Sarah Lynne Bowman is a game scholar, designer, and organizer. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Game Design at Uppsala University, a founding member of their Transformative Play Initiative, as well as the Program Coordinator for Peace & Conflict Studies at Austin Community College. Bowman also teaches as adjunct faculty in English, Communication, and Humanities. McFarland Press published her dissertation in 2010 as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. She helped organize the Living Games Conference (2014, 2016, 2016) and the Role-playing and Simulation in Education Conference (2016, 2018). In addition, Bowman served as an editor for The Wyrd Con Companion Book from 2012-2015. She is currently a Coordinating Editor for the International Journal of Role-Playing and a managing editor at Nordiclarp.org.
What is magic? From our perspective, at its core, magic is a form of manifestation: the ability to alter the self and the world around us through the power of intentional thought, force of will, and creative action.[1]Mat Auryn, Psychic…
This manifesto describes our preference for playing, designing, and facilitating larp experiences with the purpose of encouraging transformative impacts.
This article discusses some of the pros and cons of this larp domino effect, in which content from one area of the game spreads throughout the fiction like a wildfire as the result of emergent play. In larps where the…
Immerton is a 4-day larp written by women for women participants, taking place in a fictional society of women in a polytheistic goddess pantheon. Produced by Learn Larp, the game used a feminist sandbox design that emphasized rituals, relationships, collaborative…
It’s not a revolution… it’s an insurrection.Anarch catchphrase during Enlightenment in Blood Enlightenment in Blood was an official White Wolf larp in the Nordic style spanning 10 locations for approximately 200 players in the city of Berlin. The larp lasted…