Artist and game designer Asya Volodina will share a set of game techniques that she implements to create fictional worlds.
The role-playing game is a medium that immerses all participants into a shared speculative space, which they collectively create and change. Over the several decades of these games’ existence, an extensive toolkit has been developed to create such works and interact with them from the participant’s perspective. Asya Volodina will introduce some of these instruments and provide participants with an opportunity to work with them, “touching” the role-playing game’s inner mechanism.
In a traditional role-playing game, the masters pre-set the setting—the world or part of the world in which the events of the game will take place—and the rules by which the interactions take place. All players get the roles of the characters of this setting and, on a given day and hour in a designated space, begin to live and act on their behalf. The plot is not set in advance; the stories are formed as a result of free play and free choices of all participants.
How do you organize space, people, rules, and a fictitious world to make a complete piece? How is a drama built when the story depends on the actions of many people and the plot cannot be predetermined? How differently can reality be modeled, and on what should the choice depend? What gaps and tensions arise between different game participants, and what relationships do the roles of player, spectator, character, director enter within each participant? The artist will find answers to these questions together with the workshop participants.