessions. Figure 2: Visual representation of the mean z-scores of the class of 2019-2022 before and after the larp sessions.

    To examine if this development was statistically greater than in the class of the previous year, 2018-2021, an independent samples t-test was performed. This test did not yield any significant difference in the development of the z-score in the class of 2019-2022 (Mean score=0,61) compared to that of 2018-2021 (Mean score=0,73), showing a mean difference of 0,12. This could indicate that the larp sessions had little or no influence on the class as a whole, and that hypothesis number 1 should be rejected.

    Nevertheless, this cannot be concluded with certainty. There are several examples of previous classes at the RNNA where development has differed greatly between classes, in spite of seemingly similar frameworks (Nissestad, 2007). Furthermore, 40,6 percent of the cadets reported that their spectrum of behaviours had been broadened as a result of their participation in the larp sessions. 65,6 percent of the cadets reported that their ability to observe other cadets had improved as a result of their participation in the larp sessions. These numbers indicate that the development the cadets experienced not exclusively could be attributed to other factors on board.

    Figure 3: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “My spectrum of behaviours has been broadened as a consequence of my participation in the larp sessions”. Figure 3: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “My spectrum of behaviours has been broadened as a consequence of my participation in the larp sessions”.

     

    Figure 4: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “My ability to observe the other cadets aboard has improved as a consequence of my participation in the larp sessions”. Figure 4: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “My ability to observe the other cadets aboard has improved as a consequence of my participation in the larp sessions”.

    Based on this, it was concluded that hypothesis number 1 should be partially accepted.

    Hypothesis 2

    “The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions and choose to play characters that challenge them will have the greatest development in their spectrum of behaviours”

    Those who are motivated in a learning situation are prone to learn more, and so I hypothesised that the cadets that felt positively inclined towards the larp sessions would learn more than those who felt negatively inclined (Volet & Järvelä, 2001). Furthermore, a prerequisite for broadening the behavioural spectrum is stepping outside one’s comfort zone (Sjøvold, 2007). Due to this, I also included that the cadets who felt challenged by the characters they played would develop the most.

    The second hypothesis was examined using both results from the questionnaire and the SPGR-tests. I worked with four groups of cadets, those who were:

    1. Negatively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that were not challenging (N=16)
    2. Negatively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that were challenging (N=6)
    3. Positively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that were not challenging (N=10)
    4. Positively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that were challenging (N=28)

    A Kruskal-Wallis H test was conducted to determine if there were differences in self-reported broadening of the behavioural spectrum between four groups of cadets (Figure 3, 1=completely disagree, 5=completely agree). This data was acquired from the questionnaire. The test revealed a statistically significantly difference between group a) the cadets who were negatively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that were not challenging (Median = 2,50), and group d) the participants who were positively inclined towards the sessions and played roles that they found challenging (Median=4,00), p<0,0005.

    Figure 5: Visual representation of the distribution of the responses from figure 3 according to the four groups. Figure 5: Visual representation of the distribution of the responses from figure 3 according to the four groups.

     

    Figure 6: The median and mean scores in self-reported broadening of the behavioural spectrum, showing values from figure 5. Figure 6: The median and mean scores in self-reported broadening of the behavioural spectrum, showing values from figure 5.

    A mixed two-way ANOVA examining the development of the ability to show role flexibility among various groups using the z-score as the measurement showed similar results. This data originated from the SPGR-tests. The results are illustrated in the figure below.

     

    Figure 7: Graphs displaying the mean z-scores in the different groups before and after the larp sessions. Figure 7: Graphs displaying the mean z-scores in the different groups before and after the larp sessions.

    Figure 7 shows us that the groups who felt most challenged by the characters they played also had the lowest z-scores to begin with. This might indicate that the larp sessions in their current form are most beneficial to those with the least developed ability to show role flexibility to begin with. A general linear model procedure for the simple main effects of time showed that group d) the positively inclined and challenged cadets, saw a statistically significant*** effect of time on the z-score, F(1, 27)=18,481, p<0,0005, partial η2=0,406. This means that group d) was the only group which had a statistically significant development from the first measurement to the second.

