Written by
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
Written by
Thomas B. is an opinionated connoisseur of larp, dilettante larpwright, and immersive theatre debutante. While repeatedly ranting about the word “immersive”, Thomas will cover highlights of larp-ish events such as Assassin’s Creed in Napoléon’s mausoleum, costume parties in Versailles, a murder mystery in the prison cell of the Marquis de Sade, physically chasing the plot train in NYC, and larping with unprepared actors in theatre basements. Mélanie & Michael co-wrote The Lost Generation, an immersive theatre party focused on seamless narrative design. They will present a vision from the field as well as examples from their design. All attendees welcome, no prior experience necessary.
Thomas B., Mélanie Dorey, Michael Freudenthal
[CW] sexual assault
PART 1:
Anonymous 1:n OK, what /is/ eläytim… Something?
Thomas B: immersion in character
Anonymous 2: What’s an example of a non-immersive party?
Michael F: Smoking outside? (Nah, that’s still peripheral participation)
PART 2:
Anonymous 3: Looks fascinating! i imagine it’s played in French?
Melanie Dorey: Yes it’s played in French for now but we are thinking about opening an English speaking version 🙂
Anonymous 4: plateauwriting I would call “devicing”
Melanie Dorey: Oh okay thanks !
Anonymous 5: I like this production process overview timeline but what happens after Showtime 😀 #experiencedesign
Melanie Dorey: We’re not covering in so much in the talk but can talk about it after in the live chat if you are interested 😀
Michael F: Pretty much it’s a party. People are talking about themselves, about each others views on fun things like war or artistic creation, then later yelling at each other, or supporting each other. Just a party. But Melanie will put it differently!
Melanie Dorey That allowed the cast to differentiate participants and for the actors to know what interaction to do with the participants
Melanie Dorey Note : all types of interaction are the same price
ANON5: I wonder how this would work with my aversion to larping with NPC:s? I always experence them as being “empty” because they aren’t played by a fellow player who wants things for themselves and that they should stop wasting time on me and go play with someone who appreciates them.
Thomas B: you could avoid talking to them and talk to the other guests instead
Thomas B: some other attendees were basically larping, others more shy and just an
Anon6: Would love the name of the book and the auther about queer games and degamification
Anon7: I believe it is this one:
Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw, eds. Queer game studies. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Michael Gyr Yes and Video-Games Have Always Been Queer!
Anon8: A very mudane question to this amazing project: What did the tickets cost? Did you get support/sponsing from other sources?
Melanie Dorey We don’t really cover that in the talk but can talk about it after in the live chat
Melanie Dorey Very briefly : all the costs were covered by tickets
Melanie Dorey And we didn’t have any support or sponsoring
Michael Gyr The tickets were 55€ (early bird) to 65€ but the next production budget needed more to cover the cost and make a small margin, and got to 68€ – 78€.
Hanne Grasmo Michael Gyr OK, that is not much: I paid like 290 dollars for similar experience in NYC.
Michael Gyr The Paris immersive scene is just starting. Also, we would like to be as accessible as possible and it’s a bummer because the production costs a lot. Kol Ford’s talk this year was inspiring in that light.
Jenny M. Nordfalk The definition of being a professional is that you get paid, I guess? maybe there should be a third group in between the actors and the audience? We went to an immersive interactive murder mystery last year and I had a lot of guests coming up to me after and thanking me along with the actors..
Michael Gyr We had people mistook for actors AND actors mistook for audience. That was the intent of blurring the lines alright 🙂
Anon9: Who’s your photographer? This all looks gorgeous.
Melanie Dorey It’s Les Garçonnes Studio !
Anon10: How many hours did the actors use for preparations? Where they paid for all of that???
Melanie Dorey We had about 10 full days of workshops and rehearsals with the actors (which is not a lot), we didn’t have the budget unfortunately for the rehearsals but all the show nights were paid
Anon11: What were the buzz words given to the most interactive participants, and hiow did they work?
Melanie Dorey They were secret phrases about the characters personal lives (like something you would know if you were an acquaintance)
Melanie Dorey Like “How was summer in the Riviera, Zelda ?”
Anon12: Were they different for different players and towards different characters, was it like giving the players relationships with the actors characters?
Melanie Dorey Players had different characters but each character had only one secret code
Anon12: Did the actors then take extra responsibility for those players? making them part of their group?
Melanie Dorey Yes those participants were part of their “crew” for the night
Anon12: Perfect, how many players did every actor have in their crew? and as it only the most intersctive feathers or did all players take part in a crew?
Melanie Dorey Yes it was for the most interactive feathers only (as it included more intense interactions), and each character had from 5 to 7 members of the “crew”
Anon14: Was it possible for the participants to change their feather during the performance?
Michael Gyr Very good one. No it was not. But if you were to talk with the cast while wearing a “I don’t want direct interaction” feather, they would adapt their behaviour towards you, and talk with you (with a little caution). Also, all feathers all looked nice (golden, black with a golden tip, red with a golden tip).
Anon13: If possible would you implement that feature for a rerun or was it best as it was?
Melanie Dorey I think it could be a possibility to include that feature in our out of game safe zone !
Anon15: What was the number of involved people in the team overall? Light, sound, production design, actors, concierges etc. On your team and from the rented location if any
Melanie Dorey We had overall a team of 15 people for the staff (production, filming, venue, bar,…)
Melanie Dorey 2 people from the venue
Anon12: How many actors?
Melanie Dorey 7 actors, 3 musicians, 2 bartenders, 3 people from production
Anon16: What major things did you change from run 1 to run 2?
Melanie Dorey We changed : set design (moved furniture), lighting, acting direction (by prepping to better answers to participants and implementing yesterday’s successes and mistakes)
Melanie Dorey Mostly the change of the set design was a huge improvement because it allowed participants to feel more legitimate in the space
Anon16: Did you as designers had a vision for content (not only aestetics) before you started researching and designing?
Melanie Dorey We wanted something that was truly interactive and felt like a legitimate party for everyone (cast AND participants) : we didn’t want to have a frontal story with pieces of interaction but really a sandbox for everyone.
Melanie Dorey That determined the party format before anything else.
Anon17: Thank you so much, it was super-interesting!! 2 Questions: Was there a mechanism to step interaction up or down during runtime? Did you use safe-words or tap out to signal something is too much?
Michael Gyr Good question, thanks! Besides training with the actors (which was not enough, considering errors have been made), there were three levels of “human safety nets” for audience participants. All were on the production side.
The opener was the person to go to if you needed something during the show (they wandered around and checked up with people, in character), the bar was the place you go if there was any kind of problem or behaviour to report, and there was a saf(er), more quiet place where we would check up on the audience, or bring them if needed.
Anon18: What info did participants get beforehand? Did they get a 30 second rules brief at the door or a document with the ticket or website?
Michael Gyr Hi! By mail they got information on what was expected of them in terms of dressing up and more importantly, a quite short and explicit “accepted behaviour”. Thomas pointed out it looked inspired by SK/KP, which it was. There we mentioned, among other things, that racist or sexist historical (or not) talk will not be accepted by audience participants, with examples.
Michael Gyr The onboarding was quite thought of and showed the rules of interaction for the evening, to make the audience participant understand they can role play, talk to us, laugh with us and so on. The process could be another 30mn talk.
Anon18: Did you bring them in in groups you briefed or a short one-by-one thing?
Michael Gyr Haha as I said, a whole new talk. The briefing was short and simple, with a very small group (4-5 people). It was more of an in-character scene including practicalities, setting the tone and announcing the ending (like Thomas said about opening and closing the “magic circle”, the blurry boundaries of play).
