Lizzie Stark

Come out of the larp closet in three easy steps: explain it to non-gamers using analogy, own it and forget about the haters, documentation doesn't hurt. Advice from seasoned gamers.

The BBC films a segment on Leaving Mundania, and a great review from Geekadelphia.

Leaving Mundania hits stores, and the Oxford English Dictionary adds "LARPing."

While I was in Finland, I had the pleasure of participating in the Nordic Larp Talks, a yearly series of short talks on larp and larp design modeled on the TED talks and hosted by famed journalist, author and larper Johanna Koljonen. I chose to tell a story that I didn’t have room for in Leaving Mundania, [...]... Read More

Notes I took during the player safety panel at Solmukohta 2012.

I’ve written about the programming that I enjoyed at Solmukohta, but I’ve got more observations scrambling to escape my noggin. Here they are, in no particular order: Travel Fatigue Foreign travel depresses my natural level of pep. There’s something about the unfamiliarity of small events — the rude-sounding “toilet” instead of the “restroom,” the luncheon [...]... Read More

After my stop in Denmark for Fastaval, I headed to Helsinki to participate in Solmukohta, the Finnish installation of the Knutepunkt conference that rotates its way around the Nordic capitals, changing its name according to the local languages. The event features larps, workshops, run-downs of completed or upcoming games, and tons of talks on larp [...]... Read More

Yesterday,  I riffed on Fastaval, an awesome Danish roleplay convention I attended as part of my two-week Nordic roleplay junket. Today, I want to talk about a few favorite elements of the convention that US convention designers might import into their own conventions: The Dirtbusters. So far as I know, the Dirtbusters were created — maybe [...]... Read More

The first stop on my crazy Nordic tour was Fastaval, a convention devoted to board-gaming, larps, and freeform games. What are freeform games, you ask? No one knows for sure. They are sort of like tabletop games, except you sometimes get up and act out scenes rather than simply narrating them. And on the whole, [...]... Read More

With the publication of Leaving Mundania imminent (May 1 is the official pub date, but a few large online retailers already have it in stock!), I wanted to share a few things I learned while reporting and writing a book on larp. 1. Geeks secretly rule the world. Don’t cross the geek mafia, because they’re [...]... Read More