Simon Brind is a PhD candidate at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE, UK. He is researching moments of narrative crisis in participatory fiction. He has been playing and writing larps since 1985 and hopes one day to get it right. He believes in the primacy of player agency. He lives in London, England.
Sometimes a larp does not work, either for us as individual players or for a number of participants. Sometimes in order to play the game, you need to change the rules.
Many different types of energy come into play during a larp. This short article surveys some of the terms larpers have used to describe the types of energy they bring to a larp. It also considers why understanding this may…
Supporting characters tend to accept invitations to play more easily than some player characters (or some players.) This is the most important lesson we can learn from supporting characters: to always find a reason to engage, to initiate play, and…
A number of high profile articles and discussions about safety in Nordic larp seem to imply that safety has become the primary concern for larp design. This article interrogates that implication by a series of interviews with larp designers, and…
How a UK larp’s take on dystopian cyberpunk is learning from Nordic larp design principles “One day you will see the truth, you will learn to understand the patterns and numbers in the data. When God left the analogue world…
Pre-bleed is the experience of emotional bleed prior to ever playing the character in a larp setting. This paper considers pre-bleed before College of Wizardry 5.