    Figure 8: The same z-scores as shown in figure 7, here in greater detail. Figure 8: The same z-scores as shown in figure 7, here in greater detail.

    This data shows us that a statistically significantly greater development happened in the cadets who were positively inclined towards the larp sessions and who played characters that challenged them compared to the negatively inclined cadets who played characters they found unchallenging.

    This leads us to the conclusion that hypothesis number 2 should be accepted.

    Hypothesis 3

    “The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions will have the greatest development in their ability to observe situations and select an appropriate behaviour.”
    Like in hypothesis number 2, it was predicted that the participants who felt motivated would learn more during the sessions. A Mann-Whitney U test showed statistically significantly** higher self-reported observation development scores in the positively inclined cadets (Mdn= 4,00) compared to the negatively inclined cadets (Mdn=3,50). The numbers are from figure 4, “My ability to observe the other cadets aboard has improved as a consequence of my participation in the larp sessions” (1= completely disagree, 5 = completely agree).

    Figure 9: Population pyramid from the Mann-Whitney U test, showing the distributing of the answers to the question in figure 4 based on inclination towards the larp sessions. Figure 9: Population pyramid from the Mann-Whitney U test, showing the distributing of the answers to the question in figure 4 based on inclination towards the larp sessions.

     

    Figure 10: The numbers from the independent-samples Mann Whitney U test illustrated in figure 9. Figure 10: The numbers from the independent-samples Mann Whitney U test illustrated in figure 9.

    These results are based on the cadets’ self-reported development, and a weakness is that they could be influenced by personal biases. However, the results seem plausible based on learning theory and logical deduction.

    Based on this, it was concluded that hypothesis number 3 should be accepted.

    Benefits other than those concerning role flexibility

    As stated in the limitations, the scope of the article does not leave much room to examine the other possible benefits of the larp sessions other than those concerning role flexibility. It should however be mentioned that 78,1 percent of the cadets probably or definitely would recommend the larp sessions to another cadet if asked. As this number is much higher than those who reported to have had benefits concerning broadening of the behavioural spectrum and the ability to observe, it suggests that other benefits were experienced. Indeed, gaining a better understanding of the spin theory, acquiring new perspectives and achieving a greater understanding of group dynamics were reported in the questionnaire by several cadets when asked what they learned from the sessions.

    Figure 11: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “I would recommend the larp sessions to another cadet if asked” from the questionnaire. Figure 11: Visual representation of the responses to the statement “I would recommend the larp sessions to another cadet if asked” from the questionnaire.

    Conclusion

    The following was concluded in regard to the hypotheses:

    1. The cadets will become more role flexible after completing five larp sessions
      => Partially accepted
    2. The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions will have the greatest development in their ability to observe situations and select an appropriate behaviour
      => Accepted
    3. The cadets who are positively inclined towards the larp sessions and choose to play characters that challenge them will have the greatest development in their spectrum of behaviours
      => Accepted

    Based on this and the fact that almost four out of five cadets would recommend the larp sessions to another cadet if asked, the answer to the research question is:

    Yes, the use of larp can be beneficial in the leadership training at the RNNA.

    Considering the conclusion, my recommendation was to keep the larp sessions in the training of future cadets at the RNNA. Based on the feedback from the cadets, I also recommended some changes to the sessions. These changes included creating five unique scenarios instead of replaying two of them. By replaying the scenarios with different players, I had hoped that recognizability and repetition would promote learning. However, as the cadets pointed out, this effect was achieved by having recognizable characters. Furthermore, the cadets desired more characters to choose from in each scenario, so everyone could practise the traits they wanted. I think this would be very interesting to try, though I have some reservations as this would make for some very unpredictable dynamics within the larps. The only way to know if it could work is to try! Finally, I recommended exploring the possibility of including more subject matter learning into the scenarios. I think this could help motivate a greater part of the cadet mass to participate, though I would only advise adding more to the scenarios if more time is allowed. My main concern with including more subject matter or making the scenarios more like a military mission is the challenge regarding staying in character with so little time to prepare. Keep in mind that each session only lasted 70 minutes in total. I worry that scenarios that are too personally engaging might lead the players to “play themselves” instead of the characters provided, thus missing out on the role flexibility training. However, I think more complex and relevant scenarios are a great idea with enough time to get properly into character!

