Monthly Archives: July 2013

Debriefing Intense Larps 101

Debriefing is a structured conversation amongst players about their larp experience, usually held immediately after a larp.

Debriefs have rules. They often have a facilitator. They have a different purpose than the usual post-larp venting, sharing, bragging, joking and celebrating.

Debriefs are used for many different purposes, and there are several different styles. Edu-larp designers, for example, often use long debriefs to facilitate a learning process, bridging the personal experience with the subject matter. My home community in Oslo used “debrief” to mean a speach where the organisers tell players what REALLY happened. I’m not writing about that kind of debrief.
Continue reading Debriefing Intense Larps 101

Dogma 99 – preface to the Italian edition

I’d like to use this opportunity to dispel a common misunderstanding, and reveal a well-kept secret, both regarding a certain manifesto published in Oslo on the 3rd of December, 1999.
Dogma 99
The misunderstanding first: that the Dogma 99 Vow Of Chastity should be a statement about how all larps – and especially those designed by the signatories – should be made, everywhere, in perpetuity.

It was not. How could it be? Continue reading Dogma 99 – preface to the Italian edition

The Play of Fate – preface to the Italian edition

I first started writing about “fateplay” in 1996, the stone age of role-playing theory. This was before John Kim’s “Threefold Model FAQ” (1998), when “dramatism” was identified as a possible player agenda, before the birth of the online indie-rpgs community at “the Forge” (2001), before the first Knutepunkt conference (1997) where Nordic arthaus larpers would begin formalizing their ideas.

During the 90s, both in Scandinavia and the English-speaking world, the claim was commonly put forth that role-playing was somehow about “storytelling”. White Wolf, producers of the most influential larp & tabletop games of the day, even called their game mechanics for the “Storyteller System”, while local larpers often used the phrase “experiencing a story together” as a way to explain the point of it all.

My key insight was they they were lying. Continue reading The Play of Fate – preface to the Italian edition