Thomas Be Also, importantly the emails were sent well in advance, so you had time to prep, as opposed to most other immersive experiences that really send info last minute. I’m all for last-minute reminders, but the ground rules should be laid early on, a bit how we do in larps with design documents etc.
Anon18: What made you decide on theme? Location or story or something else?
I see both negative and positive aspects of the 20’s aesthetic as it has been done (at least in Sweden) as Great Gatsby parties that seem very directed to a non-interactive crowd.
Melanie Dorey A few things made us decide on the theme :
– We always create site-specific work, and we were inspired by this particular historical location.
– We used on purpose the 20’s aesthetic to go in the opposite direction that is generally portrayed in “Gatsby parties”, and therefore to write about : femininity, masculinity, post-war trauma, abusive relationships, closeted queerness… All these themes portrayed by the characters we chose.
– This “twist” (in the expectations) was something we wanted for participants experience, even though we did a lot of disclaimers about themes addressed in the experience.
– We didn’t notice any negative effects coming from the audience because the party format and the types of interaction were giving the choices to everyone of how they wanted to live the experience. So you could have a nice themed party with your friends or chose to dive in the heart of the story and influence it.
– Globally, we thinks that the Roaring Twenties are such an interesting period to write about because it can be layered so much in writing and is reflective in many ways of the times we live today.
Thomas Be Also stuff I had to cut down due to time: check out the binaural-audio-in-the-dark work of Darkfield http://www.darkfield.org/ , I attended “Play” in Edinburgh and “Flight” in Melbourne and both are super interesting. No agency, but amazing audio/installation work.
Thomas Be For another “glorified treasure hunt in a cool location”, check out Inside Opéra, in Paris’ Opéra Garnier: https://www.inside-infos.fr/opera/en/index.php
Thomas Be And for another immersive theatre play, this time set in a fictitious Parisian brothel with various design issues (pay to play, favouring the loud, and super uncomfortable masks) check out Close: https://www.bigdrama.fr/
Thomas Be For an immersive theatre version of Hamlet, clearly inspired by Sleep No More but with Shakespearean text (in French) instead of dancing, check out out Helsingor: https://chateauhamlet.jimdofree.com/
Thomas Be And thanks to Le Musée du Fake for the reminder, other things I cut out due to time: if you’re wondering about what an immersive poetry event could look like, check your local Poetry Brothel, or Le Bordel de la Poésie in Paris, by L’assaut des poètes: https://www.lassautdespoetes.com/
Anon19: I like this slider. Do/did you have in France what’s sometimes called “environmental theatre”? It’s perhaps a cousin of what is now usually described as “immersive”, and started in the 1960s with a movement to consciously minimise the role between actor and audience. In the 90s “environmental theatre” also sometimes referred to theatre where you as the audience walked around the space, like shows where you go from room to room to see different scenes and put it all together.
I’m just wondering because I suspect this slider has even more words between these ones.
Oh heck I just realised this is a talk that should be done.
Michael Gyr A talk that should be done, yes! Anna & I put together a spreadsheet to gather examples (but that can be improved)
Thomas Be There’s a lot of other types of participatory thingies “proper theatre” from theatre of the oppressed to I-cant-remember, no idea how much was done in France. I know a French larper who wrote a paper about it long time ago
Thomas Be the article (unpublished so far I think) by is by Saetta Des CanonsdelaButte (not part of group), a larper and proper academic, about theatre of the oppressed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal , we actually have one in Paris: http://www.theatredelopprime.com/
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
Getting information about larps in the hands of players is an ongoing struggle for organizers. And finding out what larps are being run is equally challenging for players. I have a proposal — and a prototype — for a larp clearinghouse named Peacock. It includes standards for larp data and a website to share that information. This talk will show the basic features of the system, along with the design decisions, to be followed by a discussion about the remaining steps to reach a public beta.
Anonymous 1: I suppose you just need a system like the escape rooms or the delievery-fooderies have (BOX, Escapeall, E-food, Walt, etc), with a small % if you get your players from there.
Problem is, do you want your larp to exist in a platform with another 100/200/500 “competitive” larps?
Anonymous 2: I would like is one very useful feature for producers and designers: A call for last minute participants, when there is people jumping off – with info on if it is paid for or not etc. And participants could have profiles where they list if they are “a last minute player”. This feature would maybe make larps wanna be on the site.
Anonymous 3: Are there many other services that work like this?
Chris Bergstresser: Federated services are fairly common in computing.
Anonymous 3: Uhm, I am not aware of any public service like this one. Everything I’ve used or seen requires logging into the central interface to modify data. This rocks.
Anonymous 4: Ah, automatic currency conversion, that’s convenient (and prevents using free-form text fields for prices, but I see that multiple prices are allowed). One suggestion though: Annotate prices with a description (e.g. “Player”, “NPC”, etc.) to make it a bit clearer?
Chris Bergstresser: Great ideas, but it’s part of the complexity of offering more than one price. The more complicated, the harder to understand. Fairly simple technical problem, somewhat less so UI/UX problem.
Anonymous 5: Looks really useful! One suggestion is to have the Location on the filter show the country instead of the address
Anonymous 6: What’s your code sharing model? Will this be a GitHub thing?
Chris Bergstresser It’s on GitHub. I’m willing to open source it, but we need to think through licensing.
Chris Bergstresser I’m more concerned the API is well-documented, so it can be replicated by others without needing the code.
Anonymous 7: Chris Bergstresser I am not sure how much and in which way I can contribute, but this looks interesting. How should I contact you to get involved?
Chris Bergstresser Chat on Facebook is probably easiest to get started.
Anonymous 8: I also have some ideas and feedback already based on the talk and the documentation online, what would be the best place for that? Here in the comments allows others to react, but it is easy to lose it, of course.
Chris Bergstresser I’ve created this Google Form to sign up to contribute: https://forms.gle/AB1sMG1XWAaMQmPZ8
For feedback, I think here is an okay place to start the discussion. Better to start than wait for the right place, I’ve found.
Chris Bergstresser I created a Google form to sign up if you’re interested in contributing: https://forms.gle/AB1sMG1XWAaMQmPZ8
Sindre Punsvik Thank you! Sounds very interesting, in particular as an UX designer. Not sure if I will have capacity to help more than bouncing ideas
Anonymous 9: I saw the idea is to put YAML in `<script>` tags in webpages. I’m all for YAML, but I’m not sure a `<script>` tag is the right place. Doesn’t HTML have something more semantically applicable for this?
Also, it is nice to just put it into an event website (probably easy enough for novice webmasters too), but at first glance that would mean that each event must be registered in the system separately. It would be interesting to have just a single URL to be polled for an organization that can list all events (though I guess the current design could actually do that).
ALso, isn’t there some kind of existing annotation system (RDF springs into my mind) from the “semantic web” corner that could be used as a base for annotations?
Chris Bergstresser: The initial idea would be to register a root domain, and spider all the pages to gather all the larps for a given organization. That’s a little complicated, though, which is why it’s not in the initial prototype.
As for a better HTML container for this data, I’m not aware of one. <script> tags have the advantage there’s all sorts of special coding around them (since they have to be able to handle Javascript, which contains < and & characters) so they’re safe in all browsers for embedding the information.
I stole the idea from Mustache, which does things like:
<script id="template" type="x-tmpl-mustache">
Hello {{ name }}!
</script>
Anonymous 9: Spidering could indeed work, but does make things more complicated maybe. Thinking from our own organisation, we have a single registration system (which is *almost* ready) that knows about all our events and could easily export all needed into on a single URL. I guess both single-URL and spidering approaches could co-exist, of course.
As for the script tags, I’m slightly worried that browsers will try to execute javascript as a fallback if they do not know the type (not sure if that happens in practice, maybe only with ancient browsers) and that all kinds of systems might end up stripping script tags.