    Musings from the Author

    I would like to round off this text with some personal thoughts on the subject of using larps for training personal development. I think most larpers can agree that larps can be great arenas to go outside the limits we set for ourselves in our everyday lives and to try new or challenging things. Having the alibi of a character, and thus this character to blame for our mistakes while within the setting of a larp, can feel very liberating. It can allow us to try things we would most likely never do as “ourselves”. Having experienced personal growth from many larps that were never designed for this purpose specifically made me wonder what would be possible to achieve when actually designing for personal growth!

    The edu-larp scene has of course already explored this to some degree. It has previously been argued that a well-designed edu-larp can train several skills at once: both subject matter skills and social skills. I very much agree! However, it is my impression that subject matter often gets priority in edu-larps, as these results are considerably easier to measure. To promote the incorporation of personal growth into larps, I would like to share these two reflections that I made after writing my bachelor’s thesis.

    Developing social skills can be very daunting, and so we as designers need to help the players get the hang of it! To help the players in my larp sessions, I made lists in the character sheets containing concrete actions that their characters could take during the larps. In my experience, experienced larpers don’t use their character sheets for support as much as new larpers. This was clearly illustrated during the playtests. One of the most distinct differences between these two groups was that the experienced larpers almost didn’t look at their character sheets with suggested actions after the workshop was finished. The unexperienced larpers, one the other hand, had the character sheets in front of them the whole time. An effect of this was that the unexperienced larpers used many more of the suggested actions. In doing so, they got a lot more actual practice than the experienced larpers. When designing for personal development, I think we should encourage tools that can help the players get the hang of it, not only in the workshop, but also during the larp itself! These could for example be lists to be carry around, meta-techniques, breaks during play to discuss, reminders on the bathroom door, and more. This could be included in any larp you design!

    You can design your own character for personal growth in almost any kind of larp you play! This one might seem obvious, but doing this project made me realise how true this statement really is. One way to do this, is to first choose a character to play with traits you want to explore. Next, do a little research online; find inspiration in characters from books or movies who are talented at the traits you choose; think of people you know, etc and write down a list of concrete (this is important) actions they do. Finally, bring the list to the larp, read the actions regularly, and then do the actions as your character. Asking coplayers for feedback after or during the larp will help you see your progress more clearly. Even if the larp designers did not design for personal development, you can add it if you want to!

    Sources

    Boe, Ole. (2016). Character strengths and its relevance for military officers. Lesehefte, Forsvarets Høgskole.

    Bowman, S. L. (2014). The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014. Wyrd Con under Creative Commons License.

    Jensen, Maria Kolseth. (2020). Larp in Leadership Development. Can the use of live action role plays (larps) be beneficial in the leadership training at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy? FHS, Sjøkrigsskolen. https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2724530

    Lindholm, M., Sverige, & Försvarsmakten. (2006). Pedagogiska grunder. Försvarsmakten.

    Nissestad, Odd Arne. (2007). Leadership development: An empirical study of effectiveness of the leadership development program at The Royal Norwegian Naval Academy and its impact on preparing officers to execute leadership in today’s conflicts and the conflicts in the years ahead (Doctoral dissertation, Norges Handelshøyskole). From 21.06.20 https://fhs.brage.unit.no/fhs-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2449975/Nissestad.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

    Sjøvold, E. (2006). Teamet. Universitetsforlaget.

    Sjøvold, E. (2007). “Systematizing Person-Group Relations (SPGR): A Field Theory of Social Interaction.” Small Group Research, 38(5), 615–635.

    Sjøvold, E. (2014). Resultater gjennom team. Universitetsforlaget.

    Volet, S., & Järvelä, S. (Eds.). (2001). Motivation in learning contexts: Theoretical advances and methodological implications (1. ed). Pergamon.

