Tag: Knutepunkt 2025

  • Experiencing Art from Within

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    Experiencing Art from Within

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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.


    In my larp Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors), artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of the participants. I designed the larp for Amos Rex, one of the three big art museums in Helsinki, Finland. I ran it twice at their exhibition Musta tuntuu, toistaiseksi (I Feel, for Now), which presented artworks from their collections. It was a scalable larp that could accommodate at most 50 players, and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Players included both experienced larpers and newcomers. The larp was run when the museum was closed, so there were no spectators and players had privacy.

    Amos Rex profiles as a “young” museum. For example, they have featured exhibitions by teamLab, Hans Op de Beeck, Ryoji Ikeda, and other artists who create immersive installations – sometimes like alternative visual realities that you experience from the inside. Amos Rex has also held Game Amos seminars about game art. No wonder, then, that they also wished to have a larp in their repertoire.

    I could have used the exhibition as merely a venue where some events happened to play out, but I did not want that, I wanted my larp to be in dialogue with the exhibition. Neither did I want the larp to be just one art piece among others in the exhibition. I wanted the larp to be about the exhibition, and I wanted the participants to be in constant interaction with the artworks as they played.

    The game scholar Jaakko Stenros pointed out to me that I was doing in reverse something that artists like Brody Condon and Adam James have been involved with. Whereas they make art objects (such as a film) out of a larp, I made a larp out of an exhibition of art objects. Each player used one artwork as a basis for creating a character that would then possess the player’s body during the larp. The idea was that the artworks were living creatures with personalities of their own. In the beginning of the larp, they would take over museumgoers’ bodies: Each player walked into the exhibition as themselves, stopped in front of their artwork, and let it take control of their body (or, in other words, began playing the artwork-character). Thus, there was a pervasive element, and the players became the artworks.

    Design philosophy from the blackbox tradition

    For the Amos Rex museum, the larp was a way to draw in new audiences that might revisit the museum on other occasions. At the same time, we were showcasing larp as a form of expression to people with no previous experience of it. When a larp is advertised on the social media channels of a large museum, it attracts people from outside the larp community.

    I aimed for a beginner-friendly design and for a larp that would be easy to access: Participants needed to be able to walk in without preparing beforehand. Dropouts and no shows were common at museum events, so I went for a scalable larp. It could not be too long; it had to be something that could be played in one evening after work. As no preparations, short duration and scalability are common in Nordic blackbox larps, I applied several design innovations from that tradition.

    I aimed to fit the larp in 4 hours (which is the typical length of a larp slot at blackbox festivals). We ended up with a 2-hour workshop and about 2 hours of play. As in many blackbox larps, most of the design effort went into the workshop. I began the workshop with a guided meditation that introduced players to the themes of the larp. Then, there was a warmup designed to help them play artworks physically, and finally, we created characters and relationships.

    Newcomers can find it difficult to come up with things to do in a larp. It becomes easier if there are experienced larpers present, whose example the beginners can follow. This is called herd competence (Lundqvist 2015). To achieve herd competence, we aimed for half of our participants to have some previous larp experience. There were two ticket categories, one for beginners and another for experienced larpers.

    In the fiction of the larp, Amos Rex was a museum where artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of visitors every now and then, and the guides knew about it. It was their job to advise paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art who were confused in their newly acquired human bodies. Most of the guides were played by actual museum guides, and we had a lot of fun together brainstorming “nighttime personalities” for them in preparation for the larp. Participants could always consult these museum guides – either in-game or off-game – if they felt at loss during the larp and did not know what to do.

    Goals and Rituals

    Clear (and perhaps even slightly gamist (see Edwards 2001, Bøckman 2003) goals are often helpful for first-time larpers. When players focus on a goal, it is easier to come up with things to do, and they don’t get bored. Goals generate action that helps structure playtime.

    Another possibility to make a larp beginner-friendly is to have a lot of pre-planned events to which the players can react. Since Hyvät museovieraat involved exploring a large exhibition space, planned events didn’t feel practical, and I decided to go for goal-oriented play. Moreover, I wanted to give players who so wished the possibility to just freely delve in the museum space and concentrate on interactions, and in a larp it is easier to ignore goals than planned events.

    The goal for some characters was to stay in the body of a visitor, leave the museum, and become a human (the players got to decide for themselves whether their characters wanted this). To achieve this, an artwork had to perform a ritual that attached it permanently to the body, and it needed help from two other artworks. However, these assistants would have to give up the possibility of performing the ritual for themselves and thus give up on their hope of becoming human!

    Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.
    Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.

    Museum guides instructed characters on how to perform the rituals, which meant we did not need to use workshop time on practicing them. Experiential artworks were used as ritual sites. One of these was Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚ (2023–2024), a science-fiction style installation by the artist collective Keiken (see photo above). It is a glowing, shell-like space curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, where visitors lie down on soft pods with a vibrating silicone womb on their abdomen, listening to the installation’s soundscape through headphones (see Amos Rex 2024). In the ritual, the group of three artworks – one who wished to stay in a human body and two helpers – would occupy one of the pods.

    Characters could also have other objectives. Some of them wished to continue their existence as artworks somewhere else than in this particular museum. Others wanted to prevent another character from escaping the museum so as not to be separated from them. Players came up with these goals in guided workshop exercises. Sometimes the outcomes could be quite drastic: one painting hated its maker and wanted somebody else to escape the museum and kill the artist.

    Characters who went for the ritual option faced the challenge of persuading two other artworks to assist. One way to do this was to offer deals. An artwork could promise to do a favor for another one once it was outside the museum. The characters could trust each other’s word on it since the ritual would bind them to it. Kalervo Palsa’s painting Itseriittoisuus (1978; Eng. Self-sufficiency, see cover photo) desired to be hung on display in a meeting room of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, a lobby group and major wielder of economic power. It helped another painting in the ritual on the condition that the escapee would convince the Confederation to purchase it from the museum.

