by Jamie Sutcliffe
Learn more about the symposium here.
Tabletop roleplaying games are a deceptively complex medium. On the surface they offer a modest exercise in “interactive storytelling” and the temporary inhabitation and exploration of what we might conveniently describe as “imagined worlds”. These stories may be experienced independently or as part of a small group, utilise rule systems such as the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons, are often unfurled via the drawing of hastily-improvised maps onto multiple scraps of paper, and are commonly adjudicated by dice rolls and the consultation of seemingly endless tables of esoteric data. Chancing upon a session, it wouldn’t be too surprising to hear something like the following interaction…
“…What do we find inside the magic chest then?”
***quickly looks up a dice result on a printed chart***
“…oh, it’s a letter stained with the tears of a lovelorn goblin pastry chef!!!…”
Areas Of Effect, 2024. arebyte Gallery, London. Image: Ellinor Paik.
Despite their propensity for fantasy, roleplaying games are conducted through a material culture that may be deemed no different to the clutter that pervades the administrative drudgery of office work, a comparison once memorably made by the late anthropologist David Graeber in his 2015 book The Utopia Of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. But all of this bureaucratic ephemera—the pens, the notepads, the candy-coloured polyhedral dice—tend to conceal the dark pulsing energy operating at the core of any tabletop roleplaying experience… the almost hallucinatory transposition of the mind into a protean domain of shared fabulation.
Roleplaying games take us elsewhere. They invite us to become other (for both better and for worse… most frequently worse!), and they can also help us to challenge some of our deepest-held presumptions in a context that is, fundamentally, fun. Importantly, while shows such as Netflix’s Stranger Things have been rehabilitating the reputation of roleplaying games from the enclaves of geekdom, a vibrant community of independent artists, writers and game designers have been evolving the medium into unique expressions of ambient activism and politically-conscious play that rivals speculative literature as a testing ground for thinking how things could be otherwise.
Areas Of Effect, 2024. arebyte Gallery, London. Image: Ellinor Paik.
Following the success of arebyte’s 2022 symposium Science Fiction Squared, artist David Blandy and writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe considered the development of their own event focusing on these expressive capacities, thinking of roleplaying games much like they do science fiction, as potent tools of speculation and critical defamiliarisation. Blandy’s own artistic practice had commonly utilised roleplaying game mechanics to problematise colonial legacies and highlight the frail contingencies of equitable futures, while Sutcliffe’s critical essays and exhibitions have often traced the novel politics embedded in emergent gaming cultures. Areas of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries, sought to build upon the model of 2022’s symposium by forwarding a hybrid-event, equal parts conference, digital arts exhibition, live play session, and zine fair, in an attempt to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of the field.
A keynote was provided by the artist, writer and philosopher Simon O’Sullivan, who generously framed the concerns of the day in light of his own theorising on the process of “fictioning”, a form of mythopoetic practice that might cultivate inhabitable fictions, ultimately destabilising any clear distinction between reality and invention. This was followed by panel discussion chaired by David Blandy in which artist and gardener Holly White and game designer Zedeck Siew spoke thoughtfully about the role of ecology in their work, and how the personal experience of community gardening in Glasgow, or the fallout of petrochemical infrastructure in Malaysia, might underscore a game design practice sensitive to the anxious proximities of an extractive capitalism in terminal free-fall.
A second panel hosted by game designer Chris McDowell invited journalist and writer Timothy Linward, and artist and game maker Kayla Dice to discuss the role of lore in shaping imaginary worlds, crucially reflecting upon the uses and abuses of fictional mythologies, from the naturalisation of ill-considered cultural differences to the ways in which lore might reinforce the toxicity of fandoms. These pressing themes were extended into a conversation between Jamie Sutcliffe and author, RPG historian and host of the Vintage RPG Podcast Stu Horvath, who discussed the politics of the gaming community within the context of Horvath’s seminal history of roleplaying games Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground, published by The MIT Press in 2023.
Areas Of Effect, 2024. arebyte Gallery, London. Image: Ellinor Paik.
A final panel, sensitively hosted by writer and publisher Mark Pilkington, invited artist and game designer Samuel Mui, musician and game designer Chris Bissette, and writer and editor Mike Mason to discuss the various uses of horror with gaming experiences. The panel was preceded by a brilliant performance of Mui’s A Bowl Of Noodle Soup (2024) which used a simple online interface to generate darkly poetic provocations surrounding generational, cultural, and diasporic inheritances. Mui, Bissette and Mason spoke passionately about horror as something that wasn’t essentially reducible to a genre concerned with thrills, but a complex and generative strategy that might be layered atop other genres and modes of storytelling to create cathartic, critical, and ultimately remedial encounters.
Areas Of Effect, 2024. arebyte Gallery, London. Image: Ellinor Paik.
Making full use of Arebyte’s resources, Areas of Effect also included an interactive bay of digital roleplaying games by artists Uma Breakdown, Kitty Clark, John Powell-Jones, Petra Szemán, and Holly White, while a zine fair populated by Melsonian Arts Council, Leo Hunt, Chris Bissette and Laurie O’Connel demonstrated the vibrancy of independent game design and publishing. Importantly, the event concluded with live-play sessions coordinated by David Blandy (running his new game Eco Mofos!!!), Chris McDowall (employing his own Mythic Bastionland System), and Samuel Mui, who used an innovative game system that dispensed with any “games master” in favour of processes of collaborative storytelling.
Listen to the symposium here.
