It’s just a link to the forum thread with all the pictures… but some of them are VERY nice… especially those taken by Christina Molbech (who played a Red Army Press Photographer) and Jeppe Permin (who played one of the soldiers with a career in the Red Army Photo Journalism Corps)
The pervasive game Sanningen om Marika is now the winner of an
international interactive Emmy award!
The joint The company P and Svt participation drama Sanningen om Marika eng. The Truth about Marika did a grand slam in Cannes and just took home an Emmy in the best interactive television service class.
Amazing is a word I would like to use to describe this recent event.
Updates with details will follow!
Chamber Games is a blog and website dedicated to publishing short larps. Chamber Games publishes all the material and information you need to run several short larps in the Nordic style. The games require only a few hours and a small space like a single room to run, unlike larger larps who usually run for days and are only played once. Published larps include art exhibition larp New Voices in Art, abstract between-life-and-death Limbo and Artistocats style clubnight cat larp Club Felis.
The website is run by Tor Kjetil Edland, Arvid Falch and Erling Rognli who felt the need for a publishing space for this type of larps after producing the Limbo game. If you want to try making a larp for the first time, try a game outside your usual larp genre or just explore some really good games, a visit to Chamber Games is well worth your while. And remember to write the original organizers if you re-run their game, since you probably have a lot to learn from each other!
Do you have a game that would fit the Chamber Games website? Get in touch with the editors and get it published for the world to see.
In April 2009, Norway will host the next installment of the yearly larp conference Knutepunkt. They already have an organization in place, so if you are interested in the conference, have ideas for the programme or want to contribute in any way, make sure you visit the Knutepunkt website. Sign up for the newsletter there to get information about the conference.
The Solmukohta conference is over, and all the participants have a new book in their hands: Playground Worlds - Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games is a new anthology from the nordic larp conference Solmukohta/Knutepunkt/Knutpunkt/Knudepunkt (Nodal Point) edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. You can find a list of earlier books in the series here: Solmukohta 2008 Book and the Book History. From the back cover of the book:
Playground Worlds is a collection of articles on role-playing games by leading researchers, artists and other experts. The book documents the theory and practice of the Nordic role-playing scene – one of the most vibrant in the world – and presents numerous methods and techniques that are directly applicable to larp design and production. It also offers a peek into some Anglo-American role-playing cultures.
The book is divided into three sections. Community and Journalism includes articles on role-player communities written particularly with an eye for approachability. Art and Design covers role-play as the product of a creative process, exposing philosophies and intentions behind specific role-playing works while providing advice and guidance for prospective designers. The Research and Theory section focuses on recent advances in analytic and academic thought on role-play.
The book will be published online at some point in the future, but for now you need to get hold of a physical copy. Details about how to do this can be found at the book page at the Solmukohta website. You can also read article abstracts and look at some images from the book.
Tango for Two is a one-evening larp experiment by Even Tømte and Tor Kjetil Edland. Two players will act different parts of one character’s personality. Either you play the conscious self, or the underlying desires of the person. The two of them work in tandem, each one of them being the dominant part in different phases of the game. - Chamber Games
This one evening larp is played for the first time on March 30. No preparation is needed. The event takes 20 players, costs 50 nkr and you sign up by emailing Even Tømte.
Read all about the game at it’s dedicated page on Chamber Games: Tango for to or if you have Facebook account, take a look at the Event. After the premiere, the game material will be made avaliable under a Creative Commons license at the game page so that other people can host the game.
As part of the yearly conference on nordic style larps, Knutpunkt/Knutepunkt/Knudepunkt/Solmukohta, an anthology is published with articles about larp, roleplaying, theory about larps, game reviews and reflections on the larp hobby.
This year is no different, and the Solmukohta book will be released on March 31 in Helsinki. You can see the table of contents at the book website, and the book will have three parts: Journalism and Community, Art and Design and Research and Theory.
The book is given to all participants of the Solmukohta conference, but will also be published online like all the books from the last few years of conferences. The books are a continuting debate on what larp is or could be and a platform for ideas and experiements to spread from one larp culture to another. You will find both academic style papers on roleplaying theory and columns, rants, game analysis and political vision in these books. They are an excellent starting poing if you want to know more about what kind of larps happen on the Nordic scene and what some of the ambitions in the community are.
Following is links to the online versions of previous conference anthologies:
Knudepunkt 2007 in Denmark: The book is called Lifelike.