    Emotions and inter-character drama

    Unlike many collection exhibitions, I Feel, For Now did not present artworks chronologically or arrange them based on art movements. Instead, the art pieces were organized thematically, with a focus on the emotions they expressed (in the curators’ opinion). Five major themes had emerged this way: Beneath the Surface, Memory Games, A Moment of Extasy, Emotional Language and Carried Away by the Senses.

    Since the exhibition was about emotions, I hoped the larp could be about them too. Moreover, I wanted to incorporate the main themes of the exhibition in the larp. So I decided that the curators’ theme groups would determine who could help a given artwork in the ritual.

    All the characters were artworks from either the Beneath the Surface part of the exhibition or the Memory Games part or A Moment of Extasy part. The emotional life of an artwork was more limited than that of a human. Thus, in the ritual, an artwork who wanted to stay in a human body had to absorb the whole spectrum of human emotions. This meant that an artwork who was labeled under Beneath the Surface (which usually meant that they had dark, hidden emotions) needed the playful childlike emotions embodied by the Memory Games artworks and the feelings of almost religious ecstasy from A Moment of Extasy. Each ritual group would contain artworks from three different theme groups, and in the ritual, the two helpers would donate part of their own emotional landscape to the character who was going to become human.

    To create emotional drama, I wanted to make the decision to leave or stay in the museum hard. Either way, the character would have to make a sacrifice – to let go of something. One obvious design choice was to divide the characters into tight-knit groups that would split during the larp.

    In the workshop, we divided the characters into groups of about five. These artworks had been displayed close to each other in the exhibition, and their group dynamics resembled that of a family. We workshopped the details with the players and instructed them to create both negative and positive relations within the group. These groups would eventually break apart when some members would stay in the museum and others leave.

    Physicality

    Physicality was another thing to be considered in the design process. There is a social script for a museum space: a mode of behavior to which you tend to instinctively fall back when you enter an exhibition. In an art museum, people are likely to slowly wander around looking at the objects and talk in low voices. One of the goals with Hyvät museovieraat was to break the script and encourage people to behave in ways you don’t usually see in a museum. For this to succeed, it was crucial that there were no outsiders in the museum during the larp.

    The rules of the museum constrained the possibilities for physicality. For example, running is not allowed in the exhibition space, and there are other limitations in place to ensure the safety of the artworks. Moreover, intense physical touch was ruled out since the larp was in the official program of the museum and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Participants could touch each other on hands and arms and hug each other after asking for permission.

    However, nothing stopped players from e.g. crawling on the floor or moving their bodies in unexpected, non-human ways. A museum representative mentioned this at the beginning of the workshop when explaining the museum rules. During the workshop, I encouraged participants to explore new ways of moving that could suit their characters. The players warmed up for the larp with an exercise where they looked at different artworks and then tried to move the way the artwork would move if it were a living being.

    In the character creation exercise, participants chose an artwork from a given area in the exhibition, and we would then broadcast from the museum PA system a list of questions that helped them create the character. There were questions about the character’s personality and goals, as well as questions that inspired the participants to look at the artwork in new ways. Some questions guided them to think about movement, such as the following:

    When you take over the human body, how do you move it? How does this movement convey your true essence? Take a few steps and try out this way to move.

    The first run of the larp became surprisingly physical and emotional, given that it was such a short larp. One participant kept his hands behind his back all the time since a character in the artwork lacked arms. People crawled on the floor and screamed at each other. There was emotional drama, and players cried. I hadn’t expected it to be so intense and wondered where the emotions came from. Maybe it was the artworks that inspired people’s play.

    On the other hand, the second run seemed much less physical and emotional. In the end, every player group makes a different larp.

    Art pedagogy

    Ultimately, Hyvät museovieraat was a way to experience art in a new fashion. The participants concentrated on one artwork and went quite deeply into it – often the way you immerse in a larp character. Thus, it was like looking at the artwork from inside.

    Melanie Orenius, who works as a curator of education at Amos Rex, brought an art pedagogical angle to the larp. She formulated character creation questions that had to do with the size of the artwork or the technique used to create it. These questions guided the participants to pay attention to details they might have otherwise ignored. For example, one question was:

    “Think about the colors in the artwork. Is there a tinge that dominates it, and is it tranquilizing or energizing? What do the colors tell you about the character?”

    The questions also discussed how art is displayed and went into deeper inquiries about its worth. Part of the PA announcement went:

    “Dear artworks. You are part of the collections of Amos Rex. But did anyone ask your permission for it?

    Would you rather be in another museum, in a public space, or in somebody’s – maybe your own – home? How valuable do you feel you are, and what determines your value?”

    When we were workshopping the small family-like groups, players looked at each other’s artworks when creating relationships. One group spontaneously came up with the idea of checking the years when the artworks were made and created a seniority hierarchy based on them: The older artworks would treat the younger ones like children or little siblings.

    Curation and display became major topics during the larp. Many artworks wished to be moved to another place in the exhibition. In the second run, there was even a discussion about what would happen to the artworks who stayed in the museum once the exhibition ended. When I told them, in the role of a museum guide, that they would be moved into a storage space, it created an uproar.

    Artworks who permanently took over a human body had to find a place to store the human spirit (that of the players) – a suitable artwork in the exhibition. At the end of the larp, everybody filled in details about their artwork (either the one they played, or the one they stored their human into) on a small form with questions like the name of the artwork, how it should be cared for, and how it should be displayed.

    Many players left these little pieces of paper in the museum, and they were archived. It was fun to read them afterward. One participant renamed her artwork – a stylistic, acrylic neon sculpture of a pig – The Plexiglass Queen and wrote that champagne should always be served in front of it. Another one wrote that his artwork should not be displayed at all: curtains should be drawn in front of it.

    Radical interpretations

    During the larp each participant held the interpretative authority on what their artwork-character was truly about. There were no introductions to the exhibition or its artworks beforehand. It was the participants who decided how exactly to transform the artworks into characters.

    This meant that there were some unorthodox and unusual interpretations. For example, one participant found their artwork ugly – a horrible sum of mistakes that just wanted to be destroyed and to destroy the artist who had made it. Based on the feedback, some participants found others’ ways of seeing the artwork shocking.

