℘Ɩąყɠཞơųŋɖ game test: TORN HISTORY
Play a game to make a game, with a few twists. Torn History is a new take on a Lost & Found game, a system developed by @mouseholepress for games like Artefact or Skeletons. Lost & Found games center the lifespan of objects and inanimate concepts, from recipes to a nation’s borders, as they grow and change through long stretches of history. As a solo, nonviolent, journaling game, this subgenre becomes a great medium for guided storytelling and dynamic worldbuilding that blooms through millennia in minutes. In Torn History, designer Pearse Anderson will teach workshop participants how to build their own version of a Lost & Found game and then how to quilt these simulated histories together, creating an interconnected collage of game mechanics and stories throughout the room. After playing this game as a group, participants will leave with their own set of rules for a new solo game they’ve created on an A3 sheet. Torn History plays with the physicality of rules through the very paper those rules are printed on—the paper itself can be scribbled on, origamied, and torn. It has also never been tested before, and is ready for curious players and criticism.
Pearse Anderson is an analog game designer, food journalist, speculative fiction author, and baker. His previous games about developing fictional histories include Recipe on Kmiydish Paper, Likeness Machines, and Your True Name, all available at pearseanderson.itch.io. He specializes in games that let people come together at a table to explore topics of food culture, climate change, community-building, and nonviolent resistance. You can read his gaming writing in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and WIRED, and find him on all social media at @pearseanderson. He’d love to collaborate on more games with more artists in the Netherlands!
From 18:00 – 21:00 (dinner included)
RSVP via mail to: hello@zipspace.nl
Duration approximately 2 hours. Dinner will be served at 20:00 with a feedback session on the game’s design.
Access and content notes: The workshop will be in English and require participants to write in English. As players bring their own rules and themes into the game, the content will vary. Safety mechanisms will be introduced at the start.
With ℘Ɩąყɠཞơųŋɖ we aim to create a space for presenting, creating, and participating in LARP-based work, TTRPGs and collective storytelling tools. We welcome anyone who is willing to be curious and respectful to new ways of thinking and modes of being, and is aware or willing to learn how to build and keep a safe space together.
℘Ɩąყɠཞơųŋɖ is a recurring meet up initiated and facilitated by Sophie Allerding and Louisa Teichmann at media lab .zip in Rotterdam since 2024.
