Nordic Larp Talks 2018

The annual Nordic Larp Talks happened this morning. For those who don’t know, these are a series of short talks given in the leadup to Knutpunkt on varying topics. There’s a videostream on Facebook, but it should eventually be chopped up into individual talks and put on the official website.

Talks included: (list will be added to as I watch)

  • Tor Kjetil Edland on “1942: Representing History”
  • Siri Sandquist “Female narratives and why we should play them” (from ~18:30)
  • Eva Wei “Designing Sigridsdotter: a guide through a matriarchy” (from ~30:00)
  • Muriel Algayres “Larp Women Unite: Emotional safety, sorority and #metoo” (from 41:00)
  • Alna D. Skonsfjell “White knighting and why it is problematic”
  • Ben Books Schwartz “The Wayfinder Experience” (a US children’s camp which uses larp)
  • Karijn van der Heij on “Same Role, Different Life” - the odd phenomena of different people playing the same character (from ~1h 12m)
  • Agata Swìstak “Under 25 - we’re here to take your place”
  • Evan Torner “Emergence in larp” (from 1h 55m)
  • Will Osmond “Routes of Inheritance: What do we give to larping?”
  • Maria Petterson, on Parliament of Shadows (from ~2h 21m)
  • Laura Wood & Mo Holkar “On Location: Playing, with expectations”
  • Stefan Deutsch, “5 things about Larping on a sailing ship”
  • Jonaya Kemper “The Good, the Bad, and the Internalized: Searching for Self Liberation in Conscience” (from ~2h 57m)

I liked “Same Role, Different Life” and “Emergence in Larp”. The first is about the weird experience of playing the same character as someone else in another run, and the bond it creates. The latter is based on a formal article on “Emergence, Iteration, and Reincorporation in Larp”, and has some useful language about cultivated, uncultivated, divergant and unleashed emergence, illustrated with a wonderful example of the entirely fictional “goat god larp”.

The specific game-related talks (On Location, Parliament of Shadows, 1942) were generally interesting and good to watch for seeing the cool stuff other people are doing.

Videos of the individual talks are now up here:

Most are about 10 minutes long, so easy to dip in and out of.