Dying Earth Catalogues: Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Crisis-Responsive Imaginaries

Guest lecture with Jamie Sutcliffe.

Is the world a game that might be played? If so, who’s taken the lead? In a moment of profound poly-crisis, where silicon cronyism and proxy wars unfurl against the background radiation of heated populisms and climate collapse, what strategies for resilience or survival might be found in the simulative possibilities of play? How might inhabiting the grim dark futures of dystopian science fiction, or the muddied pasts of trope-laden fantasy, illuminate our own living hell?  

Taking the analogue tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) as a modest object of poetic and mechanical curiosity, writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe asks what happens to us when we enter into ludic zones of critical fabulation. Drawing upon his own experiences playing, commissioning and curating roleplaying experiences within contemporary art contexts, this lecture seeks to identify within the TTRPG various possibilities for mythopoetic transformation: from the evolution of a personal ethics, to the development of new political imaginaries, and crisis-responsive tactics. 

Avoiding the easy solutionist rhetorics of worldbuilding, this talk instead looks to the TTRPG as a vital site for exploring contingency, difference, and disputation.

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator and publisher at Strange Attractor Pres, UK where he has helped champion neglected and underground currents across culture, science and the occult. His works explores the intersections of contemporary art, science fiction fabulations, gaming politics, animation and digital folklore. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic (Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press) and Weeb Theory (Banner Repeater) and regularly writes for publications such as Art Review and Frieze.