OTOH, I guess that stripping script tags can be a feature: If someone can publish script tags on a domain, they will have some authority on this domain (e.g. you will not be able to fake event data using a comment on a website since script tags will usually be stripped). Another approach could be to only look at the <head> tags and not the <body>, but that could complicate publishing data in typicaly CMS’s mayb e.
Anonymous 9: The proposed YAML format does not list a format version number, which is probably good to add to facilitate format changes in the future (and think a bit on how that would work as well).
Chris Bergstresser: There is one coded, but if it’s missing we assume it’s version “1”. I’m hoping most changes can be accomodated in a backwards-compatible fashion, but we’re safe if it can’t be.
Anonymous 9: In my experience, requiring (or at least encouraging) an explicit version number is always a good idea, since it leaves less room for interpretation. But indeed, a default of 1 could work as well.
Anonymous 9: One thing to think about is how to *remove* an event from the list. Removing it from the original webpage could work, but that means that normally events should be listed there indefinitely (which might not happen in practice as people clean up their websites or websites go offline, without any intention of being removed from the archive).
Chris Bergstresser: We need to think through how events age through the system. If events disappear before they happen we assume they were canceled (you took down the web page before it happened, must not be happening) but after that point I think we assume they ran.
But there’s weirdness there. What if people reuse the id? Do we allow people to remove events after the fact? What if people say they attended a canceled larp?
Anonymous 9: I also think that the list of URLs to scrape metadata from might be one of the biggest assets in this system and might need to be separately managed and published (e.g. a github repo with URL lists per country maybe?). Making this list separate makes i…See
Chris Bergstresser: One of the eventual things should be a way for federated systems to share routes to poll with each other, so you can register a route with any given aggregator and they’ll all learn about it. Seems overkill at this point in the design.
Google avoids the problem by just indexing every web page in the universe. Which must be nice.
Anonymous 9: Using Google to find these tags could be nice (maybe require including some unique string in the metadata), but that also opens up a lot of possibilities of dataset poisoning because it removes the step of explicitly adding routes to the dataset and thus also the implicit review process in that.
Chris Bergstresser: Oh, I wasn’t suggesting using Google to find them. Just that, if we were Google, this problem is solved through brute force.
Anonymous 9: I know, but your comment made me realize that Google *could* be used to find them, which is interesting in itself.
Anonymous 10: Is there a status field? For signup open, cloSed, waitlist, in design
Chris Bergstresser: Yes. By default it’s “active” which is why it’s left off many of the examples.
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
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).
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/
Written by
This is a talk about the larp/theatre crossover work currently emerging in NYC, based on the projects Lindsay has been a part of in the past year as a professional actor in New York. Productions include Sinking Ship Creations’ Off-Off Broadway show The Mortality Machine, Calculations by Caroline Murphy of Incantrix Productions, OASIS Travel Agency (an immersive theatre/nightlife/alternate reality game blend with participatory elements by Silver Dream Factory) and more! Discussion includes the experience of being a hired facilitator/actor in these pieces as well as the trend of commercial “immersive experiences” in NYC.
Q, Anon1: My question on all participatory theater is: How much agency do you think counts as agency? I’ve only been to something like three pieces, and none of them gave me any. (Sleep No More gave me the least.)
A, Lindsay Wolgel: So I wouldn’t consider Sleep No More participatory theatre! I would only call that Immersive theatre, but I agree, I felt the same way when I saw it!
Anon2: I think that’s evolving in a lot of different ways – some companies like PunchDrunk have their own audience literacy, but at the same time it’s no longer the only participatory company out there
Anon3: I would say punchdrunk is mostly interactive, while our pieces are more participative 🙂
Anon1: Whats… the difference, Anon3?
Lindsay Wolgel: In sleep no more, your choices don’t affect the show at all!
Anon4: And not even all that interactive honestly, at least based on Sleep no More and the Drowned Man
Anon5: Be Agreed, in SNM you move the camera and sometimes get easter egg, but you don’t create or influence anything
Anon6: The Camera Anon5 is talking is about – its to my understanding what the broader fin art scene – see as interaction and interactive art
Lindsay Wolgel: Reacting would be living in the given circumstances of your character – aka acting! Yes anding is more of an improv term- where you accept a piece of story someone is offering and you say okay and build on it!
Anon9: Yeah, if I remember, reacting is where you as the actor are able to behave as though this is happening for the first time, because you are attentive to the other actors around you, and the circumstances of the play. It’s a way to get actors to get out of the habit of pre-planning all of their feelings and how they will say things, to try to be reactive in the moment even though you know what the text is. Otherwise you’re just painting by numbers.
Yes and is more of a tool to prevent people from shutting down ideas, so instead of saying no, I don’t want to, you say yes, and I will add THIS to make it mine, too.
Ryan Hart: Anon9 really did a good job with it.
I don’t remember if Lindsay got into it, but when we talked for this piece, I mentioned we really go for a presentational style of acting and roleplay, as I think it’s very accessible to our audience. Which means we want people going through “as if” they were in that situation (usually with an “alibi” in the form of a character) and reacting as they would using their lifetime of experience.
What *I* (not speaking for anyone else here) is that people have to come in and co-create. These experiences are expensive, and run pretty quick, and need to accommodate all experience levels, so I don’t want people to get in there have to make up a story or context. They still have agency in how they deal with the situation, and they still have to take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy the experience, but I don’t want someone to come in and have to do the beginning of an improv class to enjoy the experience.
“Yes, and…” is a great technique, but there’s more to improv, and this particular technique tends to get heavy into content creation. We also lose sight of it’s purpose (again, as Anon9 pointed out) which is to get past the “no” response.
All of this ties into the difference between a facilitator and a participant.
Lindsay Wolgel: Ryan Hart I didn’t – I ran out of time to go into everything, so that was a piece that didn’t make it in! I love this extended response
Ryan Hart: So, i’m going to speak for how I use the terms, and I use them very specifically. It’s not like this carries any weight
First, I don’t use the term “player” in theatrical larp. I use the verb “to play” because a “player” can “play” a game, and an “actor” can “play” a role, but a player doesn’t really play a role and an actor doesn’t really play a game. This isn’t a statement about larp, it’s about how I, as a native English speaker, construct those sentences. “Player” implies “Game.” For a variety of reasons (focused mostly on win/lose) conditions, I don’t use the term player, I use the term “participant.” So if a person is playing in the larp, they’re a participant.
*SOME* participants are paid to be there, and involved in the design. They’re still playing a role, but they have to bring the design to the participants on whom the experience is focused. If some is a facilitator, they’re there exclusively for other people. I hope they have a good time, and I’m obligated to treat them well, but I’m not asking them “how did you like it.” I call those individuals “facilitators.”
From a design perspective, there’s two big things:
When you have that split: a group of people who are all playing characters, and some of those people are professionals who are there to express the design to the others, the facilitator / participant terminology works very well.
Ryan Hart: With all that said, we don’t have NPCs… because we don’t have “Non-Participants.” An NPC refers to a character, and all our character design has to be fundamentally similar… we can alter the method of delivery (a facilitator does not need the same materials as other participants) but the character played by a facilitator should be indistinguishable in interaction from other participants (this is part of our 360 design). For example, for Scapegoat, a 4 day, 120 participant larp that happened all over NYC, about 20 of those participants were facilitators, and with two exceptions, none of them changed characters.
So we don’t have “PCs” or “NPCs” in this design, we just have “characters.” The people who play them are participants, and some facilitators.
Anon10: It sounds like facilitator covers more or less the original intent of an NPC, i.e. a character in place to influence the experience of the non-facilitating participants, but that the updated nomenclature is more descriptive of the current situation.
