Asya Volodina conducting a workshop on time and space: working with them in life action role playing.

Continuing the series of the workshops in the class, we will focus on live action role plays (larps). In this genre all the participants enter some fictional situation by their bodies and take roles of some characters in this situation for the duration of the game. We will see how larps can work with phenomena of time and space. Despite the fact that they are usually limited both in time and space as events, there are multiple techniques developed to break these limits out. On this workshop, we will talk, play, and create new ideas based on these techniques.

There are two important qualities of larps we will focus on during workshop: on the one hand, larps are highly immersive. It is easy and natural for the audience to become a part of the situation on a very emotional level.
On the other hand, game designer has to use rules or techniques to include any fictional parts to a diegetic world or to focus on something. In fact, it is a programming not a computer but participants themselves, which means designer has to reveal their models of reality. Combination of these two qualities forms a special way by which larps communicates to participants at the same time on a rational and irrational levels.