Some eight years ago, I decided to study interactive media – as an undergraduate at Designskolen Kolding and then for a masters degree at Media Lab Helsinki – in order to better comprehend what we did with larp, as well as to find a profession where I might benefit from my experience as a larpwright. [...]

Elves! Orcs!  Digeses! Ninjas! As mentioned, I drafted a  bunch of blog-posts before opening this blog. So when I’m promising at least two new posts per week for the next few weeks, it’s a promise I actually have a good chance of keeping. Here’s a sneak peak on what we’ll be covering:

Role-playing is play – improvised drama – done for the benefit of the participant/actor rather than an audience. There are many kinds of role-playing – educational, therapeutic, sexual, tabletop, online, freeform, pervasive – and many different contexts where role-playing is performed. Role-playing is “play” both in the sense that Hamlet is “a play” and in the sense that children play. Anyone who has ever played together as kids understand the basic mechanisms of role-playing. Anyone who has only role-played as a kid is also in for a couple of surprises when encountering adults role-playing.

In “The Prince”, Machiavelli insisted that to govern well, the prince had to be a sneaky and manipulative bastard. While I might disagree with his politics, he certainly had a point when it came to larp.
There’s a certain sneakiness required to do larp design well – even if you design with open cards, your players [...]