Anon11: With a non-larper audience it’s really important how you name things for the participants, too. They take what they’re called and run with it, not having that much information to build on. So it’s a big difference if you call them players/participants/audience/characters/initiates/whatever. Usually – don’t let them know what you’re calling them behind the scenes!
Ryan Hart: Anon11 That’s exactly why we stopped using the term player.
We also had to, after our first review, explicitly tell people “this is not an escape room.”
Tommy Honton did a great design on TMM, and did exactly what we asked, but if I could make one change it would have been to remove the biggest “puzzle.” We were worried people wouldn’t have enough to do, and so we literally locked up elements of the narrative, and then prominently placed those locks in front of people. They always got the locks open, and generally loved the way they accessed the narrative, but it did put some people into problem solving mode.
Q, Anon12: But Lindsay Wolgel wasn’t the 1 on 2 expereince much less taxing? In my exp the 1 on 1 mean I’m included in everything, there’s no breaks.
Lindsay Wolgel: I couldn’t say! I’ve never done a 1 on 1 larp experience! It was hard in some ways to split my attention between the two participants but there were definitely times where they would be dealing with each other more than me. Two groups actually asked me to give them some privacy while they sussed out what to do 😅
Ryan Hart: I think the 1 on 2 is less taxing, except if one of the 2 is a child. Then it’s my personal version of hell.
It also depends on the phase. Something we’ve gotten really good at is onboarding in role (it’s why I want to take the smaller version of TMM to KP). It’s very hard, when you have a list of bullets in your head you have to hit, in order, with specific phrases, to manage that and a three or four way conversation. It’s much easier to onboard 1 person.
The conflict management and resolution? Easier with multiple people, because if you get a “fish” (a person who just isn’t doing anything, just flopping around) you have other people to play off of. Plus if you get someone who gets the design, it’s really pleasureable.
I actually instruct facilitators to avoid talking to one person for more than five minutes without a “reason.” That’s because actors love people who give them good responses, and if left to their own devices, facilitators will gravitate towards strong roleplayers and have amazing scenes. But I’m not paying for them to give amazing scenes to experienced people who can probably get there on their own… I need them to work with the entire group.
Q, Anon13: Hey, thanks again for this. I watched it again with better concentration. In the title you speak of “Larp/Theatre crossovers.”
Content-wise, these seem like 100% larps to me. Would that be correct?
(I understand that for marketing you might says they are “Participatory Theatre” or “Immersive Theatre” or something.)
Anon14: From what I’ve gathered, it’s rather low on roleplay component.
Lindsay Wolgel: Yes! Calculations was written as a larp where the only thing changed when it became a commercial theatre experience was the addition of one audience member and it being set in a hotel room. The content of the larp is exactly the same! And The Mortality Machine belongs in the genre which Ryan is naming Theatre Larp! So yes, I think participatory theatre is just a naming device that can place these in the theatre world. And to me, they are so much more than immersive theatre so I would never name them immersive theatre alone.. I’d probably add more descriptives to the title!
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
Have you ever thought about what you actually do when you larp? How you understand the game around you and decide what to do next? Have you thought about that awkward period at the start of a game where nothing connects yet? In this talk, Johanna, Martin, and Eleanor will try to make sense of the way we manage information and make decisions during play.
Slides: Maps, Loops, and Larps
Anon 1: I love it that some people joined hearing Joc just ask random questions: “Where am I? Am I hungry?”
Anon 2: Very important questions.
Johanna Koljonen Essential to larp! 😀
Anon 3: The map is not the territory 🙂
Anon 4: That’s basically the OODA loop, right?
Johanna Koljonen Anon 4: yes, exactly
Eleanor Saitta Yes.
Anon 4: Cool!
Eleanor Saitta Like most OODA-loop versions applied to practice, we tweak ours for the task at hand
Anon 5: If you don’t know much about OODA loop, yes. If you know a lot, then no. 🙂
Anon 6: as a cognitive neuroscientist, I’m very happy with the concepts of map and loop <3
Anon 7: Enjoying this a lot so far.
Eleanor Saitta Infinite love to Anon 8: for doing a huge amount of work editing this video for us. <3
Anon 8: Part of the hyper-realistic SK experience of panic-finishing a talk an hour before it goes live <3
Anon 1: I think Anon 9: might know what you’re talking about.
Anon 9: Hey, I’m now rendering the final version, 1min50sec to go, and then uploading, still 56 minutes of ample time left! 😀
Anon 1: What could possibly go wrong?
Anon 10: Yes, Im just playing w changing the word larp to life? so curious of it there are differences
Johanna Koljonen not very much difference, if I remember my cognitive semiotics classes correctly 🙂
Johanna Koljonen But the fact that these are temporary and categorized as fictional is a big difference of course!
Anon 10: i use the kind of similar concept to describe some art experiences, and then the differences are about framing or just what you pay notice to. larping as a way of paying attention to life Johanna Koljonen
Johanna Koljonen Yes! Of course this has the difference that the art form typically relies on our building equifinal maps, since we’re also co-creators.
Anon 10: Johanna Koljonen what do you mean by equifinal maps? do it together?
Anon 5: Equifinal = leading to equal (indistinguishable) outcomes.
Johanna Koljonen Sorry I forgot I cut it from the talk! Equifinal maps are close enough that the differences don’t matter in practice
Anon 10: So the art form relies on the players ability to build maps thy can be shared, and make actions, makes it different from other art forms.
Anon 11: Okay, this is excellent. Thank you for giving me words for what I think, again <3
Anon 12: Finally some larp theory that me the geographer feel a bit “in” on. 😛
Anon 13: I’m so glad i’m watching this <3
Anon 14: This is so cool! As a psychology student currently studying cognitition, this is so relevant to my interests.
Eleanor Saitta There’s an 8400 word version of it coming your way soon, if you want it in much, much, much more detail 🙂
Anon 15: I’m autistic, and thinking about how that influences how my map is (re)created.
Anon 2: Oooooh, now I understand heuristics!
Johanna Koljonen I am so relieved that you recognize your play in this! 😂 Otherwise we would have worked so many hours for nothing.
Anon 16: I’m really looking forward to the article in the book to learn more about this 🙂
Johanna Koljonen Looking forward to talking about it and your challenging it too! 😀
Anon 17: might be language differences, but the ‘you’ format in most of this makes me not as good at listening to the content 😮
Eleanor Saitta It’s because in the book, we address “you” as a player throughout; we kept the same framing here without even really thinking about it
Anon 17: ok. Sitting alone at home at watching this, i think the effekt is probably different then when ill read it
Anon 18: If you kill another player, co-players will perceive you stepping outside of the fiction. 😀
Anon 19: Important point about affordances there
Anon 5: One thing I hope we’ll have a LOT of conversation afterwards is this:
Htf is it so hard to make a map out of a larp before you are on-site, compared to how easy it is during the first 10 minutes of the larp.
That gap is a source of 95% of my stress prior to larp. I don’t know how this is going to work. But ten minutes into it, it all always clicks together (although not necessarily in a way I’d like.)
Johanna Koljonen So true
Anon 17: percieved reality versus reality?
Eleanor Saitta So we didn’t write the design paper about this, but I think we haven’t been designing for map warmups
Eleanor Saitta or for pre-game map sketching
Eleanor Saitta I don’t know that we can totally fix it, but
Anon 20: Sometimes it feels like the map gets a major revision 10 minutes after the larp ends.
Let’s go again, now I know how to do this!
Anon 13: Remind me to get back, I have ideas I can’t articulate now
Anon 5: When you enter a space, physically, you immediately figure out most of its constraints and affordances.
When an organiser says “characters will live in a camp”, you still have NO IDEA of anything.