    Waade, A. M. (2006). “Jeg – en actionhelt!” in K. Sandvik & A. M. Waade (Red.) Rollespil: – I æstetisk, pædagogisk og kulturel sammenhæng. Aarhus University Press.

    Cover photo: Image

    This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Kolseth Jensen, Maria. “Larp in Leadership Development.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.

  • Solmukohta 2020: 500 Magic Schools for Children and Youth

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    Solmukohta 2020: 500 Magic Schools for Children and Youth

    Written by

    Josefin Westborg, Anders Berned, Kol Ford, Mike Pohjola

    This programme item brings together the NGOs, companies and other entities that run magic schools for kids and youth. Each organisation will be presented with a focus on what they have in common, what they do differently and why, and how they can inspire each other. The aim is to create knowledge exchange and inspire others to start up magic schools. One goal in the programme is to agree on when we would like to have 500 magic schools for kids in Europe (and how to get the funds to start it up).

    Q&A from the original viewing at Solmukohta 2020 Online event

    Anon 1: I love the idea to create your own IP for the magic school based on the local culture, folk tales and myths. I’d love to know more about the Finnish magic school.

     

    Anon 2: Agree! I run an ‘edularp’ for 4 Hungarian students weekly which is set in the HP universe and it uses the Hungarian Pálos rend (Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit) as a background

     

    Anders Gredal Berner Anon 2: Sound awesome! What age group is the students?

     

    Anon 2: 11-12yo. One of them already had tabletop RPG experience .

     

    Mike Pohjola We’ve used local customs and beliefs when applicable. Like using an Easter tradition to create monsters (trulli) and a way to defeat them (Easter whips) for a larp played in Easter.

    The school Houses are loosely inspired by different parts of heritage of this area, but that’s not something we’ve explained to the kids yet. Mostly they’re based on different personality traits.

    Then many of the words we’ve created based on really old Finnish words, like marto (=dead) for a non-wizard. (Just to be different than Potterverse.)

     

    Anon 4: Would be interesting to do a magic school intirely based on folklore

     

    Anon 5: In magic school you can play out your wildest fantasy of going to school where the classes aren’t boring

     

    Anon 6: I just listened to some of the interviews from last autumn about Finnish Velhokoulu, and some of the kids love stealing candy while invisible and teasing the teachers, so basically making things happen with “magic” in a very simple way

     

    Anon 7: I would love to throw on (I work in a non profit association as game facilitator and children educator) but truly I don’t know where to begin. I have children from 6 to 15

     

    Anders Gredal Berner Anon 7: Sound awesome. We had a long discussion after the recording, also touching on how to help others to starting up. Im sure the rest of the panel is also up for helping -And your very welcome to get our materiales, guides ect.

     

    Anon 7: I would love that if it’s ok with you. :O

    :

    Anon 3: Anders I would like that very much.

     

    Anon 6: And kids love adults reacting to the magic the students perform

     

    Anon 2: Do you think its ‘just’ the power of empowerment or is there something else in it?

     

    Anon 6: I think it’s both: it’s also immersion, and having adults play with them in this imaginary world that to some feels very real and they keep playing their characters even at home with friends and family

     

    Anon 2: They keep playing at home? THAT sounds interesting!

     

    Mike Pohjola Essentially we teach them new children’s games. Like if you put your hands like this you’re invisible. Or this is a new version of catch-me-if-you-can that is the magical effect of the monster.

     

    Anon 6: Velhokoulu.fi is the Finnish website, it’s all in Finnish at the moment but you can find a description and pictures of our houses there. Also video links and Instagram was recently added

     

    Anon 5: magic schools have no homework

     

    Anon 8: A side note, Josefin’s outfit is a blast <3

     

    Anon 9: also yay for gender-neutral terms!

     

    Anon 6: In general I like to use the work “taikoja” so a “magic user”, since I feel velho is more a boy term still but that’s mainly because in the books Harry Potter is a velho/wizard and Hermione is a noita/witch.

