News from the Department

Event: The Personal and the Political: Playing and Designing for Transformation in Nordic Larp

2021-09-01

Photo of Johanna Koljonen on a watercolor background and text that says “The Personal and the Political: Playing and Designing for Transformation in Nordic Larp,” Johanna Koljonen, Transformative Play Initiative, Department of Game Design Uppsala University with Uppsala’s logoJoin us for our next lecture in the Transformative Play Initiative Event Series: "The Personal and the Political: Playing and Designing for Transformation in Nordic Larp” by Johanna Koljonen!

  • When: September 7, 2021, 7-8:30pm Central European Summer Time (CEST)
  • Where: Online on Zoom

Nordic larp is a collaborative artform structured around exploration of situations and structures and around narratives of personal change. Players even of larps created only for entertainment, with no transformative agenda, report personally meaningful or even life-changing experiences. Other larps expressly attempt to educate, inform, affect or transform – and succeed to varying degrees. In this talk, Johanna Koljonen gives an introduction to the form and sketches out some ways of thinking about transformation in Nordic larp. She argues that while the artform is inherently and perhaps inevitably transformative, it has many limitations as a tool for social change; and explores some of the ethical tensions inherent both in participants playing towards and larpmakers designing for transformation as a goal.

Presenter bio: Johanna Koljonen (co-founder, Participation Design Agency) is an experience designer, theorist and strategic consultant, and an expert in designing for safe and enthusiastic participation. She lectures internationally on participatory storytelling and on the future of the audiovisual industries, as well as advising cultural institutions as well as public and private sector clients on participation and immersive experiences. An occasional writer of drama, comics, and digital games, she serves on the board of the Swedish Film Institute. In 2011, she received the Swedish Grand Journalism Award in the Innovator category. Her latest book is the edited anthology Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences (2019).

This series is hosted by the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. The series explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.

Register here
RSVP to the event here


Learn more about Transformative Play at Uppsala and join the TPI mailing list.
Learn more about the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design.

Like Transformative Play Initiative and the Games and Society Lab on FB.

Graphic design by Liliia Chorna

Last modified: 2022-10-25