Anon 17: NAME i would love to – at some point- dive into what things you (and others) persieve as the important information needed before the larp. My guess is that there is something in how many ppl prep that gives them a somewhat useless luggage to bring
Anon 21: Designing for this could both be 1) giving the players a better picture of the map before the larp (but we are already trying to do that and it’s difficult, and besides some of the on-site larp that will happen is as as much a mystery to the organisers as the players before the larp) and 2) designing time/space to do this mapping after the larp has started and you have some real observations to do the mapping from.
Anon 5: I suspect most larp organisers (51%+) don’t understand their own maps before they start physically building on-site.
If even then.
Also note: Map is also temporal. So issues of space and affordance is not all there is to it; also “what should I be expect to be doing 11pm Friday night”.
Anon 21: Anon 5:. During runtime of House of Craving I thought about this more than I have previously when running larps. Very significant parts of this larp is a mystery to me and it’s as much an exploration for me to try to map this as for the players.
Anon 20: On the other end of that, a 100% accurate map would be immediately hacked.
When I think of pregame frustrations they are often very basic: What will be doing when we are idle?
How will this idea work when everyone has so many layers of clothes?
Etc.
Anon 7: Great work all, I’m going to have to watch this many times
Anon 1: Thank you! Tactical loop and strategic loop… Do these terms come from some field of science? Or did you develop them specifically for this?
Eleanor Saitta So, “strategic” as the top-level timescale, and “tactical” as a finer-grain time scale is a standard construction in military doctrine, which is also where the OODA loop comes from. Adding the “performative” loop as the finest timeframe, and the “act”, “scene”, and “phrase” as names for iterations of the loops are from larp/my head.
Anon 1: Right!
Cause I come from a fairly different background, and would have maybe used words like dramaturgical or structural. Depends on where you look at it from, I guess.
To me those words sounded slightly gamist as in, you are trying to make the best choice strategically. (The explanations didn’t carry this stigma.)
Anon 10: I read tactical and strategical more as in the moment vs making plans ahead
Eleanor Saitta Sure — I guess in part because the loop model came from OODA, we took other bits of that language with us. But you can substitute “act-scale” for strategic, “scene-scale” for tactical, and “phrase-scale” for performative. Basically, each one is an increasingly short-term set of thoughts, where you also think about things more practically and in more detail.
Anon 20: These words are also prevalent in company lingo, the tactical scale being about our immediate operations, running teams, etc, and the strategic being about larger business choices.
I’m not a fan but it’s readily understandable from that vocabulary as well, which I am sure also comes from military doctrine.
Anon 4: I’ve recently come across this quote from Gerald Abrahams, a chess player: “The tactician knows what to do when there is something to do; whereas the strategian knows what to do when there is nothing to do”.
Which gives me the idea for the following distinction in larp: strategy is about deciding what goals you want to achieve, while tactics is about doing things to achieve these goals.
Goals, in this case, can either be something like “take over the rival kingdom” in a political larp, or it can be things like “explore how I handle a painful breakup”.
(Just a half-baked thought.)
Anon 19: I now really really want the book.
Anon 22: Thank you so much for this wonderful and thought provoking talk. I have so many questions, in the best possible way.
Anon 23: My takeaway:
In a competitive game, “In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop.” (Boyd)
In a cooperative game, we need to make our loops accessible to other players on all levels, especially on the performative level.
Johanna Koljonen interesting!
Eleanor Saitta This is a super-useful comment, thank you.
Anon 17: So where did this version of Affordance theory come from? Within my field of tool/human interaction the concept is more narrow.
Eleanor Saitta It is late and I am probably not being entirely clear, but can you expand on the difference? Like, yes, I think we’re using it broadly, but not in a way which is outside the spirit of the meaning.
Anon 17: To me there is a diffence between actions ‘ affordances are the actions you can do’ and affordances as something that happens in relation to something. To me, affordances is something _something_ has/is percieved to offer.
Johanna Koljonen I can’t answer this late but e use affordance as a design term and I’m pretty sure design theory is where constraints comes from as well.
Anon 17: no need to reply this late but it would be lovely to get it elaborated at some point
Anon 20: I understand the use of affordance here to be the conventional use in interaction design, i.e. what does the environment (in this case the larp situation as a whole) offer that I perceive as possible.
And likewise, constraints are then limitations on these affordances, for example game mechanics or social convention.
I think constraint is used somewhat broadly here. In interaction design, constraints guide the user to useful actions. As I understand them used here they also provide outer bounds.
In this way of laying it out, a constraint will always be a boundary (“do not go past the red building” tells you not to bother the neighbours) and will sometimes be a guide (“secrets may only be discussed in places where you are likely to be overheard” tells you that this is a larp where we spill our beans).
Says Joc: “Affordances is what you can do and what are the costs and risks for you of doing that thing”
I would nitpick that affordance is cost/risk-agnostic. If something is perceived possible, it is afforded.
In these terms I see risk/cost as a factor in mapping affordance to agency, making them soft constraints.
Agree? Disagree? Am I misunderstanding something?
Anon 18: I’ve read the article this talk is based on and I seem to recall that the concept of affordable used there is compatible with Gibson’s formulation, although obviously, since this is dedign-adjecent, Norman is also an influence.
Anon 17: Anon 18-> Super! Then it is just the quick use in the video that ended up being a bit off? 🙂 – I think the important part of the concept of affordance is that it is something that something has. Not the person experiencing it (or not if designissue) but the thing itself. That the perception of an affordance makes me able to take an action makes it easy to say that it is all about me, but that – as i know it- is not the point with the concept.
Anon 18: Hm. My understanding is that affordance is a relationship between an object and an organism in a specific ecology. It varies depending the thing, the user, and the site.
Anon 17: Anon 18- > Im happy with that definition 🙂
Anon 24: I thought the use of “affordance” was a bit different from the way it’s normally used, but it was a useful stretch of the definition.
There’s a very interesting question about what the “affordance of a LARP” is: that is, if we import the term “affordance” into LARP, what would that mean? The classic use of “affordance” applies to a tool like a hammer: it “affords its use”, because the design makes it clear that you pick it up using the handle and hit with the head. The idea of a LARP “affording its use” must be different, because it’s not a physical object, so the definition needs to stretch.
(Just to be clear, I know that there has been work on “affordance” within LARP before, and I’m not forgetting that. I’m really just making the point that the definition of “affordance” needs to stretch if we bring it into LARP.)
Anon 17: Anon 24: i think that stretching the term is…counter productive compared to importing it. Talking about a character texts persieved affordances would be a good investigation for example. The same goes for the setting and the physical setting of a larp
Anon 24: Anon 17: I think that’s a fair argument: I often think that “affordance” is used in a way that stretches the term beyond usefulness. For me, I liked the way it was used in this video: that was a useful stretch for me. (Although maybe not for you!)
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
Second Year (Toinen vuosi) was a 4-part larp campaign about building a community of survivors immediately following an apocalyptic pandemic. The larp focused on community building and practical aspects of survival – how a group of strangers coordinates their interests, how norms and institutions develop over time, and how consultants build a chicken coop. The presentation discusses pros and cons of this setting for a larp and what aspects should be given special attention in larp design.
Mikko Heimola, Nino Hynninen, Jukka Seppänen
[CW] pandemic
Jukka Seppänen We had sheep, a goat and chickens.
Jukka Seppänen We wanted the community to kinda be the main, shared character of all players.
Anon 1: How fast would anyone be ready to run a campaign like this again because of the pandemic topic?
Anon 2: I think there will probably be hoards of pandemia larps once the corona epidemic is over. People will use larps to process it.
Anon 8: One constantly ESCAPING goat
Mikko Heimola Well, pandemic and apocalypse has been a stable of literature, games, movies etc. for past few years, it will be interesting to see whether the current pandemic will boost or smother it
Anon 9: I can’t imagine apocalypse as a theme will ever go completely away, but I guess it will change.
