So many have been created that they are now known collectively as “Powered by the Apocalypse” games. Instead, players co-create the world through their in-game interactions.Īpocalypse World, created for a post-apocalyptic setting, has inspired nearly 100 tabletop role-playing games in other milieux that use similar mechanics, like the fantastical Dungeon World, the cyberpunk The Veil and the queerly angsty Monsterhearts. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, which revolves around a game master who prepares scripts and encounters for players to experience, Apocalypse World discourages the game master from pre-planning the story of the game.
The trend of collaborative world-building began with games like Apocalypse World. Emotional experiences can encourage them to see our world differently after the game ends. According to Bogost, structural norms encourage specific forms of engagement and interaction, thus shaping players’ perspectives.Īs other scholars, like game studies professor Bo Ruberg and human-computer interaction researcher Katherine Isbister, have elaborated, game rules can also encourage players to enact emotional states through play. Game scholars and designers use a concept called “procedural rhetoric,” first developed by technology studies scholar and game designer Ian Bogost, to describe how games propose political arguments through their rule structures. While the world-building games I discuss can be played in person, online play using video or text conferencing via platforms like Zoom, Slack or Discord has allowed tabletop role-playing gamers to create online communities of game designers and players. I count my own games One Hour Worldbuilders and City Planning Department as part of this emerging genre.
They represent a compelling way to rethink our own world: by inhabiting and thinking through a world in which things are different.Īs a researcher of the politics of world-building and a game designer and instructor, I am interested in intersections between world-building, game-making and political imagination. World-building games challenge players to imagine radical alternatives for social and political organization.