New Publication! Rituals of Play

Rituals of Play: Our Zine Is Here

Rituals of Play, published by the Manchester Game Centre and DVRK, gathers seventeen pieces from writers, designers, artists, and practitioners who work at the threshold of games and the occult. Their work explores games as magical practice, and magic as a form of play. The zine gathers material from the Multiplatform event in 2025 (and beyond). Scholarly essays sit alongside working rituals, grimoires, games, and visual and sonic experiments, with no firm line drawn between studying (or practicing) the occult, and playing games.

Inside, Jeff Howard traces the lusory attitude running through magical practice; Leah Lockhart follows solo TTRPGs into chaos magic and servitor work; Annika Olofsdotter Bergström and Rebeca Yates offer a ritual for becoming-moon; Ingmar Vogelsang retells Hanover's history through the Cthulhu Mythos; and Andrej Kapcar asks what esoteric knowledge lurks behind the screen of modern horror games. Alongside these essays there are boardgaming rituals, alchemical horrors, botanical grimoires, and other pieces that treat the game table, the magick circle, and the liminal space between as one and the same territory.

The full zine is free to read and download as a PDF.

Our thanks to every contributor for trusting us with such strange and generous work, and to everyone who joined us at Multiplatform 2025, where many of these ideas first circled. Also, huge thanks to Isa Alsaba, Kevin Craig, Matteo Polato and Chloé Wake for work on editing, layout and art.