Anon 7: I see a large potential for using the current crisis for larps both creatively and as a way to deal with it. For a long time most if not al post apocalypse larps will be heavily affected by the corona crisis, so i think it will affect it allot but not diminish it.
Anon 5: I’m the one in the red t-shirt. This is one of the many many votes my character lost. 😀
Anon 2: Many people don’t like playing situations that are common for them in real life, but close to home has its upsides, too! 😉 #vasemmistoliitto
Anon 3: Anon 5:, sorry about that 😀
Anon 6: I came on as an additional character from the second game onward and the feeling of an existing community with its own norms and social structures was very strong <3
Anon 1: Realized I had never larped in a sauna before :O
Anon 2: Did I hear correctly that two characters were shot during the game? Would like to hear more about that, like why and how it happened in-game.
Anon 7: Same!
Anon 1: GM Characters but it was unplanned and interesting.
Anon 2: But why, what was the motivation and social process behind it (in the in-game community)?
Anon 6: If I remember correctly, the characters wanted to leave the community in a way some people felt would endanger everyone.
Jukka Seppänen Anon 2: That happened, unplanned, to two gm characters. That became a large element of the following games as their friends remained and mourned, demanding for justice, whatever it may be. Also not everyone agreed to that decision.
Anon 4: The characters were apparently wanting to join the regional robbery gang and some felt they would betray or seriously endanger the community by doing so
Jukka Seppänen Even more interestingly the players had somewhat clouded memories of the situation and who shot first etc. Highlighting stress reaction in a simulated threat.
Anon 8: There were also big questions: did they mean what they said they were going to do? Was it a just a “running execution” as in who shot first? Who actually was present and who could comment on the situation?
Anon 1: Super interesting experience and really happy how it turned out (I was one of three player characters at the groove when the shooting happened, more arrived at the aftermath). Could have felt like trivializing violence but this time it was taken seriously by all.
Anon 1: This is the first photo of the aftermath. Photographer didn’t get there on time for the action https://www.flickr.com/…/in/album-72157697231608902/
Anon 10: I think the post apocalypse genre became popular especially during the cold war, when a nuclear apocalypse was a very real possibility. Based on that, chances are the current situation will give the genre a boost
Anon 3: Their death became one of the most important disagreements imho
Anon 2: I’d love to hear more about the dynamics in this!
Mikko Heimola The gm characters had announced their intention to leave the community with their resources and hinted they might join a pirate group. A group of players decided to stop them, and it turned violent.
Anon 2: So they were more or less spontaneously killed? Like no communal decision or verdict about it?
Anon 3: Things escalated quickly and there was no consensus
Mikko Heimola That’s a prime example of players creating unexpected outcomes that create lots of play. I don’t think we would ever have planned such an event. It was in a sense a very dumb death for them.
Mikko Heimola Which probably made it feel more genuine in the game. It was stupid. It just happened. You cannot rewind it.
Anon 2: Sounds like super interesting content!
Anon 3: That was me! Never chopped wood before.
Anon 4: Same 😀
Jukka Seppänen Key learning: consultants cant build chicken coops without help.
Anon 4: And shearing sheep is hard work!
Mikko Heimola Nino has escaped to the community site to make it ready for the rest of us, and cannot participate currently!
Anon 2: Jukka is promoting team building exercises: shearing sheep & gardening!
Anon 1: There were also “really useful” tasks, like building the watch tower xD
Mikko Heimola Depends on sheep… in the next larp we had different sheep. They didn’t just stand and let you cut the wool 😛
Anon 4: And the method we used for shearing the sheep in that game was way too meticulous! Later I (and lots of other players) watched heaps of sheep shearing videos, and a more relaxed shear would have been much faster and good enough 😀
Anon 3: I was really stressed over not having covered carrot seeds carefully enough while planting (but they did sprout)
Anon 6: With practical tasks, sometimes player skills and character skills can be at odds, when skillfull players play unskilled characters and cannot help the unskilled players without breaking immersion. Detailed instructions from the GMs help with this.
Anon 2: What kind of instructions were there?
Anon 1: I have deep dislike for skiing but did that anyway because the watch duty kinda expected it.
Anon 2: Okay, so you meant detailed instructions on how to do the task! 😀
I thought you were talking about some sort of mechanics on how to play more skilled than you are.
Anon 6: Exactly, instructions on how to actually do the tasks.
Anon 8: Slacking from tasks? Who would do that?
Mikko Heimola This covers the other game I mentioned and also discusses ingame work, but onlyin Finnish: https://roolipeliloki.com/…/ennen-vedenpaisumusta-ei…/
Jukka Seppänen All pics available here: https://www.flickr.com/…/albums/with/72157696573152925
Jukka Seppänen Separated into four albums
Jukka Seppänen Sheep shearing ingame: https://flic.kr/p/28Ue1Zn
Anon 11: Thanks! I wanted to do something like that but set in the 7th century. Nice to see it might be feasible.
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
In the recent years, we have witnessed a definitive growth of the larp community and a growth in recognition of larp in wider culture as a legitimised activity. As larp begins to be more present in society, the wider culture also penetrates the social structures of larp as a community and an activity, one of the central outcomes of which is the commodification of larp. In this talk, I discuss how larp is becoming commodified, what that means, and what the repercussions of this development are for specific events as well as the community at large.
Usva Seregina
Anon1 Can’t we also say that professionalization of larp practices makes it harder for new organizers to step in?
Anon2 Probably very much this! Ironically probably lessening the available larps and making the ones acessible even more scares 😮
Usva Seregina: yep, definitely agree with you on this
Anon3 also socioeconomic class starts playing even a bigger role within professionalized
Usva Seregina yes! exactly!! i talk about this a bit later :
Anon4 It’s interesting how that does not affect at all TTRPG? Or does it? Being much more “intimate” people just dare to play whatever, or what is it?
Anon5 I feel TTRPGs are commodified in different terms? the commodity is the physical product, the miniatures, the swag?
Anon6 There are professional DMs in a TTRPG context. Fewer, though, because the profit structure is tough
Usva Seregina: I’m not very familiar with TTRPG unfortunately, but I would agree with Sanna that there are potentially other ways it emerges?
Anon3 I feel the Nordic NGO organizational culture, based on a lot of grassroots volunteer work, is a model of organizing that has traditionally resisted commodification with some success
Anon3 Question: what models of engagement and organization do we have that are not based on consumption? Art, kinda maybe? Are there ways for larp to be legible and credible without being commodified?
Anon7 Isn’t a lot of art (mainstream theatre, movies, books, etc) quite commodified?
Anon5 Different kinds of community based practices that are mostly present in anarchist circles etc?
Anon8 Art outside the “established art world”
Usva Seregina: I have no direct answer to this, but my main aim was to ask this question 😀 For me, I think it is mainly in the form that we continue to be reflexive about how we do things, continue to include and engage people, and do not fall into normative consumption-based patterns.
Anon9 I’m surprised not to have heard the word ” Disney” yet (unless i missed it) The new star wars attraction essentially is a commercial commoditized LARP.
Anon10 Not just essentially, actually. We’ve seen Disney Imageneers on VP levels and up at Nordic events for years. And a bunch of us have worked or interacted with them in different ways. Sometimes, I now believe, rather naively,
Usva Seregina: I steered away from examples intentionally in the talk, but I do mention Disney in the paper that I wrote for Nordic Larp 😀
Anon11 As a view from the Balkans, LARPS never really get the chance to cover their costs, and even rarer can afford to pay the organizers anything that comes close to the time, experience and effort they placed in the table.
