Enjoy our next lecture in the Transformative Play Initiative Event Series:
“The Personal and the Political: Playing and Designing for Transformation in Nordic Larp”
Lecture by: Johanna Koljonen
Moderated by: Josefin Westborg
Description: 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).
The Transformative Play Initiative Event 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 and other forms of play as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.