25th October - 5th November
Diving into theory
LARP (live action role-playing game) is a form of role-playing game where the participants physically portray their characters. LARPing is not a structured game but rather a free state where participants co create a fictional world. I specifically looked into educational LARP. Educational LARPs can be a catalyst for classroom engagement and improved student learning (Vanek, Peterson, 2016) I found an interesting case study of the Danish boarding school, Østerskov Efterskole. This school has the complete curriculum as educational LARP.
An educational LARP is a pedagogical activity where students take on character roles in pre-written scenarios designed to facilitate self-motivated learning, as well as teach pre-determined knowledge in a contextual framework. (Vanek, Peterson, 2016)
Application of theory
I wanted to apply the theory of LARPing into the context of the story I had written. My goal was to understand whether participants would assume the role of another person and therefore be comfortable to speak about things which they normally would not.
This would be done with the help of the masks I had created. The participants would be LARPing in the story.
I had three participants - 2 male and 1 female.
I informed them the story which I had written, and how they played a part in it. The next step was to get them to talk about menstruation. I designed a small game for the participants to play all the while assuming the role. I had a judge who was giving points and asking questions.
This is a video compilation of how it turned out.
The drawings of the uterus -
Participant 1- Madhubani
Participant 2 - Warli art
Feedback from participants
The participants enjoyed the game and felt really competitive. They said that the game was engaging, but it did not have a relevance to the story told earlier. They felt that the masks gave them enough confidence to dance/sing about menstruation even on camera, but they did not relate to their own identities of the masks.
Feeback
Mor was impressed with the videos of the participants behaving the way they did. She encouraged me to dig deeper into the story aspect, however she felt that making it into a game would lose the richness of the concept. I agreed to this, and felt that I wanted to take a mythical road and have an outcome which signified that.
Takeaway's
It was good to go back to theory for a moment and try to apply it to my work. I felt like a theoretical backing was needed for my experimenting and outcomes and reading about LARP did that for me.
References
Hyltoft, M., 2008. The role-players’ school: Østerskov Efterskole. Playground worlds creating and evaluating experiences of role-playing games, 14, p.12.
Vancouver
Vanek, A. and Peterson, A., 2016. Live Action Role-Playing (Larp): Insight into an Underutilized Educational Tool. Learning, Education and Games, 219.
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