Really interesting subject but just keep in mind that there are areas that just don’t have the base to run any actual pay-to-enter serious larp, and thus work as a balancing factor with community models and free games/for some volunteer work.
Usva Seregina: Absolutely, I think this a very contextual issue. Costs are very different in different parts of the world.
To reiterate from the talk, I don’t think that money is the biggest issue here, but rather how we approach larp.
Anon13 Have we ever see artificial scarcity in larp?
Usva Seregina: Artificial scarcity easily comes with hype and marketing
Anon14 This is a hard one. We need to have more people making larps, and if the new people come in through the big easily approachable blockbuster larps, then it is very hard to tell them that they, too, can make a larp from scratch.
We need more coverage and appreciaton inside our scene of small larps, unprofessional larps, larps that invent the wheel again, larps that anyone could make. This is not easy, as I recognize the tendency to look down on those because I’ve been through that myself a long time ago. And also, because I am ambitious with this art form.
There are no easy answers.
Usva Seregina: That’s true that the larp scene has mainly operated on a sort of word-of-mouth type of communication before. And I do agree that this has major issues in terms of being able to get into larp (which I also remember experiencing when I first started larping). And hence commodification and marketing are actually extremely good for allowing larp to be more accessible.
Perhaps it is about thinking how to communicate without falling into the traps of marketing?
And I agree with NAME that looking into and appreciating different forms larping is extremely important. We need to make room for all levels of skill and engagement.
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. is a professor. scholar, game designer, and event organizer. In this keynote, Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman will discuss the importance of integration practices for concretizing and completing transformative processes after larps end and daily life resumes. She will present different techniques for integrating transformative experiences into our off-game lives, including creative expression, intellectual analysis, emotional processing, interpersonal processing, and community building.
Article associated with the talk: https://nordiclarp.org/2019/12/10/transformative-role-play-design-implementation-and-integration/
Solmukohta 2020 Keynote speakers: Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Usva Seregina, Jonaya Kemper.
Hello, I am Sarah Lynne Bowman. I am a professor, scholar, game designer, and event organizer. Today I am going to discuss the concept of Integration with you as an important part of the process of personal transformation.
As role-players, it’s no surprise to many of us that we are deeply fragmented in our identities. There are parts of us that are only able to be seen by certain people in specific contexts. Some parts get left behind, discarded, or buried when we are out in the world.
When we role-play, we are allowed to bring these aspects from the shadows into the light. Now, some of these parts are undesirable; we might want to disavow them completely and pretend they don’t exist. Often, though, role-playing reveals parts of ourselves that we wish were more in the light, more seen by others. Sometimes we discover parts of ourselves that surprise us, that we didn’t even know were there: aptitudes that we might have, courage that we didn’t know existed, or abilities to connect with others in ways we had not before experienced.
In many cases, we have powerful experiences within larping communities that are not replicable in other frames of reality. We may have extremely altering experiences, ones that change us and transform us, whether in dramatic ways or in more subtle ways. Regardless of the degree of change that we undergo, after a powerful larp experience, we are never quite the same. And we have to find ways to make sense of these experiences after they conclude.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to talk about these experiences with people who have not taken part in them, especially people who don’t regularly shift their identity and inhabit fictional worlds in their spare time. Often, we might feel even more fragmented than we did before, as pieces of ourselves feel trapped or lost or ephemeral in this fictional reality that technically no longer exists after the larp is over.
But, what I have come to understand is that, for many of us, those bits of fiction, those pieces of self, still exist and they still may need to be integrated into the daily self in some way and into our understanding of reality. This integration may mean acknowledging, but further distancing ourselves from those parts It may mean finding ways to bring those parts into the light in our daily lives. Integration may even mean fundamentally changing our self-concept.
Through role-playing, I have discovered some of my deepest spiritual understandings. I have discovered my deepest fears, my deepest desires for love and connection. I have discovered what community can actually feel like when it’s supportive, nurturing, and permissive of different ways of being. I have discovered what creativity and play can do in terms of understanding who we are and who we deeply desire to be.
For us to really maximize the potential of role-playing, I think that we need to remove the stigma around personal identification with the character. Around playing parts of ourselves that were perhaps quite vulnerable and we are afraid others will see out here. We need to step into our desires. We need to step into our dreams and our hopes. Not hide them away solely in play as things that are frivolous or that can only exist in leisure or in some bounded reality that is not this one.
Now, this all may seem obvious to some of you, but the truth is, a lot of us still hold shame around our play experiences. We are taught at a very young age that play is for children and that what we experience when we role-play isn’t real. And therefore, we shouldn’t take it seriously as something that transfers to this world. And as artists, academics, journalists, many of us have been working very hard to dispel that shame. To validate that this artform is useful. That it has educational purposes. That it can change lives. But I would argue that even in our communities, we still carry that shame at times.
A common example is the larp crush, as Sanne Harder discusses in Nordiclarp.org. The larp crush is the experience of falling in love or becoming infatuated with a co-player after sharing a powerfully intimate larp experience with them. And this is an area that is still extremely taboo for a lot of people, especially people who have very clear, bounded relationship agreements outside of the frame of the larp. Because it’s play, we have alibi to explore our fantasies, our romantic needs. We may touch into parts of ourselves that were dormant before or maybe we didn’t know existed. And then all of a sudden, the larp is over, and we don’t know what to do with these emotions. Those places that still need to be seen and loved. And we think maybe that other person is the answer. And sometimes they are. But often, the larp has merely revealed to us our deeper needs for intimacy.
Another example is larp drop, sometimes called post-larp depression, when a peak experience that was so intense and so powerful is over. Players may wonder if the sense of community they felt at the larp still exists, where those parts of themselves they explored in the larp still exist, where those stories exist. It may feel like these things have evaporated or dissipated, which may feel intensely painful.
In transformational language, this is what we call a contraction, meaning that after a period of expansion — of stretching ourselves past our normal comfort zones — it’s natural that we will also then contract. That we will need time to come back into ourselves, to perhaps grieve, to perhaps rest, to process, to think, to feel.
Integration processes help validate that need for contraction. We can validate that it is understandable and also perhaps necessary to come back into ourselves and make sense of these experiences, so that we don’t continue to feel even more fragmented and incoherent. We have a tremendous opportunity here to alchemize: to take lead and make it into gold. To find within ourselves the things that are perhaps unfinished, are not in the form that we would like. To learn how to transmute and transform ourselves.
Integration processes can take many forms. They can be artistic in nature; we can create new works. We can create pieces of art. We can create stories. We can create new larps. Often, creativity begets creativity, so it makes sense that some of us would process in this way. Usva Seregina has centered their academic work on the creation of art as a means of making sense of larp experiences. Jonaya Kemper’s beautiful post-game autoethnographies help her articulate the ways in which larp experiences have felt emancipatory for her, how she has grown as the result of embodying her characters.
We can also emotionally process. We can debrief. We can write journals. We can write letters to our characters and vice versa, which is a beautiful way to integrate and dialogue with these parts of ourselves.
We can intellectually process. We can write theories and research. We can document experiences in larps for others, making them comprehensible to the outside world. We can discuss our experiences in groups, innovating our field of design, improving our implementation strategies, and expanding our consideration of the diverse perspectives of members of our communities.
We can engage in group processes where people tell stories about their experiences. We can create new communities after larps so those feelings of connectedness and shared imagination can move forward. We can envision and build the future that we would like to see together rather than feeling so overwhelmed by the way the world is as we see it now. Through our shared imagination, we can envision new ways to move through the challenges that we face. We can transform conflict through play by envisioning new futures, new ways of being, and new selves.