     

    Mike Pohjola Yeah, that’s an Anglicism. In Finnish tradition they’re both gender neutral.

     

    Anon 10: The adults keeps the world more real for the children, being a part of the immersion and magic. It’s easier for the children to be a part and take a part of the game as their characters when the adults encourages them in their characters. The younger the player, the more important it is.

     

    Anon 7: It’s cool that things happen in the magic world. Like it’s not just a background and can be played anywhere

     

    Anon 6: We have 40min class then 20min break where they can invade the teachers’ lounge, talk to creatures and explore.

     

    Anon 6: Classes usually have handcrafts or taming magical creatures or spell tag

     

    Anon 10: Not sure if I missed this, but (about) how many players you have in one game? Since we have about 50players a game in Velhokoulu.

     

    Anon 6: Good question!

     

    Anders Gredal Berner Our magic school is up to 50 participant + teachers, helpers, monsters.

     

    Josefin Westborg In the library larp we have they meet famous children story characters from books that they need to help. One of them are Loki the Norse god. Last time we had a child that asked who I was when I showed up as Loki. I didn’t answer but mumbled something about that I needed to get back at my brother Thor. Then he looked at me and got wide eyes and said: Oh, no. I know who you are. You are Loki! I’m not gonna help you, I’m on your brothers side”. And then he walked away.

     

    Anon 6: I like this test idea :OOO we could have that too in Ropecon etc!

     

    Mike Pohjola Totally stealing it! 😀

     

    Anon 5: does anyone ever fail anything in schools of magic?

     

    Anon 6: If I understood correctly, I’d say the characters are not perfect in what they do, so the teacher will assist them during class and they will get better during the class

     

    Anders Gredal Berner Anon 5: Yes 🙂 both on a personal level and plotlines – you can fail at our magic schools. But its a kids activities for 8 to 13 years and with a visions about producing better humans – so there is somethimes the PC takes over 😉

     

    Anon 11: I remember a kid from my latest Velhokoulu who had a character who failed all the spells they tried until the end when they finally suceeded, they seemed to enjoy it a great deal

     

    Mike Pohjola The most common failure is being too shy to participate or scared of our monster. Then we try to help them overcome this.

    But of course they can also fail in, for example, translating ancient runes into modern alphabet.

     

    Josefin Westborg Anon 10:: In the shortest little drop in larp we can run it with just 1 player but max 12. For the libraries, we have 1-16 and for the school one we take around 30. We have made a special version where we do it as a pleasure larp and not an edularp and then we can have up to 40 players.

     

    Anon 6: We raised the prices since our expenses have risen, storage and book keeper have come into the picture. Also the locations are tricky to find within a reasonable price range as we need to run two games in one weekend for it to be financially smarter.

     

    Anon 12: Hope you get City funding Mike. The entrance fee is a lot of money for many people. Not for what they get (a long, wonderful experience) but as a sum. The threshold for many people for applying for free admittance is high I think. Hope you reach that group of people, too. Perhaps channels/contacts with for example some children’s organisations might help in this?

    Velhokoulu’s rock! <3

     

    Anon 6: I’m envious of your cheap prices as I fear we’ll be unreachable for some players soon, even if we have the “discount ticket” of 10€ available as we can’t give it to everyone (so far we have managed to take everyone in who needs the discount ticket though)

     

    Anon 2: Thats interesting because only 1 of my students from 4 wanted to have wizard parents!

     

    Anon 2: I think you have a larger sample size, Josefin. I have to ask my students why do they like muggle parents 🙂

     

    Josefin Westborg This is mainly in the school larps. It’s not as much with the slightly older students when we do it for leisure. The school larps are mandatory for the students. So that might be part of it. That the kids who come to magic school larps out of free will have another relation to it.

     

    Anon 6: Our kids have an option to be part creature too. So far we’ve had one half-dragon, one son of Zeus (allegedly, he had no proof) and one half-Pigglet.

     

    Mike Pohjola Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this! We added this option because so many wanted to be NPCs since then they could be magical creatures. But we didn’t want random 8-year olds as NPCs. 😀

     

    Anon 6: We started a YouTube channel, we’re hoping to create content there that will amuse our players and will hopefully reach new players too.