    How a larp turns out always depends on the ensemble of players. A group of curators and critics would probably have played Hyvät museovieraat differently. Maybe their interpretations of the art would have carried more weight and been better justified. However, some motivations for the larp came from the field of audience development, where guides and curators who do interactive tours wish they could get visitors to be bolder about expressing their thoughts on the art.

    The larp functioned as a platform for exactly this. Most people who look at art are not art professionals, and they always make their own readings and judgments on the art. They just don’t usually express them to people within the art world. The new and radical thing about the larp was that it served as a forum to voice those thoughts and play with them.

    Other reflections

    All in all, Hyvät museovieraat got good scores on the participant feedback forms. Originally, the larp was to be run only once, but a rerun was scheduled because of the positive feedback. However, the larp probably wasn’t as beginner-friendly as it looked on paper – even experienced larpers reported that it was not an easy larp.

    In some sense, I knew this all along, deep down. Shortness and no preparation requirements lower the threshold for newcomers to participate in the larp, but they don’t make it easy to play. First-time larpers often need clear instructions and struggle when they have to come up with stuff themselves. They are not sure what is possible, and they wonder what they are supposed to do. It is often more difficult to make your own character than to play a pre-written one. Furthermore, it is definitely easier to throw yourself into something familiar than to start creating characters and relationships out of artworks that might not have obvious connections to each other. There are a myriad of ways to turn an artwork into a larp character, even with guiding questions, and that very freedom makes it difficult.

    However, we got positive feedback also from newcomers who had great experiences. Many of them also created beautiful play. Creating content for Hyvät museovieraat lay heavily on the players, but I don’t see any other way in which we could have made this larp. If the goal is to engage participants with art, you have to do it on their own terms, with no readymade interpretations and easy-to-apply formulae.

    Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors)

    Location: Amos Rex art museum, Helsinki
    Runs: May 21th and August 20th, 2024.
    Duration: 4 hours
    Number of participants: scalable, at most 50
    Admission fee: 30 / 15 euros
    Design: Kaisa Kangas (larp design) and Melanie Orenius (art education)
    Producer: Sanja Kulomaa

    Special thanks: Syksy Räsänen, Dare Talvitie, Bjarke Pedersen, Halden Pfearsen, Miles Lizak.

    Bibliography

    Amos Rex. Keiken: Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. 2024. https://amosrex.fi/en/collections/keiken/ (last accessed Nov 29, 2024).

    Bøckman, Petter. “The Three Way Model”. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp, eds. Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03. 2003.

    Edwards, Ron. 2001. “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2” The Forge, October 14, 2001. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)

    Lundqvist, Miriam. “Making Mandatory Larps for Non-players”. Nordic Larp Talks 2015. Copenhagen. https://nordiclarptalks.org/tag/miriam-lundqvist/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)


    This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
    Kangas, Kaisa. 2025. “Experiencing Art from Within.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.


    Cover image: Kalervo Palsa (1978): Itseriittoisuus (Eng. Self-Sufficiency). Photo: Stella Ojala / Amos Rex.

  • Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters

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    Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters

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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.


    The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, popularly known as the “Star Wars hotel”, was a live action experience in Walt Disney World, Florida. Over the course of 40 hours, hundreds of guests (Disney’s term for visitors or players) picked sides between the heroic Resistance and the evil First Order, taking on missions from spies, smugglers, and soldiers. Basically, it’s a romantic drama – Casablanca in space.

    The Starcruiser opened to great fanfare in March 2022 as one of the most ambitious permanent “immersive” experiences ever made. Initial reviews were generally positive, but coverage was dominated by its price – as much as $6000 for a cabin holding up to four or five people, far more than traditional cruises or theme park stays. Many people couldn’t understand how it could justify such a high price. Eighteen months later, the Starcruiser closed for reasons that are still not fully known. In 2024, after the closure, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson described her poor experience in a four hour video((Jenny Nicholson, “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” May 19, 2024, Jenny Nicholson, YouTube, 4:05:38, https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4.)) that attracted over ten million views. The video and the closure established a widespread narrative of the Starcruiser as a cynical, unmitigated disaster.

    When I learned of the Starcruiser’s impending closure, I rushed to book a ticket for one of the final “sailings” in the summer of 2023. As an augmented reality and alternate reality game designer, I was keen to see it with my own eyes. Based on that visit and my subsequent research, I believe the Starcruiser is more interesting than a simple folly. It has many parallels to larps – especially high price, deeply immersive 360º((Johanna Koljonen, “eye-witness to the illusion: an essay on the impossibility of 360° role-playing,” in Lifelike (Knudepunkt 2007), ed. Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade, Line Thorup (Knudepunkt 2007, 2007), 175.)) blockbuster larps such as Odysseus (inspired by Battlestar Galactica), Conscience (Westworld), and Eclipse (Arrival/Interstellar) – with many innovative and impressive aspects that are worth studying. At the same time, its confusing marketing raised unrealistic expectations and exacerbated flaws like poor onboarding.

    This article explores the contrasts between the Starcruiser and larps, such as its lack of workshops and training; highly realistic player tasks; spaces for relaxation and guest-to-guest interaction; app-based NPC interactions; and its profit-based commercial nature. This will include observations of the experience, its technical achievements, and my encounters with other players. Finally, it will explore the Starcruiser’s financials, confusing marketing, and the circumstances surrounding its closure. The Starcruiser represents a harbinger of the future for all blockbuster larps, whether made by volunteers or billion dollar corporations.


    Disney has long experimented with role playing. Early Disneyland rides were designed from the perspective of protagonists, meaning guests on the Snow White attraction or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride saw neither Snow White nor Mr. Toad – they were the characters.((Leslie Iwerks, “Chapter 2: The Happiest Place on Earth,” in The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (Disney Editions, 2022).)) This was later changed due to the confusion it caused, but the interest in role play remained. The cancelled Disney’s America theme park, intended to open in 1998, would have included Civil War battle re-enactments;((Iwerks, “Chapter 16: The Battle of Disney’s America,” The Imagineering Story.)) Bob Weis, Senior Vice President, said, “We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad,” arguing the park couldn’t present a rose-tinted view of America.