Each player has their own needs with regard to preferred integration practices. Larp designers such as Martin Nielsen and Johanna Koljonen have worked hard to establish methods where, after a larp, there are multiple areas of the space where people can get their various needs met, such as a place for hugs, a place for game design discussions, a place to debrief, a place to talk about life moving forward. Regardless of our individual needs, it is clear that creating means to more easily transition from the fictional frame to everyday life is beneficial, and may even strengthen the potential for personal transformation.
In order to concretize these shifts, I am advocating for a greater awareness and more deliberate practices around integration. As players, as designers, as organizers, we see the world from the meta perspective due to our experiences with larp. We inhabit characters, we experience, we feel. But we also analyze and we can see the systems that underlie social reality. We can learn the lessons that came out of these group experiences and we can use them to shape the world that we’re in on a daily basis. Larp allows us to create new realities with new frames of reference, with new rules for reality. And it allows us to experiment with new ways of being, with new ways of interacting and organizing. It allows us to explore existing ways of interacting with others and figure out what aspects of those patterns we want to keep and what aspects we want to leave behind.
So my questions to you are: how do we move forward with these understandings? How do we move forward with helping this transfer between this world and those worlds? How do we value and honor those lessons that we learn inside of these larps and help each other to make them more concrete in this life, in this world? It may be more important now than it ever was as the world becomes more and more bifurcated, fragmented, and polarized. How can we find alignment with one another and with ourselves? And how can we build the future that we want to see?
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/
Written by
Kjell Hedgard Hugaas is a game designer, activist, politician, event organizer, and trained actor. In this keynote, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas will make the case for why we should design larps that invite the potential for transformative impacts on players. He will discuss the importance of transparency and intentionality when designing for impacts in domains such as emotional processing, social cohesion, educational goals, and political aims.
Slides: Designing for Transformative Impacts — Kjelll Hedgard Hugaas (Solmukohta 2020)
Link to article mentioned in talk: https://nordiclarp.org/2019/12/10/transformative-role-play-design-implementation-and-integration/
Solmukohta 2020 Keynote speakers: Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Usva Seregina, Jonaya Kemper
My name is Kjell Hedgard Hugaas.
I am a game designer, activist, politician, event organizer, and trained actor, and I am here to make the case for why we should design larps that invite the potential for transformative impacts on players.
In doing so, I will discuss the importance of transparency and intentionality when designing for impacts in domains such as emotional processing, social cohesion, educational goals, and political aims.
(The Why)
In a world that seems to turn ever more difficult to make sense of by every passing day, where do we, the role-players, fit in? What is our mission? Our task? Are we artists? Are we entertainers? Coaches maybe? Or trainers? Maybe we are just passing time and using role-playing as another way to socialize and connect with our friends?
In short: Why do we do the things we do?
Before I give my answer to that, I want to make it clear that people participate in play for a variety of reasons, and most any reason is valid. The following is merely my opinion on what role-playing could be used for and what we could benefit if we followed this particular path.
I believe that almost everything we do in life can be done in ways that can add value to our own lives, the lives of others in our communities and the world in general. Role-playing is in no way an exception to this and it is my own hope that we as a collection of communities can rise to the challenge and help a world that needs healing now more than ever.
I believe that we as skilled and curious role-players are in the possession of a powerful tool, that if used with intention can, and indeed almost certainly will, change the world for the better. On the other side of the coin, if we choose to not address or comment on important issues, facilitate for expansion and understanding, lay down frameworks for growth, or help participants make sense of the world that exists outside of the magic circle, we are letting important and potentially very powerful opportunities pass us by.
My vision for the future of larp is that we explore the limits of our craft, learn to use it to the extent of it’s potential, and then wield it to enact the change we want to see in the world.
I know that it is a tall order. Maybe even painfully naive to believe in. But are we not people who are used to dreaming big and making the seemingly fantastical come true? Are we not inventors and designers of our own worlds? Is it too much to think that at least some of the things we create within the magic circle might seep out into the world in general?
Some might say that this is all just a dream.. But am I the only dreamer out there? Maybe one of a happy few? Or maybe, just maybe is the future of role-playing more potently world changing than any of us can even dare to imagine?
(The Potential)
The potential for role-playing to have profound transformative impacts on participants should be quite obvious by now. It can facilitate dramatic expansion in their worldview, their understanding of others, and their ability to affect change in the world around them. As Sarah Lynne Bowman noted in 2014; The sheer number of people interested in implementing role-playing and simulation as tools for education, empathy-building, and skill training attests to the methods’ potential potency.
In my own years of playing I can certainly point to several role-playing experiences that have been transformative to a point where they have altered the course of my life, and judging by the hundreds of stories I and others have gathered over the years, I am far from alone in this experience. For many players, these transformative effects might occur—and certainly do occur—by chance or as a result of intuitive choices that designers and participants make. But, imagine for a moment if you will, what our communities might look like if we actively sought to maximize the potential of such impacts through intentional design, implementation, and post-event integration.
Well, In my opinion, there is only one way to find out. And I invite you all to join in on this adventure.
(The How)
Before we proceed, we should note that even the most skilled and careful consideration and implementation of these ideas and thoughts will not ensure that transformative impacts undoubtedly will take place. Experiences will always vary from person to person and from event to event. To put it bluntly; we are not dealing with an exact science here.
When seeking to design for transformation, the first step should be establishing a clear vision carefully detailing the desired impacts we want to experience. Sarah Lynne Bowman and I have previously proposed four broad groups of impacts, in order to establish a system. These lists are not exhaustive and in the future we expect that the need for further categorization might also present itself. But for now, we have the following groups: Emotional Processing, Social Cohesion, Educational Goals, and Political Aims.
A disclaimer here: Designing for certain types of impacts—such as therapeutic aims—may require advanced training, consultation with experts, or increased safety measures.
As you can see; on these two slides I have listed the groups that we proposed. As you can see, there is a lot of different concepts and themes here and I will not go into them in any detail in this short talk. For those of you who are interested in a deeper dive, there is an article on nordiclarp.org with more details. It also contains a reference list with suggestions for further reading. I will link it in the comments.
Be it through virtual play, tabletop, or larp, role-playing can arguably change people’s lives for the better. But, in order to maximize this potential, we as participants need to be open to it. In order to be as open as possibly to transformative impacts, we need to feel safe and held. For this reason, I cannot stress enough how principles of informed consent and safety need to be at the forefront of this design philosophy.
We need to create a container that is strong enough for players to feel that they have the freedom to judge or themselves the extent to which they feel comfortable leaning into certain types of content or experiences based on their own emotional, psychological, and physical thresholds. The freedom of choice is important, since although growth often involves facing our own resistance to change, pushing participants beyond their limits can have the exact opposite effect to what they are seeking for themselves.
Therefore, while it is my strong belief that transformative impacts should always be at the forefront of design and implementation choices, concerns about safety and consent are inextricably linked to creating a secure-enough container for such experiences to take place.
So.. why should we design for transformative impacts?
If 25 years of activism and political engagement have taught me anything, it is that change is not something that is handed to us. Women were not given the right to vote.. it was won by the many that fought for it. Workers were not given the 5 day work-week because the factory owners decided to be kind. It was made into law because they fought for it. Apartheid was not ended out of the good hearts of the oppressors. It was ended because the people of the world made it so.
In other words.. we cannot allow ourselves to sit and wait for the change we want to see in the world. We need to make it so.
We need more compassion and empathy.
We need more peaceful solutions to conflict.
We need progressive social change.
We need to raise the voices the disenfranchised and oppressed.
We need to heal our own wounds.
We need to heal the wounds of the many.
And so on and so on…
The needs are many and the time is now.
Let us add our skills and knowledge to the efforts and help make it so.
That is my vision for the future.
Thank you.
This was part of the Solmukohta 2020 online program. https://solmukohta.eu/