New in Larp: July 22, 2012

Summer is a busy time for the larp community, which has been concocting theories, writing papers, and running conventions. Here’s what’s new in larp:

• Norwegian organizers ran the Larpwriter Summer School, a five-day camp dedicated to teaching young organizers the basics of game creation and GMing. The main website is still posting video, audio, and slides of the main presentations.
  • The main thing to come out of the camp appears to be the Mixing Desk of Larp, a way of thinking about larp design, using the visualization of faders. For example, the play style fader goes between verbal and physical — are players describing their actions? or doing their actions. To read more, check out the entry in the Nordic Larp Wiki.
  • Larp organizer Petter Karlsson has a nice round-up of the event. So does Belarus Larpwriter, though you’ll have to read it in Google translation.
• On the American side, Evan Torner is running a set of sweet sweet game-design interviews on his blog, to celebrate the release of Immersive Gameplay, a volume of game-studies essays he co-edited with William White, which features essays by many luminaries of theory. Interviewed so far:
  • Finnish academic J. Tuomas Harviainen, drops some science on under-read game studies scholars and talks about information-seeking behavior in roleplaying games.
  • American academic Sarah Bowman gets Jungian on us and talks about how roleplayers channel archetypes.
  • Superstar game designer Emily Care Boss talks about the current state of game design, and what current offerings ring her bell.
• The most fascinating post I’ve read in a while from Swedish prof Annika Waern, on whether games feature “emergent” narratives, whether game-worlds can produce a variety of stories that emerge from the surroundings. Her first piece focuses on video games, with promise of a larp piece to follow (I can’t wait!). The idea of emergent narratives in games fascinates me because I consider nonfiction to be an emergent form of story-telling, and I like gaming so…
• J. Tuomas Harviainen, a Finnish game studies academic with notoriously exacting standards for games scholarship calls Markus Montola’s PhD thesis a must-read for game scholars.
• One of my lady-crushes, Gaming as Women, has been nominated for an ENnie, the fan-based awards doled out at Gen Con each year. Vote here.
• Nordic Larp, the awesome book, has been nominated for a Diana Jones excellence in gaming award.
• Petter Karlsson also has a black-box larp system out on his blog.
• Nerd 101 interviews California larper Aaron Vanek about larp.
• American larpers are following in the footsteps of their Nordic counterparts with a US Larp Wiki
• Artist Brody Condon has a larp-generated exhibit out at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
• A sweet piece in io9 looks at the turn-of the century tradition of pretending to duel one’s friends with wax-bullet-laden pistols. Larpy!
• American journalist Nathan Thornburgh has written a brilliant introduction to Nordic larp, published both over at Roads & Kingdoms, and Time.com

Leaving Mundania has garnered a bit more press. New on my front:

• I’ve got a column up on the Daily Beast about larp’s rich history and why that’s important, and a slideshow showcasing the many different types of larp.
• According to the Washington Post, “the freshness of Stark’s look at a much-maligned pastime makes it more difficult to dismiss.”
•  Jason Pettus of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography gives the book a 9.4/10 and calls it, “Funny, insightful and well-written, this is perfect for people like me who love learning all about some random new subject every now and again, simply for the sake of learning about it.”
• The wonderfully-named Nerdbrarian reviews the book, noting “Stark presents the LARP world with a careful, measured hand, varied in its scope from self-conscious silliness to serious art, and all the while maintaining the consciousness that LARPers are real people with genuine human complications.”
• Croatian larper Ivan Zalac says the book is “insightful” with “a bit of everything for everyone.”
• Shelf Awareness interviewed me about reading habits, and awesome writer Matthew Salesses had me on his month-long revision series over at Necessary Fiction.
• Finally, I head to Gen Con in a month, and my seminar schedule is up.