The wide world of larp: American edularp

Community Larp discussion
#1

While browsing around for a publicly-available French Revolution game (sadly I couldn’t find one), I stumbled across something interesting: the “reacting to the past” series of educational “reacting games”. Which are basically historical larps, used as a way to get people to engage more strongly with the material by gamifying it. They’re apparently used in 300 US colleges. Most of the topics seem to be history, but there’s a specific set of science games as well.

I went to the effort of acquiring one of the course books (Henry VIII & the Reformation Parliament), but it was for students, and didn’t contain the game itself (however, the outline on political factions at the time would be useful input into a “Tudors” game). I’m currently trying to acquire the instructors manual to see what the game and characters actually look like (though there’s a template here which gives some idea).

I doubt these games would be playable without modification for purely entertainment, but the idea of using larp as a teaching tool is fascinating, and I wish they’d used it my high school history class.

#2

St John uses a kind of LARPing for training purposes, we call it casualty simulation, designed to put people thorough different situations as practice for the real thing. Pretty much you get a group of patients/victims and bystanders, apply cosmetics as required and brief them on what’s happened, how they’re reacting and how they’re presenting with various injuries/symptoms and vital signs, then set them off and send in ambulance crews to try and figure out what’s happened and how to fix it.

I’ve run full scenarios with prothsetic injuries, a version of a table top and ‘soft’ scenarios without cosmetics as well as being in scenarios. Great fun and a wonderful teaching tool.

One of my favourites to run was one designed to emphasise the importance of personal safety and triage which I ran for a group night for my division and another division. Situation was two people going berzerk in a meeting, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife and the victims all coached to say there was at least two attackers- some said three, some said two, others four. The guy with the gun was out in the open, I was hiding in a cupboard with the knife waiting for the responders to start coming in.

#3

Ah, yes, they had one in Motu Moana in 2007, same weekend as the first St Wolfgang’s Vampire Hunters.
Lovely Saturday morning, screaming from the forest, a bunch of young medics roleplaying helping some injured chick… ah, their eyes when a nun armed with sword appeared there to help them :mrgreen:
Later in the day, Sir Michael beating up the priest, and students passing by, transporting an injured guy, staring in horror :smiley:

#4

We use roleplaying a lot as a teaching tool in the hospital as well. Most of our assessments are done with actors pretending to be patients. We even have a simulation centre with several rooms - one set up as a hospital ward, one as a GPs office and one as an emergency room complete with a robot patient who has a variety of vital signs (pulse, breathing, etc) that can imitate different medical conditions. We take on roles in the team and have to respond to the emergency :smiley: It’s actually pretty cool. Sometimes they get recorded so we can discuss them later.

#5

Ooh, the robot patients and training rooms. We’ve got them for in house training at St John HQ, one set up like the back of an ambulance, a bedroom and a work room. There’s camera everywhere and training sessions are recorded and critiqued by the rest of the class. shudders I hated being recorded.

#6

Reacting to the Past recently received a boost in awareness thanks to Stephanie Jass, this crazy-fun professor who was on Jeopardy and Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. She became well known for saying “Alex Trebeck, you are the devil!”

facebook.com/StephanieJassJeopardyChampion