Thesis Statement

Everything in Motion is a theatrical storytelling roleplaying gameshow where players create an imaginary world and then transform it over a long period of fictional time. Through silly imaginative play, the game helps players understand how worlds and histories are constructed, how large systems dictate individual possibilities and how the choices of one generation impact the options for the next.

Abstract

Our lives are defined by systems so big and so obvious that they've become invisible. From our human perspective the gigantic systems that frame our lives envelope us and feel like immovable facets of our existence, the water that we swim in. From this vantage point, it's easy to get overwhelmed by their scale and persistence. However, if we zoom out just a little bit, they quickly change shape: if we look at Capitalism, for instance, not as a fact of life, but as very modern invention, just one of a thousand possible systems which we choose to uphold, then suddenly our world opens up in possibilities.

How can we recast these vast systems not as laws of nature, but as accumulations of choices- emergent entities that have their own agendas. Systems that don't have our best interests at heart but are also far more susceptible to change than we think? Everything in Motion is a storytelling game designed to cultivate this very broad view. In the game, players first create a world and all it's systems, and then they transform those systems over a long period of time. The game is played from three fundamentally different perspectives: players can play as Humans who get born into a world that was created before they got there, they can play as Systems which are trying to grow and expand, or they can play as Entropy which causes problems and crises from the byproducts that emerge from the Systems and Humans.

Through allowing players to create and then radically change fictional worlds, it is my hope that they might be able to imagine and enact radical change in their own worlds just a little bit more easily. Through joyfully imagining alternative histories, perhaps we can begin to imagine better possible futures.

Research

Influences

This game is fundamentally inspired by many projects that came before it. I was directly influenced by...

Role-playing and Table-top Games such as

• Legacy: Life Among the Ruins
• A Quiet Year
• Did Somebody Say Street Magic?
• Oath
• Watch the Skies

As well as frameworks and workshops such as

• Investing in Futures
• extrapolation factory Alternative Unknowns Method

Conceptually, the following texts were instrumental to my thinking

• The Dawn of Everything
• Systemantics/ The Systems Bible
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Energy and Civilization
• Basin and Range

Questions

I spent a lot of this process trying to figure out how to make a game that captured the essence of historical systemic change without perpetuating myths of technological progress. There have been many games about building Civilizations but most of them use 'Technology Trees' which implicitly reinforce the notion that our current world order is the culmination of centuries of 'Progress'. Throughout this process I explicitly wondered if I could design a game that accurately modeled historical change without perpetuating this bias.

While I tried several models, I consistently found that the games that were the most open ended were the most successful: I found that allowing players to imagine worlds of their own devising consistently produced far more interesting scenarios than I could have anticipated. The framework that I thus developed used specific questions to help players imagine worlds with a high degree of complexity and contradiction, but ultimately left a lot of the narrative power in the hands of the players themselves.

In any system that is evolving over Time —whether it’s a biological system or a cultural one—at any given point in that evolution, there are a finite set of ways that the system can be changed, and a much larger set of changes that can’t be made.

Technical Details

I used Figma, Miro and Playingcards.io to make paper prototypes and then MAX/MSP to make the gameshow control system. The Everything in Motion Gameshow utilized green-screen compositing and webcams to create lo-fi video puppets whose actions were recorded and added to an evolving video history of the story so far. Video, light and sound cues were all controlled by a smartphone using a local webserver.