Mo Holkar: Bleed and Debriefing

Larp is an embodied medium, in which we use our own bodies to portray and convey actions and emotions. In this, it's unusual in gaming, but shares elements with performance arts and media. Larpers identify and have studied the concept of 'bleed' -- the complex of processes by which the participant's feelings may influence those of the character, and the character's experiences may leave emotional marks on the participant. This workshop will explore bleed so as to reach a mutual understanding of it, and we will then move on to 'debriefing' -- part of the larper's toolbox for mitigating uncomfortable bleed effects, and an important aspect of the underpinning of participant emotional safety which in larp we seek to construct. The debrief aims to be a transition zone between exiting the larp and returning to the real world; and there are many techniques available to help people deal with that sometimes-difficult emergence. Throughout we will be inviting participants to share thoughts and experiences, and to undertake group and individual exercises, to explore the idea-space and to test and develop techniques.

Bio

Mo Holkar has been a larp designer for around thirty years. He is an organizer of The Game Kitchen, a larp design group based in London; a committee member of Consequences, the UK's national chamber larp convention; an organizer of The Smoke, London's international larp festival; and an editor of NordicLarp.org, the magazine website covering the hobby. He has organized workshops and given presentations at Knutepunkt, the Nordic Larp conference, and has contributed articles to the annual Knutepunkt books. He has designed somewhere around 50 larps, which have been run at festivals and at private events in upwards of a dozen countries worldwide. He is passionately interested in empowering creativity in larp, and in lowering the barrier of entry for creators.