All of the 30 articles in Lifelike can be downloaded as pdf documents here:
Knutpunkt 2006 in Sweden: The book is called Role, Play, Art
The book includes 12 articles and can be downloaded as a pdf document:
Download the entire book (2 MB)
Knutepunkt 2005 in Norway: The book is called Dissecting Larp
The book contains 15 texts that can be downloaded as pdf documents.
If you want to know a thing or two about the Nordic larp environment (at least as it was in 2005), make sure to read Knutepunkt and Nordic Live Role-playing: a crash cource by Eirik Fatland.
Download the whole book at this page: Dissecting Larp
Solmukohta 2004 in Finland: The book is called Beyond Role and Play -Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination
The book has almost 30 articles that can be downloaded as pdf documents at the book website:
Knudepunkt 2003 in Denmark: The book is called As Larp Grows Up
As Larp Grows Up has five chapters on larp, including a dictionary. All chapters can be downloaded as pdf documents here:
Freefall is a larp festival in Helsinki during the week before larp conference Solmukohta. The festival features four days (March 31 to April 3) of short and sweet larps that can be played in a day with little preparation. If you are curious about larp and want to experience nordic style larp the Freefall festival is definately the place to be. Roleplaying and art meet and techniques from many fields are used to bring out the best in short larps.
The whole programme has just been posted to the Freefall Livejournal, and includes everything from violent plastic cups, sad dates and train rides in Italy to war councils and neolithic tribes.
This has been posted as a note in the post about System Danmarc III, but deserves it’s own headline:
The organizers of System Danmarc II have posted the trailer, end film and behind the scenes documentary from System Danmarc II online. These were previously avaliable only on the game DVD.
System Danmarc II was a larp held in Denmark in 2005 about a political system where C-class citizens who could not support themselves where dumped in C-sector areas by a State system that was not fascist but still incompetent when it comes to a reasonable distribution of resources in a rich society. It was a cyberpunk larp set in a small city built from freight containers in central Copenhagen, and at the same time a very strong comment on society today.
Take a moment to have a look at this fantastic documentation.
One of the most rewarding things that can happen to a larp organizer is when your participants really believe in your project. Especially so when you’re organizing something in an unforgiving genre with a long track-record of failures and half-handed organizing, such as the Post-Apocalyptic genre. Most larps in this category, at least here in Sweden, tend to be rather cliché, with stereotypical worlds and visions, with esthetics pulled right from Mad Max and Tank Girl. Say post apocalyptic larp and people almost always think about teenagers with oversized guns, leather trenchcoats, gasmasks, spiked hair, mutants, canned foods and anarchy. It’s all very cool and movie-like, but not very creative. And when you serve clichés, it’s hard to get participants. Many PA-larps cave in and get cancelled because there is low interest among larpers for these kinds of larps.
Therefor, it’s very exciting to see the developments of our own post-apocalyptic larp Ingenmansland. During the initial planning we were pessimistic and hoped for 150 participants by May, with a theretical maximum of 220 participants. In the middle of february we had to close the door on new participants since we had allready filled our maximum of 220 participants (which grew to 240 participants counting organizers and functionaries). We have swedes, norwegians, danes and even germans coming the larp. We are now in the enviable position of having almost a hundred people who want to participate but can’t, unless we decide to open up new slots for participants (which in turn depends on our ability to provide living quarters, character coaching, props and logistics).
Why this sudden and overwhelming interest in the post apocalyptic larp genre? Without sounding cocky, I think it is because we’ve managed to get people to believe in our project in all its aspects: the fiction, the logistics of the larp, the competence of the organizers, the budget etc. And one other important factor: we’ve reached a “critical mass” of highly active, creative and skilled participants who help create our larp, both on the fictional and the logistical levels. We’re truly blessed with excellent participants.
We’ve believed in this from the start, and the recent developments prove it: people don’t want clichés. People want something different, something that, on the whole, feels realistic and believable while at the same time being escapist enough to warrant actually larping it. You don’t have to go full-out avant-garde neo-dramaturgic free-form high-level larp to attract larpers (odds are you won’t), but a simple rethink on genre-specific stereotypes might bring very rewarding results. If you believe in it, your participants will believe in it.
Andie Nordgren
Claus Raasted
Eirik Fatland
Mike Pohjola
Gabriel Widing
Bjarke Pedersen
Peter Andreasen
Mathias Kromann Rode
Anna Westerling
Martin Ericsson
Axel Löfving
You?
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