    Less controversially, guests would later be chosen to play roles in a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast, and new Star Wars and Marvel attractions in the parks have emphasised making guests “part of the stories being told, to give them a role other than passive view”, such as using web slingers to fight alongside Spider-Man. These examples afford comparatively little agency to guests, but the direction of travel is clear.

    Along with researching escape rooms and immersive theatre, senior Disney Imagineers – the workers responsible for the company’s theme parks and attractions – have been playing Nordic Larp for years. A number of Imagineers were on the Monitor Celestra in 2013, and Sara Thacher, a senior Imagineer who worked on the Starcruiser, attended the College of Wizardry twice. “A big ‘Aha!’ moment for me there was just being in a castle, in a wizard robe, having a cup of tea, and having this alibi, this reason to be there,” she told The New Yorker.((Neima Jahromi, “LARPing Goes to Disney World,” New Yorker, May 23, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/larping-goes-to-disney-world.)) In the Starcruiser, guests have a full schedule of classes and activities and optional quests, but the Sublight Lounge bar also provides an alibi to relax with a card game of Sabacc.

    Playing Sabacc in the Sublight lounge bar, photo by Adrian Hon
    Playing Sabacc in the Sublight lounge bar, photo by Adrian Hon

    These explicit links make it possible to view the Starcruiser through the lens of larp. Given the Starcruiser’s use of schedules and NPCs and its lack of boffer-style combat, the best parallel may be Eastern European larp like the College of Wizardry. Scott Trowbridge, another senior Imagineer, noted that some larps “can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience,” indicating a reluctance to give players the intense emotional experiences that often characterise Nordic larp.

    The biggest argument against the Starcruiser being a larp, let alone a Nordic Larp, is that it provides precisely zero training or workshops for guests in how to role play. Guests are not given or suggested characters or character archetypes to play; instead, they arrive on the Starcruiser – a cruise ship for interstellar tourists – as naive passengers from Earth, playing themselves, with their own alibi to ask basic questions about the Star Wars universe. Some guests did create their own characters and backstory, and performers would play along, within reason: claiming to be Darth Vader wouldn’t work.

    Rather than train guests how to participate, I’ve been told that the Starcruiser’s professional “NPC” performers were trained to “meet people where they are”, which is to say, interact with guests and encourage them to participate to the extent they appear comfortable to do so, whether simply through eye contact or by dialogue. No doubt there are financial and practical reasons behind this, too: workshops were not automatically welcomed in Nordic Larp and it’s safe to assume the Starcruiser’s guests would be similarly sceptical toward a multi-hour introductory workshop.

    During my visit to the Starcruiser in July 2023, I noticed two problems with the zero-training philosophy. The first was that for some guests, “where they are” was in their cabin, away from any opportunity for anyone to engage them. The second was that despite the impressive number of performers, there were too few to engage every guest in the first few hours.

    While loitering in the lobby shortly after boarding on the first day, I saw two young guests watching as others talked to a First Order performer. They were wearing impressive, custom-made costumes and were clearly keen to participate, but didn’t know how. Even a brief workshop might have given them the confidence, but their approach to the dark side would have to wait.

    Given how its designers evidently steered away from Nordic Larp’s fundamental tenets, it’s wrong to view the Starcruiser as a literal larp. Rather, it’s better to view it as a hybrid form, at the far end of larp, not merely at the far (less involved) end of role playing, but also at the far end of physical scale and technological complexity. No imagination was necessary on the Starcruiser: the engineering bay was packed with ducts and pipes and cables to be fixed, the bridge bordered by a vast panoramic view of space, and the Sublight Lounge’s bar atmosphere was suffused in the perfect combination of luxury and intrigue. All views of outer space on the bridge and through cabin “portholes” were synchronised in real time. In formal terms, every effort was made to make appearances and tasks indexical((Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta, Markus Montola, “The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design,” in Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, ed. Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, Ruska Kevätkoski (Ropecon ry, 2024), 64.)) rather than iconic or symbolic.

    The Starcruiser was presented to guests as an interstellar luxury cruise. The idea of a cruise felt discordant with how the Star Wars universe has been popularly depicted – we don’t see Luke Skywalker embark on a cruise, but we do see Harry Potter going to classes in Hogwarts – but it provided a reason to structure guests’ time like a real cruise; one hour might be dedicated to lightsaber training, and another to Sabacc lessons. This is not unusual amongst Nordic Larp; Odysseus has been described as a “clockwork larp”, running on a strict schedule of hyperspace jumps, and the College of Wizardry and various magic schools have scheduled classes. The Content Larp Manifesto((“Content larp manifesto”, accessed December 19, 2024, https://manifest.larpy.cz/en/)) also describes Czech larps (e.g. Legion)((“Legion: Siberian Story – LARP by Rolling,” accessed December 19, 2024, https://legion.rolling.cz.)) that use timed and pre-written scenes in the service of dramatic stories. Indeed, a planned and predictable experience is what some larpers desire,((Anni Tolvanen, “A Full House Trumps a Dance Card,” lecture, September 9, 2022, posted September 11, 2022, by Nordic Larp Talks, YouTube, 24:01, https://youtu.be/SPWCXf_LrSs.)) perhaps at the cost of openness and serendipity.

    Performer movements were, if anything, even more tightly scheduled. Earpieces conveyed timing cues so they knew when to move on for an “accidental” confrontation in a hallway. In retrospect, performers’ ability to improvise dialogue with guests to fill the precise amount of time before their next move was remarkable.

    Where the Starcruiser appears to depart from Nordic Larp is that guests were incapable of influencing the major beats and ultimate outcome of the story. No matter what guests did, there was always a confrontation between the ship’s captain and a First Order officer during dinner. Chewbacca always escaped from confinement, and Rey always made it on board – and yet guests felt crucial to the story because we were actively relaying secret messages and distracting Stormtroopers.