     

    Anon 3: Mike, is it possible to pool resources somehow?

     

    Mike Pohjola I’m sure it would be!

     

    Mike Pohjola I mean, yes! That’s one of the points of having this talk. In physical Solmukohta we would have had a bigger gathering after it.

     

    Anon 6: I feel that after this presentation I’m actually feeling the real disappointment of not being able to see you all and discuss face to face :((((

     

    Anon 6: Oh well, next time then!

     

    Anders Gredal Berner We are creating a network of magic schools – both to inspire each others and especial to help others to start up their own magic schools for kids and youth.

    Why to start a magic school for kids:

    – Give the kids a good xp and change the world one step at the time

    – Create stabel income for your larp NGO

    – Create jobs for young larpers as instructors and larp runners

    You can contact us at Orker@rollespilsfabrikken.dk or you can write here at FB :).

    All Love

    Anders Berner

    Project Coordinator

    Rollespilsfabrikken

    +4550573390

    This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/

  • Overview of Edu-Larp Conference 2019

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    Overview of Edu-Larp Conference 2019

    Written by

    Edu-larp can be described as implementing live-action role-playing games in formal or informal educational contexts, “used to impart pre-determined pedagogical or didactic content” (Balzer & Kurz 2015). The aim of the Edu-larp Conference 2019 was to present and discuss recent international research as well as share best practice examples or innovative formats of edu-larp.The first edu-larp conference was held in 2014 in Sweden, organized by Carolina Dahlberg. From single workshops at the Nordic Larp Conferences Knudepunkt dealing with edu-larp, Carolina took to actually making a separate conference, taking place before the main event. In consecutive years, the edu-larp conference has been running every year since and will again in Finland 2020. Edu-larp conferences have also been hosted in the United States in a similar setup as the ones in the Nordic countries. They have taken place the day before the Living Games Conference, the US larpers’ version of Knudepunkt, and were hosted in 2016 (Austin, Texas) and 2018 (Boston, Massachussetts).

    The Edu-larp Conference 2019 was held at Ungdomshuset in Odense (Denmark) on 7 February 2019 from 9-17. The organizers (Muriel Algayres, Charles Bo Nielsen, and Katrin Geneuss) had sent out an open call for papers via social media and all proposals were accepted. There were eight presentations in total, spanning research and development projects, as well as reports on specific ways of facilitating edu-larps and of implementing future projects. Furthermore, three workshops were held (described below) and the program included an optional trip to Efterskolen Epos, a boarding school that uses edu-larp as one of its teaching tools.

    This article contains summaries of presentations, workshops, and the trip to Efterskolen Epos.

    Photo of Josefin Westborg
    Josefin Westborg

    Summary of the Eight Presentations

    Josefin Westborg presented results from her bachelor’s thesis in a talk entitled “Who Sees What? Perceived Learning Areas After Participating in an Edu-larp.” Applying the model of Hammer et al. (2018), she handed out an existing survey using the constructs 1) portraying a character, 2) Manipulation a fictional world, 3) Altered sense of reality, and 4) Shared imagination. Further, she conducted qualitative interviews with four edu-larp participants who had different functions in the games. Their perceptions about learning from edu-larps are similar, regardless if they were a student or a teacher. The important factor seems to be how immersed a participant is in the larp. Based on her work, Westborg suggests adding the constructs agency and personal growth to the model of Hammer et al. (2018).

    Carola Nebe from the German association Waldritter e.V. presented a short film which was produced to explain the method of edu-larp to an audience who might not be familiar with the technique. It can be found here.

    Photo of Carola Nebe
    Carola Nebe

    Olivia Fischer from the College of Teacher Education in Vienna (PH Wien) presented a format for how to introduce edu-larp as a teaching method in teacher education. In short, she first explains edu-larp as a concept and then lets students participate in edu-larps with different purposes and focuses relevant to education. She proposed among other things that edu-larps holds potential for raising student self-efficacy, which concerns “people’s beliefs in their ability to influence events that affect their lives” (Bandura, 2010, p. 1) and contributing to “Bildung,” which refers to a tradition of self-cultivation, personal maturation, and identity development, which only to a certain extent can be translated with “literacy.”

