Are you psychic? Can you commune with the spirits of the dead? Can you divine whether the person before you is conscious, or merely a machine capable only of simulating a mind?
Since 2015, game designers have been enticing players to the table with such questions, designing board and card games that purport to simulate experiences of communing with other minds. These experiences include mind reading, as in The Mind (Warsch, 2018), séances, as in Phantom Ink (Flanagan and Seidman, 2022) and Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015), and ‘Turing tests’ designed to flush out philosophical ‘zombies’, as in the Bladerunner-inspired Inhuman Condition (Maranges and O'Brien, 2020), a game inspired by Bladerunner.
It is no surprise that the mind has become a theme for game design. Neither the philosophy of mind nor neuroscience have solved the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996; Talbot, 2010). The mind remains a phenomenon ripe for dark imaginings. Mind games appeal not only to players’ abilities to manage and interpret social interactions, but to folk psychology, the shared ability to explain and predict the mental states of others, including animals, experienced in day-to-day life as an ability to mind-read. Folk Psychology is more than just a ‘quick and dirty’ heuristic humans use to navigate their world; it reveals a fundamental and radical idea of the mind as something that is shared with, and co-constituted by, the world. The acceptance of shared rules in tabletop games not only makes gameplay possible but aligns the minds of players in ways that other forms of cultural communication do not.
Join the Manchester Game Centre and the Dark Arts Research Kollective as we delve into the murky world of mind games! This is a playtest and workshop-style session, hosted by Chloé Germaine, featuring a short talk and a chance to play and discuss the games, at Peste, Manchester, from 6pm.