    Caught up in the excitement, it was easy to forget our lack of agency to dramatically change events. This was not surprising given the source material’s spectacular nature. Odysseus’ play instructions also elevated discipline over agency: the larp was “designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox… this is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved.” However, the absence of meaningful deliberation was most notable during the conclusion, which reminded everyone that in the final analysis, the Star Wars universe remains dominated by superpowered Force users – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren battling on a balcony – rather than one where passengers gets a vote.

    Talking to other guests wasn’t a necessary part of the Starcruiser experience. It was encouraged, but the endless scheduled activities and optional quests (see below) meant it was less of a priority in terms of creating entertainment and drama. I quickly abandoned my attempts at role playing a morally ambiguous scientist after a couple of conversations went nowhere. However, NPC performers worked hard to engage guests. A lovelorn musician who needed relationship advice would ask children for help writing songs, while a Han Solo-esque scoundrel NPC recounted his exploits to guests in the bar. Some guests played along, talking about their own exploits or poking holes in his stories. One guest demonstrated his homemade droid collection in the lobby. Many had become friends on previous voyages or via forums, which inevitably felt a touch exclusionary, but their costuming and role playing-adjacent attitude helped enrich the Starcruiser’s atmosphere.

    None of these activities “mattered” in terms of changing the plot or ultimate fate of characters, but they were enjoyable and gave meaning to guests’ own stories. It was as if the sheer quantity of performers and length of the experience partly made up for the lack of workshops – most guests who didn’t know how to interact at the beginning could learn by watching, their initial discomfort long forgotten by the end. Since performers were trained to memorise guests’ names, it was common to be asked for an update on your activities by Resistance or First Order agents while on your way to dinner.

    What many accounts fail to convey is how much of the Starcruiser experience was driven digitally. Every guest had access to a Datapad smartphone app with which they could talk to NPCs – the very same NPCs walking around the ship. In classic video game RPG fashion, guests could respond to messages with 1-3 prewritten options of varying levels of curiosity and enthusiasm. More unusually, not only could you lie to NPCs by giving them incorrect information, you could outright betray them.

    Lt. Croy, flanked by stormtroopers, photo by Adrian Hon
    Lt. Croy, flanked by stormtroopers, photo by Adrian Hon

    On my first mission for Lt. Croy, a First Order officer, I was tasked with hacking into a physical console to find the ship’s logs. I discovered the Starcruiser had diverted its itinerary on previous cruises to supply Resistance bases with weapons; I was able to copy the logs to my Datapad, but I could have deleted or overwritten them. Because I am a boring role player, I sent the logs to Croy, but I don’t doubt that betraying him would’ve had lasting consequences through the branching story, perhaps introducing me to Resistance members.

    As more NPCs introduced themselves on the Datapad, barely a moment passed between invitations to sabotage the ship’s systems, hack the computers, search for contraband, or smuggle on board an agent – all of which involved physically walking to the engineering bay or cargo hold to connecting wires and scan codes, with NPCs instantly “knowing” when I’d completed my task. It was deeply impressive technology that worked flawlessly for me, a gold-plated version of the busywork seen in other sci-fi blockbuster larps like Odysseus’ RFID-powered HANSCA((James Bloodworth, “Odysseus 2024 / A Retrospective,” Critical Path, September 2, 2024, https://criticalpathsite.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/odysseus-2024-a-retrospective/.)) smartphone app. Another digital experience was delivered by the video comm link in my cabin, where droids would periodically call asking for help to aid or stymie the resistance. This worked wholly via voice recognition and was surprisingly funny. It goes without saying that all of these tasks and experiences were fundamentally “single player”, in the sense that co-operating with other guests was unnecessary – a marked difference to Odysseus.

    A highly indexical puzzle in the engineering bay, photo by Adrian Hon
    A highly indexical puzzle in the engineering bay, photo by Adrian Hon

    The technical complexity of the Starcruiser is likely the reason why some guests suffered major issues around the launch period in early 2022 wherein their Datapad didn’t steer them toward interesting activities. Other accounts suggest these problems were largely fixed within weeks or months, but the damage had been done: critics((Charlie Hall, “Disney’s Star Wars hotel Galactic Starcruiser was torpedoed by bad app design,” Polygon, May 28, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) then and now incorrectly believed the technical issues were permanent, like a rollercoaster whose tracks couldn’t be moved rather than a video game that could be updated over time.

    The cost of tickets to the Starcruiser also fuelled the notion that it was a cynical ploy to rip off guests. Depending on the timing of a visit, it was possible to spend as much as $6000 (€5500) for single person staying in their own cabin – an astronomical amount compared to other attractions. However, if four people shared a cabin, as is common in larps and on cruises, each person might only $1200 (€1100). There is no way to make €1100 sound cheap, but it’s comparable to the cost of blockbuster larps; my ticket to Eclipse this year will cost €875 (including a shared room in a 3 star hotel). The fact that I met so many repeat visitors, most of whom were staying three or four to a cabin, indicated they felt it was good value. Caro Murphy, Immersive Experience Director for the Starcruiser, revealed((Caro Murphy, “Reacting to a reaction,” Caro Murphy, May 30, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) it achieved a 91% guest satisfaction score, supposedly the highest rating in the history of any Disney attraction. Starcruiser fans have organised conventions,((“Halcy-Con | A 2-Day Galactic Starcruiser Superfans Event,” Halcy-Con, archived September 12, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240912154545/https://halcy-con.com/.)) created podcasts, and made movies.

    The closure of the Starcruiser may seem to contradict this argument, or at least suggest it was not popular or profitable enough. It’s too soon to know Disney’s real reasons, but Kathryn Yu has noted that most analyses fail to take into account wider corporate circumstances. In 2023, Disney faced an activist shareholder battle; in a bid to raise free cash, returning CEO Bob Iger promised to cut $5.5 billion in costs, quickly selling off TV shows and eliminating 7000 jobs.((“Disney Completes 7,000 Job Cuts,” Variety, May 31, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/.)) Closing the Starcruiser effectively unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars via accelerated depreciation,((Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, “The High-Flying Death Of Disney’s Star Wars Hotel,” Forbes, May 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/05/28/why-disney-closed-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser/.)) a move that may have been hastened by the imminent phasing out of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s “bonus depreciation”.