    Photo of Olivia Fischer
    Olivia Fischer

    Katrin Geneuss presented parts of results from her PhD thesis “Die waren ja mittendrin! Ganzheitliches Lernen im Rollenspiel EduLARP” (Geneuss 2019). She focused on difficulties associated with using edu-larps during regular lessons of German, History, and Philosophy in Bavaria. Through semi-narrative interviews, she found that pedagogues were concerned with the perceived effort/result-ratio, meaning that edu-larps take a lot of time to design and to facilitate, but the learning outcome is difficult to measure. This connects to another challenge, which is how to set grades on the student’s performance. To meet the teacher’s needs and to decrease the time of preparation, it would be of help to offer ready-to-play material, as can be found here. Despite those and other minor concerns, the thesis reported that due to the high degree of motivation and active involvement of the students, the STARS-project in Munich is appreciated by teachers and pupils alike.

    Photo of Katrin Geneuss
    Katrin Geneuss

    Muriel Algayres presented the results of the introduction of a role-playing game activity for secondary class students in History (Algayres 2019). She compared intrinsic and self determined motivation (see Ryan & Deci 2017) for a group of students involved in the activity with a control group. Though the quantitative levels of intrinsic and self-determined motivation were higher for the group of students involved in the activity, the sample of students was too small to establish statistical significance. However, based on the positive results, she highlighted the potential for educational role-playing games to increase intrinsic motivation in students.

    Photo of Andrea Castellani
    Andrea Castellani

    Andrea Castellani and Matteo Bisanti gave an overview over the Italian larp conference Edularp.it, which in its first year featured talks by 13 different speakers. Further, they presented Il Congegno di Leonardo, which is an edu-larp organization in Italy. Initially focusing on edu-larps for science education in secondary schools, they are currently expanding activities into other subjects and other target groups (primary school pupils, larpers, the general public, etc).

    Photo of Matteo Bisanti
    Matteo Bisanti

    Jannick Trolliet introduced the audience to how edu-larp is used in Swiss holiday camps with youths. He pointed out that the remote location invites children and young adults to explore the natural environment as well as physical interaction.

    Qla Zetterling from the Swedish company Lajvverkstaden summarized the project From Russia with Love in Belarus, where he facilitated edu-larps to teach sexual education in orphanages. Edu-larp can be a necessary vehicle to talk about topics that are socially not accepted or taboo otherwise.

    Photo of Qla Zetterling
    Qla Zetterling

    Workshops

    Between the sets of presentations, the participants were offered three mid-day workshops. On the workshop on research, which was led by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Katrin Geneuss, participants worked together on definitions and terminology, as well as on making a map of participant research intentions and methodologies. This workshop showed that from a research perspective, edu-larps as a field of research is diverse and fragmented both in terms of the topics and methods used, when applying edu-larp in formal or informal settings. Furthermore, qualitative research in edu-larp makes use of a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, for example, thematic analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006), grounded theory (see Strauss & Corbin 1997), action research (see Stringer 2008), ethnography (see Balsiger & Lambelet 2014), motivation theory (see Ryan & Deci 2017), and network analysis (see Bruun & Evans 2018). These are some of the perspectives in use to answer equally diverse research questions. Many participants were in the beginning of their research careers and/or had edu-larps as one of many research interests. As can be expected from a budding field, researchers seem to bring in the theories and methodologies they know from other more or less related fields.

    sticky notes on a whiteboard brainstorming the academic field of edu-larp

    Another workshop was lead by Olivia Fischer, and was concerned with implementing drama techniques and edu-larps in teacher education. This workshop featured many hands-on exercises for the participants, several of which were inspired by improvisational theatre. A third workshop on edu-larp design was lead by Charles Bo Nielsen. The workshop to the format of what can be called “a larp jam:” Starting with a brainstorm of ideas from common “idea points,” the workshop participants proceeded to team up and develop ideas further. As an end product, the developed ideas were narrowed down by participants to finalized pitches, which were presented to the overall audience of the conference.

