I started this blog quite some time ago in the hope of using it to facilitate writing. I struggle with getting my thoughts down on a page, to the extent that I will do just about anything with them rather than write them down. I thought that with a blog, an audience, this might make a difference. However, the internet is a big place, with few landmarks or signposts. So I am starting anew, with a particular focus. For some time I have been performing, doing, organising and coordinating as well as writing about, LARP. It even made its way into my PhD Thesis. I am convinced that it is both fundamentally interesting as a hobby and as a social phenomenon. It is also amenable to photography, although it is usually impossible to an outsider to “guess what it is yet”. I will therefore use this blog to write about LARP, for a non-LARPing audience, as well as for those who may wish to reflect on the hobby.
Before I take on the task of writing my own extensive wanderings on the subject, it is worth making a short list of other sources on the subject. I am enormously indebted to the publications of the Knutepunkt/Solmukohta/Knudepunkt conferences which I have sadly never been able to attend but have read from afar with great interest. The website does tend to move around but with the help of Google you can find most publications online (I recently found most through here: http://xklsv.org/viewwiki.php?title=Knutepunkt ).
In traditional format, I will also be discussing the book “leaving Mundania” written by Lizzie Stark which focuses on the hobby in the US, with input from the Nordic scene. She lists her top sources here: http://lizziestark.com/2011/11/28/advice-for-first-time-larp-scholars/
As a community source, I am not always a regular attendee on this particular forum, but the Rule 7 forums are a longstanding location of discussion and debate for roleplayers and can be found here: http://forums.rule7.co.uk/
The popular German magazine on the hobby “LARPzeit” is also now published online in English: http://www.larpzeit.de/international/
Finally, in the past the journal of interactive drama has featured articles on LARP, although it has had something of a turbulent history. Archived material can be found here: http://www.interactivedramas.info/jarchive.htm
Aside from other writing on LARP, there has also been material on roleplaying games generally, and an often overlooked source is Gary Alan Fine’s “Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as social worlds”.
Seriously Learned 