Lates Knutepunkt book, Larp, the Universe and Everything: An anthology on the theory and practice of live role-playing (larp), is now published online. The book chapters are available at http://knutepunkt.laiv.org/2009/book/

TOC:

• Introduction (Matthijs Holter, Eirik Fatland, Even Tømte)
• A bilingual history of Latvian larp (Agnese “Axa” Dzervite)
• 33 ways to have fun at a Latvian larp (Agnese “Axa” Dzervite)
• Towards a larp-acting culture: A manifesto (Morgan Jarl)
• Elements of Harry Potter: Deconstructing an edu-larp (Malik Hyltoft & Jakob T. Holm)
• Ten comparisons between UK LRP and French GN (Tadeusz Cantwell)
• Larp in Kamensky forest (Anita Myhre Andersen & Erik Aarebrot)
• Role-playing games and education in Brazil: how we do it (Wagner Luiz Schmit, João Batista Martins & Thales Ferreira)
• Notes on designing repeatable larps (J. Tuomas Harviainen)
• Tabletop RPG meets performing arts: Bringing pen & paper role-playing to the stage (Florian Berger)
• Pix or didn’t happen (Juhana Pettersson)
• Britta Bergersen: The in-game photographer (Interviewed by Eirik Fatland)
• Creating a character: A summary of a process with exercises and advice (Morgan Jarl)
• Face and figuration in RPG play (William J. White)
• The Vademecum of the Karstic Style (Andrea Castellani)
• Philosophies and strategies of pervasive larp design (Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros & Annika Waern)
• Excavating AmerikA (Eirik Fatland)
• Fun for everybody? (Katri Lassila)

The game can be downloaded for free at www.liesandseductions.com. OSX and Windows versions available. Works also in Linux via Wine.

Lies and Seductions is a single player game about seduction, lies, and betrayal.

Are you able to guide Abby to seduce a rock star, Chris, promised to stay virgin untill marriage? In order to success you need to gather dirty little secrets, use those secrets in your advantage, and make an impression on Chris.

Features:

• four seduceable characters
• flirt, mislied, eavesdrop, and pump information
• persuade characters to help you to reach the goal
• play Texas hold’em poker
• dance to impress
• non-player characters forms opionnions based on your choices they perceive
• three different endings

Olli Sotamaa’s PhD thesis The Player’s Game: Towards Understanding Player Production Among Computer Game Cultures is available online: http://acta.uta.fi/teos.php?id=11176.

GIC’08 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games papers are available online: http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/cig08/acceptedPapers.html.

http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/issue/view/7/showToc

Articles:

• Games and Self-Imagining, a Comparative Media Perspective by Jan Van Looy
• ‘I am Trying to Believe’: Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game by Alexander Charles Oliver Hall

Issue also includes seven smaller persective pieces and five reviews.