    Regardless, it’s undeniable that the Starcruiser had an uneven launch and was poorly understood. I can’t help but think the Starcruiser would have been more successful, or at least made more sense as an expensive multi-day attraction, had the setup been that guests were secret agents merely pretending to be guests on an interstellar cruise. As much as the conceit of being naive cruise passengers provided structure and alibi in the absence of a workshop, it also made the entire experience appear deeply boring from the outside – a sample “itinerary”((Shannen Ace, “Disney Releases Sample 3-Day Itinerary of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel Experience,” WDW News Today, August 4, 2021, https://wdwnt.com/2021/08/disney-releases-sample-itinerary-for-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-experience/.)) revealed in 2021 suggested that these opportunities to sabotage the ship would be few and far between, rather than the bulk of the experience. It’s tantamount to marketing malpractice that these more adventurous aspects were omitted in favour of a focus on “luxury” – misleading, since the Starcruiser’s cabins and amenities were not luxurious in a conventional sense.

    Disney’s position at the top of the entertainment world comes with increased expectations and a lack of willingness for customers to accept problems. Larps, as largely co-created, volunteer-run, non-profit experiences with little to no marketing budgets, attract players who are more experienced and tolerant of problems, creating a reservoir of goodwill understandably absent for a multi-billion dollar corporation. Larp promotion also tends to be more transparent about the details of player experience, helping avoid problems. This is no doubt borne out of decades of experience throughout the larp community – something the Starcruiser’s marketers and customers lacked.

    Goodwill is essential with larp-like experiences becoming as technically complex as video games – and growing the chances for things to go catastrophically wrong. Game developers have adapted by instituting lengthy beta testing and “early access” periods. A similar strategy may have helped the Starcruiser’s launch; failing that, proactively offering full refunds for major technical issues would have restored some goodwill. Other blockbuster larps could manage technical risk by pooling resources on open source projects, as Odysseus did with the open source EmptyEpsilon “bridge simulator” game engine. This was probably not an option for Disney given the highly specific needs of a Star Wars-based experience and their desire to maintain a technical advantage over competitors.

    An undercover agent beside Chewbacca, photo by Adrian Hon
    An undercover agent beside Chewbacca, photo by Adrian Hon

    The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was an admirable foray into creating a larp-like experience for mass audiences on a gargantuan scale. It was not perfect, but it was far from a disaster.

    One can imagine a different outcome. If the Starcruiser had been marketed better and had launched with more robust technology, it could have attracted more guests; if Disney hadn’t been subject to a shareholder battle, there would have been less incentive to close it. The Starcruiser might be expanding around the world, employing hundreds of people to entertain hundreds of thousands of guests per year. It almost got there. Regardless, the Starcruiser highlights a growing appetite for larp, and a growing willingness to pay for blockbuster experiences. Some of its fans have moved on to larping as a way to continue their hobby.

    It’s impossible to say when Disney or other theme parks will create another blockbuster larp-like experience given the negative sentiment now surrounding the Starcruiser. But this demonstrates the strength of the decentralised, non-profit, volunteer-run international larp community – it can withstand failures and misunderstandings, learn from them, and keep going.

    Further Reading

    Nick Fortugno has written a detailed response to Jenny Nicholson’s popular four hour video on the Starcruiser, referencing larps: https://nicholasfortugno.substack.com/p/a-response-to-the-spectacular-failure

    I wrote an extended report of my experience on the Starcruiser in 2023: https://mssv.net/2023/08/07/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser/

    Kathryn Yu’s article on the experience design and story flow: https://kathrynyu.medium.com/the-experience-design-of-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-immersive-and-interactive-personalized-d8b2ad8a1f03


    This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
    Hon, Adrian. 2025. “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.


    Cover image: The bridge of the Starcruiser, photo by Adrian Hon

  • Design for young adult players: The relevance of designing for hope, agency and inclusion

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    Design for young adult players: The relevance of designing for hope, agency and inclusion

    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.


    As larp communities evolve, it becomes increasingly important to consider how we include young adults (12-18 years old) in our communities and at our larps. This article explores how larp designers can design larps that span generations and include young adults as co-creators and peers in the design and play processes. The article’s approach is practice-based, utilized at Østerskov Efterskole as well as at our mythical fantasy larp campaign Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga), which means that its tools and insights are created in a Danish context. The article touches upon themes such as accessibility, connections, workshops, hopeful narratives, and presents practical strategies to empower young adult (and new) players and provide safe spaces for self-exploration. It emphasizes the relevance of designing for hope, agency, and inclusion for young adult players as well as integrating and respecting popular young adult tropes and themes.

    A young adult-only scenario or an intergenerational larp

    The first step in the process is to determine whether the larp you are designing is targeted towards young adult players only, targeted to young adult players with the possibility for other age groups to participate, or if it is intended as part of an intergenerational larp, for example including children, teens, and adults. Different formats offer different advantages, and all have merit – being aware of this from the outset will clarify your needs as an organizer. 

    Larps for young adults only can be comforting and empowering. To play alongside peers at a similar level creates a safe space wherein they can explore and be braver than they would normally be. In addition it builds a strong bond with peers they can mirror. Playing in an intergenerational larp can help build relationships across age groups, expand one’s perspectives on life and forge an understanding of hopes and dreams for the future no matter what the participant’s age is. Regardless of the format, when designing a larp with young adult participants in mind it can be an advantage to include a co-organizer or consultant who is a young adult themselves to make sure their experiences and perspectives are included in the design of the larp. Your format and the age gap among players will need to be considered when you help your players calibrate, understanding their responsibility in relation to each other, together with your larp’s themes and meta-techniques.

    Off-game accessibility

    We The Lost (2024). Photo by Luka Safira Søndergaard. Larp preparations. We The Lost (2024). Photo by Luka Safira Søndergaard.

