Welcome to a K3 seminar with Sara Bjärstorp and Petra Ragnerstam, both Senior Lecturers in English Studies.

The title of the seminar is Social media and larp. An investigation into interactions between social media and an embodied, material cultural expression.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, March 24 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/67028483636?pwd=K1FISkg5WGk4Q0FvQ0lXWm1FK0hhQT09.

Below is an abstract for the seminar.

Live-action role-playing (larp) is characterized by participants’ physical and mental immersion in a storyworld. Most immersion is realized during the larp event itself, where a collective story is acted out in physical space in real time. However, contemporary larping also usually entails significant interaction and communication between players, and between players and organisers, before and after the event itself, through digital media. In this seminar, we will discuss the social media preambles and afterlife of one of the most significant Nordic larp events in recent years, Fortune and Felicity (2017). Using an affordance framework, we explore what happens to the “liveness” of the larp when it is extended into social media. Through the affordances of persistence, visibility, scalability, replicability, editability and associability, we analyse material from different Facebook groups associated with Fortune and Felicity, used by players and organisers to prepare for the larp and, afterwards, to continue the gameplay and to de-brief. In social media, the continuum of time and space, which is characteristic of the larp event itself, is changed into asynchronous and physically separate player action. Thus the affordances of social media, we argue, enable player interaction and collaborative storytelling in ways that change the narrative, interactive and reflective dynamics of the larp.