Manchester Game Centre researcher, Chloé Germaine, has been invited to present her work on roleplaying games at the international symposium: ‘Imagining Extinction in Video Games’. The symposium has been organised and is hosted online by The Centre for English Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies. It features leading international researchers working on the issue of games and sustainability.
Chloé will be discussing the collaborative storytelling techniques and ludic mechanics of tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs), which invite players to reflect on the interrelationship between humans and the worlds in which they are embedded. Her paper will claim that the ‘virtual’ environments of rpgs disclose an independent subjectivity. The affordances of roleplaying games to bring forth agentially real worlds that disclose a lively environmental subjectivity lie in their mechanics, not merely in their narrative features. Chloé will explore these affordances of RPGs through a discussion of Mörk Borg (2021), an OSR roleplaying game set in a dying world in which players are encouraged to take on characters of the misfits and scum left fighting for riches they will never be able to enjoy, or for redemption that will never come.
You can find out more about the symposium over on their website and sign up online following the link below.