    Visit to Efterskolen Epos

    The conference had an optional add-on: the audience was offered a trip to the Danish boarding school Efterskolen Epos. It is one of two secondary schools in Denmark using role-playing games as an integrated part of their teaching strategy. The trip was co-organized by Esben Wilstrup and Charles Bo Nielsen. At Efterskolen Epos, participants engaged in joint discussions with pupils as well as teachers from the school. This gave different perspectives on how the school utilizes both pupil and teacher resources when designing games from which students may acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies required by the Danish school system (grades 9 – 10). In Denmark, an “efterskole” (the literal translation from Danish is “after school”) is a government-funded institution that acts as a transitional boarding school to prepare lower secondary students (8th, 9th, and 10th graders in the Danish school system) for upper secondary school. An “efterskole” usually has a focus, often related to particular fields of interest, such as sports, music, outdoors, or larp. This focus is often accompanied by a pedagogical vision and practice. As a government funded school, Efterskolen Epos follows the standard educational regulations of 9-10th grade including regulations for exams and grades.

    participants brainstorming in the edu-larp workshop 2019
    Participants in a workshop at the Edu-Larp Conference 2019. Photo by Anders Berner

    Outlook

    The variation of the contributions to the edu-larp conference indicates that larp as an educational tool is applied in many different contexts, ranging from holiday camps to courses at colleges for teacher education. These formal and informal learning and teaching strategies demand well-trained teachers and facilitators, which is why multiple programs need to be developed. Research in edu-larps may be seen as a new bud in the young fields of game-based learning and gamification. As such, research in edu-larps is diverse both in terms of research questions and methods. Furthermore, research in edu-larps seems to be intimately tied to teacher practice and development of unique edu-larps, rather than investigations of standard materials. Finally and linked to the last point, the field has a great and diverse interdisciplinary potential, both in terms of research and design. As mentioned previously, this potential of edu-larp among others touches the fields of performative studies, drama education (Heathcote & Bolton 1995), and psychology, as well as interdisciplinary teaching, where edu-larps may help link, for example, the Humanities and the Sciences.

    References

    Algayres, Muriel. 2018. “A Study of Active Learning in Educational Roleplaying Games and Students’ Motivation.” Proceedings from the TAL2018 Conference, Syddansk University, 2018.

    Balsiger, Philip, and Alexandre Lambelet. 2014. “Participant Observation.” In Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research, edited by Donatella Della Porta, 144-172. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Balzer, Muriel, and Julia Kurz. 2015. “Learning by Playing. Larp as a Teaching Method.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified March 4.

    Bandura, Albert. 2010. “Self‐efficacy.” In The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology 1-3.

    Braun, Virgina, and Victoria Clarke. 2006. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, no. 2: 77-101.

    Bruun, Jesper, and Robert Evans. 2018. “Network Analysis as a Research Methodology in Science Education Research.” Pedagogika 68, no. 2: 201-217.

    Geneuss, Katrin. (2019). „Die waren ja mittendrin!“ Ganzheitliches Lernen im Rollenspiel EduLARP. Grundlagen – Wirkungen – Einsatz im Deutschunterricht. Elektronische Hochschulschriften: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

    Hammer, Jessica, To, Alexandra, Schrier, Karen, Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Geoff Kaufman. 2018. “Learning and Role-Playing Games.” In Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, 283-299. New York: Routledge.

    Heathcote, Dorothy, and Gavin M. Bolton. 1995. Drama for Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

    Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. 2017. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. Guilford Publications.

    Strauss, Anselm, and Corbin, Juliet M. 1997. Grounded Theory in Practice. Sage.

    Stringer, Ernie T. 2008. Action Research in Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

    Cover photo: Muriel Algayres in the foreground, Katrin Geneuss and Charles Bo Nielsen presenting.

    Editor: Elina Gouliou