About

The school: five days of intensive playing and thinking

The Larpwriter Summer School is a five-day intensive course in larp design. It was organized for the first time in 2012, and repeated in 2013, 2014 and 2015. There is also a new summer school coming up in 2016, of which you can read more.

The goal of the summer school is to enable the participants to create and run their own larps. The school includes playing larps, attending lectures, participating in workshops and brainstorming ideas for possible larps. We have a special emphasis on educational larps, but our understanding of that term is very wide. We believe that the tools that create good larps can be applied broadly, and our toolbox will be useful for most kinds of larp design.

The project: building an international community

The Larpwriter Summer School is part of a broader cooperation project between the Norwegian organization Fantasiforbundet and the Belarusian organization POST. The project is aimed at creating an international community of people who use larp to explore issues relevant to them. The main activities of the project - a summer school and a follow-up seminar (the Larporatory) - are open to participants from all over the world. The project includes other activities, such as a series of larp seminars and playdays in Minsk, Belarus where the Belarusian participants of the project meet to discuss and design games.

We believe that building an open, positive and respectful community is the best way to develop the medium of larp. We have seen how quickly people understand new concepts when they are able to use them in practice in a positive environment. We especially believe that a strong community is the key to fostering a creative design process. We invite all participants to a follow-up seminar, and we encourage cooperation between participants when creating larps. The activities

The summer school and the Larporatory is organized entirely by volunteers. None of the organizers, experts or facilitators recieve money for helping organize the school.

The organizer team: volunteers from Belarus and Norway

The summer school is organized by a team of volunteers from Belarus and Norway. The team members have no fixed posistions, and we work together to create the summer school and the supporting activities. We are:

Erlend Sand Bruer

Research pscyhologist at the Norwegian Correctional Services

Aleksandra Franskevich

Student of foreign literature at the University in Minsk

Alexander Karalevic

Secretary General of Education Center "POST"

Martin Nielsen

Manager at the Youth Information Centre in Oslo

Tatsiana Smoliak

Teacher in the public school system, Minsk

Åslaug Ullerud

Student of clinical nutrition at the University of Oslo