    When you have chosen your format, it is important to reflect upon how to make it possible for youths to

    participate in your larp, both economically and practically; young adults typically have less spending power than adults with stable income and they usually have less experience with the practical aspects of attending a larp, such as coordinating transport and costume. If possible, try to find ways to make the larp accessible for low-income players. This could for example take the form of lower ticket prices for specific target groups, or easily accessible (or low requirement) costumes. You can also have a designated person who is visible and easy to contact if they have any practical questions or problems, or design your larp so that every group has an experienced player who has the offgame responsibility to coordinate the group and its members; just make sure they know how to give space and agency to the group’s young adults.

    You should also take the implicit knowledge one gains from earlier larp experiences into account when designing and communicating with young adults. Some in the target group might be just entering the community, and it can be challenging to find information and navigate the scene without connections who have knowledge of how larps are structured. Here it can be beneficial to consider whether you communicate on the appropriate social platforms, whether there are social connections you can engage with to help spread information about the larp, and whether the materials you develop are presented in language that is both accessible and relevant to young adults.

    If you have an age limit for the larp, make it clear why the limit is set where it is, whether exceptions or accommodation are possible, and what expectations exist for the young adults in relation to other age groups. For instance, do they have additional responsibilities toward children in the game, or are there types of play they are not allowed to join because they are intended for adults?

    Familiarise yourself with the player group

    When designing a larp aimed at young adults, especially if you are not part of that age group, it is often beneficial to immerse yourself in media, stories, and life experiences that resonate with them. This helps you to understand the narrative conventions, themes, and tropes they are familiar with. If you are unsure where to begin, the best step is to find someone within the age group and ask for their guidance to get started. This could be a family member, a student, a friend’s child, or someone from your local community. Ask them questions about which media they consume, which social media they are on (and how they work) and how they prefer to be part of a story when they larp, and let them provide examples from their own life.

    Creating meaningful narratives

    An essential part of developing a young adult larp is crafting the narratives so that it is clear and transparent what the stories are about, which outcomes the players can experience when they interact with them, and how they can follow the plotlines. Surprises and unexpected revelations are of course welcome, but it is crucial that players feel they can trust the designers – that they will not be tricked or exposed if they fail to understand something, especially when the designers are from outside the target audience. This is particularly important because designers often hold greater social power and influence within our communities.

    Some designers favor larps that teach young adults about life’s darker sides: about the political challenges of our world, injustice, and how one can do everything right and still lose. While it is undoubtedly important to engage with and learn about the realities of our world – especially issues like the climate crisis, famine, wars, and systemic injustices, most of the young adults I design with and for are already acutely aware of how much darkness exists. Many of them feel a profound sense of helplessness, believing there is little they can do to make a difference. As designers, it is not enough to simply highlight the darkness. We have a responsibility to design in a way that conveys hope, that creates spaces of possibility, that demonstrates how even small actions can hold value in a larger context, especially when we design with and for young adults. Of course, we can use dark narratives and themes in our designs, but then we should balance it with aspects and plotlines that show that factors like age, gender, or background need not be barriers to making an impact, give the young adults self-confidence, teach them how to handle real-life situations and give them trust that they can make a real change in the real world. Therefore, we have a duty to design for hope and agency.

    Themes, characters and relations through workshops

    Often, our larps end up revolving around themes such as identity, self-discovery, tension between duty and freedom, relationships and responsibilities, together with social and ethical dilemmas. Essentially these are all themes involving choices and changes that the young adults in our community like to explore. These themes challenge players to reflect on morality and consequences, allowing their characters to win or lose something meaningful without any real-world repercussions for the player. For some, larps with these themes become a mirror, a transformative experience in which they can see themselves more clearly, and then use their experiences as guidelines for the direction of their lives. Especially if you include a debriefing wherein the players can reflect, by themselves and collectively, upon the shared experience of the larp.

    When we use these themes, one of our recurring tropes involves young adult characters who see the world as it really is, not as they are told it is, and who strive to challenge authorities to change the status quo or the adults’ pessimistic worldview. This provides an alibi to practice speaking up, standing one’s ground, collaborating, and forging paths forward.

    In addition, we write characters for young adults in which they act as protectors, leaders, explorers, healers, teachers, or gatherers; the characters have clear goals and believe they can influence the world around them together. These characters are connected to qualities like empathy, wisdom, strength, ingenuity, courage, and hope, giving players agency and opportunity to influence the larp and its outcomes without being hindered by their age or existing knowledge. We give their characters something to stand up for, even when all seems dark. This gives them an alibi for action, something to fight for.

    To support this, we focus heavily on workshops aimed at building strong relationships between the player characters. Every character is integrated into multiple group dynamics to ensure they have several connections if one set of relationships fails to generate meaningful play. Furthermore, we typically create four core relationships: one with a best friend, one with a nemesis, one sharing a common dream, and one sharing a common fear. This layered approach ensures characters are deeply embedded in the world, with clear, impactful roles that empower young players to explore and affect the story meaningfully.

    Thoughtful use of clichés in your design

    Some seasoned larpers speak negatively about clichés and stereotypes, not because they did not at first enjoy them, but because they have seen them repeated across numerous larps and therefore end up dismissing them as a sign of “lazy design”. While the frustration of encountering a trope or narrative element you have experienced many times before is understandable, I find that clichés hold value and have their merit as design tools. I’m not advocating for their exclusive use, but thoughtful clichés that are incorporated and embedded in your design do have their worth. Why?

    Clichés create an accessible and recognizable entry point for players to step into and explore the larp, by making it easy to decode the structure, story, and roles through shared cultural references among designers and players (even though there are different clichés in different cultures and age groups). They can work like a gateway into the larp and immersion by giving players predetermined patterns of actions, role developments and opportunity spaces that players know from other media. They can use these in the larp without doubting whether they are playing “correctly” or fearing being judged by the rest of the players.

