The Mixing Desk was not conceived in vacuum. Preparing for the larp New Voices in Art at LWSS 2015. Andresen and Nielsen have remained central in the development of new iterations, acting as keepers of the Mixing Desk, although the framework now belongs to the community. 4 One way to keep the faders fresh and to bring in diverse perspectives and improvement has been to assign different teachers to specific faders each year, enabling them to stand on the shoulders of previous speakers and adding their own perspectives. 3 Work on the Mixing Desk has continued over the years, and it has been developed, fine-tuned, and contributed to by huge number of larpwrights, mainly at LWSS. The first iteration was published a year after the first LWSS. During the first LWSS each aspect of the Mixing Desk continued to be debated. In the planning session before the first LWSS and during the summer school the Mixing Desk was overhauled as the teachers, many of whom had designed, analysed, and published on larp design, went over it in detail. Each one were to take responsibility for a fader to present and teach to the students. Photo by Anatoly Kazakov.īefore the first summer school, Andresen and Nielsen presented the Mixing Desk to the teachers. By 2016, the course had been attended by approximately 250 people from approximately 20 countries.Ī lecture at the Larpwriter Summer School 2015.

The first LWSS took place in 2012, and it has been organized annually since then. The course is taught by larp designers, pedagogues, and role-play professionals mostly from the Nordic countries (and later from Belarus). It is aimed at participants who have had very little or no experience organizing larps. Larpwriter Summer School is a weeklong course on larp design, organized by the NGO Fantasiforbundet (Norway) and Education Center “POST” (Belarus), and funded by the Norwegian government. Although larp design had been debated, discussed, theorized about, and researched for years, 2 comprehensive approaches to larp design did not exist. At the time, there was no coherent, unified model for understanding or teaching larp design. Andresen and Martin Nielsen created the very first version of the Mixing Desk of Larp as a tool for teaching larp design at the first Larpwriter Summer School (LWSS). We conclude with some reflections and criticism of the faders. We then spend most of our time with description and reflection on the thirteen faders of the current Mixing Desk. Next, we explain the Mixing Desk and the ideals and reasoning behind it. This article first explains how the Mixing Desk emerged and contextualizes it as a design theory in relation to discourses in Nordic larp and game studies.

It is not optimized for precision or analysis, but for supporting the ideation of a designer, and helping teach larp design to people new to the practice. It is a metaphor that attempts to communicate that the larpwright is able to play with different elements in larp, just as a technician is able to control light and sound in a concert. The Mixing Desk is a frame for organizing thought, a thing-to-think-with, that helps grasp the design space of larps. To fill this void, the main organizers of the Summer School put together a now renowned tool that originated in the Nordic larp community: The Mixing Desk of Larp. However, although there was significant debate and some literature on larp design, no holistic approaches to teaching design were found at the time. A group photo of the participants, organizers, teachers, and facilitators from the first Larpwriter Summer School in 2012.

Shifted lands larp