Worldbuilding is the conceptual, organizational and logistical process of creating other places and possibilities. It sets itself apart from speculation and imagination in its focus on structures, systems, and internal consistency. But in this focus on systematicity, worldbuilding processes — for games and other media — often fall back on tired tropes and conservative ways of thinking about society, culture, and history. Furthermore, by emphasizing individual, visionary authorship, worldbuilding practices can unintentionally reify hierarchical power structures and unconscious biases. How can we rethink our worldbuilding processes to be more collaborative and experimental? And how can rethinking our worldbuilding processes reshape the worlds we imagine?
In this workshop, we will use play and games to reimagine worldbuilding. Worldbuilding games can reorient our relationship to the worlds we build and to the people we build them with, and the framework of play can challenge us to imagine more radical, vivid and complex possibilities. As a group, we will play a worldbuilding game designed by me in order to kickstart a conversation about how designers can integrate radical and playful worldbuilding processes into their own workflows.
"While Waiting" is an experimental game under development by Yijia Chen and her teammates in Opticalusion. It is a philosophical game that leads players to revisit fleeting moments in our lives that are spent waiting. Waiting for the bus, waiting for the elevator, waiting for downloading, waiting for someone we love, waiting for life to unpause and continue.
In "Female Protagonists", we will be playing the waiting game together with the participants of all the panels as well as the general audience. In turning a single player game into collective play, we want to experiment and explore the social and public side of game design and game play: how does a game change when it is played by more people, and in public? In this particular case, how does waiting change when it is communally experienced by more people in public? Perhaps even more specific, how does waiting change when it is played by women in public?
The game’s designer Yijia will be onsite supervising this unusual playtest, and later share her design story and philosophy.
Sexism is deeply ingrained in the game scene. In fact, it is so common that one often does not discern its existence in everyday work culture and mainstream game products. With “Debugging - Deconstruct Normality” we invite three frontline practitioners positioned in different parts of the game scene (development, design, publishing, and research) to share their observations and diagnoses of such phenomena and deconstruct the normality that shouldn’t be.
Female protagonist games are a relatively new but well-received game genre. Such games usually stem from the personal experiences of the creators or/and thorough research of lived experiences of women in the past and present. In “Real Women, Real Experience”, four award winning game producers and designers share and discuss their creative journeys of producing such games, as well as their experiences around communication and rapport with the player communities.