    Through the familiarity of the cliché, players have a safe platform from which they can choose to follow, challenge, or even break the stereotype when they feel ready. Overall, clichés can help free up the player’s mental energy so they can use it on engaging with the larp and getting to know the rest of the players, as well as working on being confident in the medium itself. When designed right, clichés give new players access while older players can be reminded of their first encounter with them and experience the bittersweet nostalgia of reunion. Clichés you use should be empowering, intriguing, slightly quirky, or familiar, and used to develop the characters, narratives, and experiences you offer. Avoid those that do not align with the larp’s ideals and values, ensuring you do not compromise your vision by recycling harmful stereotypes that maintain toxic beliefs and behaviours.

    We The Lost (2024). Photo by Helle Zink. We The Lost (2024). Photo by Helle Zink

    Clear activities, groups, and functions

    Clear activities with tangible consequences and rewards serve as fallback options for those inexperienced players who may feel less confident, are overwhelmed by choices, or lack energy to take active initiative in the larp. These could include puzzles, smaller quests, brief blackbox scenes, or other elements that still support the goals of their groups and characters but require less initiative and larp know-how. We use this in our designs because many experience fluctuating energy levels and even though they deeply want to be part of the play, they have not yet developed larp endurance to play a full day of larp without breaks. Well-defined activities make it easier to navigate those situations, since they are just as meaningful and helpful for the rest of the team if one decides to influence the plots, develop relationships with others, immerse themselves in their character’s inner emotions or to take a break. To support this, when a player has an in-game ​​responsibility, they share it with at least one other player. This way, one can take a break without feeling guilty about the possibility that it hinders the rest of the play. Important responsibilities often have an non-player character (often shortened as NPC) attached, in case both players need to take a break or need to reflect upon what the next right move is, so the players know that someone has their backs if they find themselves in deep water.

    In some larps it can be a great option to use role models as clear examples of how to play and portray roles, showing the players what to do. If you have two or more opposing factions, it works well when the adult role models clearly show how one could choose to play. This works best if you train the role models to switch between standing behind the participants, giving them the confidence to take center stage, and taking center stage themselves to drive the story forward when the players need guidance. It is often interesting to let the role models disappear during the larp, losing their power or giving the important positions to the players. For example, the mayor could be forced by the players to arrange a new election and lose, or the leader of one clan could die in an attack from another, so the young ones need to step up and take charge.

    To make sure that the young adult players feel real freedom to choose their larp experience and take needed breaks, we articulate clear expectations, objectives and success criteria as a framework for them to play and navigate in. We measure success in initiative and participation, based on the good enough attempt rather than focusing on the perfect performance with the right in-game outcome. For example, it would be enough to take part in a ritual, opposed to running one, or to dare to act politically in front of the others, as opposed to ending up as the mayor.

    To emphasize this, we design our stories so that the characters only face consequences in-game that their players understand off-game. If the players somehow do not understand the consequences when played out, we make time, space and alibi to reflect and to help them with what they can do next, if needed. These framings are crucial, as without them some feel pressured to prove themselves to others to feel validated, or out of fear of not being welcome at a larp again.

    The best way to help the participants when their energy levels fluctuate and they need a break, is to not make a big deal out of it and just give them time to get to a place where they are able to rejoin the larp. A designated break room is a good way to explicitly communicate that it is okay to take a break during the larp. Players may, rightfully or not, worry that taking too many or long breaks can result in them losing touch with the narrative of the larp. To remedy this problem it may be beneficial to structure the larp in acts with clear endings and beginnings, possibly with planned breaks in between so that players as well as organizers can recharge. These bookend scenes can then be used to summarize the act, and ensure that everyone is on the same page, as well as provide a natural point at which to rejoin the action!

    Let us start the talk

    There is a gap between children’s and adult larps. To bridge this gap and seriously work on the integration of young adults in larp communities, it is crucial to take their experiences seriously and make them feel involved as teenagers. To do so, we must take active steps to include the next generation by initiating dialogue, and that includes having some difficult discussions about the communities we have built. Some of the questions we should ask ourselves and each other are:

    • Could we lower the age limit of an event from 18 to 16?
    • Could our larp events include less alcohol?
    • Is it necessary to include this adult-oriented theme?
    • How do we talk to and about young larpers?
    • How do we address the topics, themes, and narratives that captivate younger audiences without ridiculing them or being dismissive of their fascination?
    • Which themes can young adults and adults explore together? Which are adult only themes, and which themes can youth play on without adults?
    • How do you communicate with young adults so they feel involved, being at eye level with the rest of the play and being respected as human beings?

    Healthy, growing, and stable communities require ongoing integration of young and new people who, with passion and vibrant energy, feel at home among the older and more experienced players, and who dare to both be a part of the communities and to challenge the pre-existing canon so we can evolve together.

    We have a responsibility to make it easy and safe for young (and new) people to become part of our community, and we have the power to make it happen. To include these new larpers we must design for hope and agency, using larp to tell stories that make them confident that they have a voice to be heard and choices to make in this world.

     

    Ludography

    Fladlandssagaen (2024): Denmark. The organizer team of Fladlandssaga.

    Tin Soldiers (2024): Denmark. The Blackbox Project Liminal.

    We The Lost (2024). Denmark. Østerskov Efterskole’s study trip scenario. 

    Østerskov Efterskole (2024): Denmark. The Larp School, Østerskov Efterskole.

     

    Editor 

    Elin Dalstål.

    Reviewers

    Gijs van Bilsen, Laura op de Beke, Maya B. Hindsberg, Mathias Oliver Lykke Christensen, Paul Sinding, and Rasmus Lyngkjær.

    Young consultants

    Asta Hansen, Artemis Torfing, Eva Fernandes, Frida I. L. Grøfte, Nicolai Lindh, and Sam Hvolris.

     


    This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
    Høyer, Frederikke S. B. 2025. “Design for young adult players: The relevance of designing for hope, agency and inclusion.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.


    Cover image: Larp photo from the blackbox larp Tin Soldiers, played during Project Liminal (2024). Photo by Kalle Hunnerup. Photo has been cropped.