Now Play This is proud to present this special commission that launches with the festival and will be developed over the course of 2021 in a series of conversations, research notes and public playtests.

Collaborating for the first time, web artist/poet JR Carpenter and game designer/technologist Tomo Kihara are creating Weather Warnings, an web-based AR experience that is freely playable anywhere in the world.

In this project we use augmented reality and live weather data to overlay the user’s surroundings with signage posing questions about past and present climatic conditions. Why is the sky so blue? Has it always rained? These signs call attention to the small changes in the climate already occurring all around us, inviting playful responses.

The conversation with the artists was streamed on our Twitch channel.

Have you encountered any mysterious, poetic, strange signs? Post them in this thread over on the Now Play This community forum.

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J. R. Carpenter works across performance, print, and digital media. The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. This is a Picture of Wind was one of The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020.

http://www.luckysoap.com/

Tomo Kihara is a research driven designer making playful interventions that provide a new perspective to socio-technical problems.

http://www.tomokihara.com/

Now Play This is proud to present this special commission that launches with the festival and will be developed over the course of 2021.

Free Ice Cream will be exploring how their Playable Data methodology can help groups of people think and act collaboratively within the climate crisis.

The community of people around Now Play This are invited to join them in a workshop to collaboratively answer some questions about their creative work and lives as they relate to living sustainably, and explore how their energies and resources flow together as part of a collective system. As they do so, they will create a dynamic node map in real time.

Over the coming months and through a short series of workshops, Free Ice Cream will explore how this node map can be made playable by building worlds and mechanics into the system that can meaningfully convey how group dynamics interact with personal responsibility in a complex problem space, and how we as a game community can find connection and meaningful actions to take to combat the climate emergency.

Sign-up here to join them for their first workshop on Sunday, March 28, 15:00 GMT.

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Free Ice Cream design playful interfaces that connect people and give them the agency to imagine and explore complex ideas and social change.  Their work spans online games, playful immersive spaces, and digital magic embedded in the real world.

Summit for Intergalactic Knowledge is a digital LARP (Live-Action Role Play), a non-competitive game and an experimental educational tool for co-creating and playing in a speculative fiction world. It allows us to embody different non-human agents, form interspecies relations, learn from each other and re-shape how we think of ourselves as beings.

The game seeks to problematise human exceptionalism and speculate about alternative positions from which we can question, destabilise, and decenter humans. Through the ability to inhabit and experience those other than ourselves, we can start addressing the challenges of the anthropocentric climate crisis, which privileges human and culture over non-humans and nature.

Through our characters engaging in different creative exercises, we will explore various forms of non-extractive relationships and ways of being and relating to each other otherwise.

How to play: The game session takes around 2-3 hours and includes an intro workshop where players get ready for the game, the actual gameplay, and a guided debrief. Participants will also receive a guide for the game and a character sheet. To book for this event please sign up here.
Sunday 28th March – 4pm GMT

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Alen Ksoll (he/him) is an art educator and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. He co-founded School in Common, a self-organised school for learning, studying and being in common.

Margherita Huntley (she/her) is a graphic designer, lecturer and publisher based in London. She is also a trade union representative and a participant of the Collective Practices Research Post-Master Course at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

Nat Skoczylas (them/they) is an artist, researcher and writer based in Berlin. They are interested in utopian thinking, anarchism, cooking as a practice of community building and exchange, and collective ways of learning and growing together.

Neilson and Milan Koerner-Safrata continue a conversation with Marie Foulston about their recent work and artistic practice that started last year in their work DUSTNET. Join the artists as they discuss their latest work. The Garden of Earthly Delights is an online chatroom for the animals of Age of Empires II — metamorphose between species of the animal kingdom in playful contempt of the human civilizations in Bosch’s biblical triptych.

How to play: The conversation was streamed on our Twitch channel on March 28, 5:00 pm GMT

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Milan and Neilson Koerner-Safrata are Canadian new media artists working with video games to imagine new connections between the screen and the self. Their work has been presented at Now Play This, A MAZE., VIFF, IGF, IndieCade, and Ludicious.

Marie Foulston is a curator and creative producer of radical exhibitions, installations and experiences made in collaboration with videogame designers and artists. She was guest director of Now Play This in 2020.

Join this sharing session on the Now Play This discord to see what people have been making during the jam, or to present and discuss your own contribution.

Running throughout the festival, the Alternative Ecologies Jam brings together critical games writing and the themes of the festival. Participants will draw from examples and contribute their own writing, micro-games, or calls to action about gaming’s relation to economic and ecological issues.

More information on the themes of the jam, and how to join can be found here. Details on joining the presentation will be posted to the community section of the jam page.

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Emilie Reed is a curator, writer and researcher based in Glasgow who is interested in alternative histories of gaming, DIY game-making communities online and game-making tools.

Banner image from British Library digital collection – public domain information

Head over to our digital festival courtyard designed by artist/game designer Tiz Creel to join the playful closing moment of the festival!

How To Play: The courtyard is over at https://topia.io/nowplaythis – You’ll need a chrome browser. You’ll also be able to watch it on our Twitch channel.

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Tiz Creel (1991) is an artist from Mexico City currently based in London. Her practice is influenced by play, spontaneity and games, as forms contingent on relations between people. For Tiz, play is the practice of becoming an ongoing exploration of the human experience. When we play, we engage fully with life and its contents to reach for the deepest truths of ordinary things and hopefully pursue greater respect and interest in the things around us. The more people open themselves, the more meaning they will find. Ultimately the meaning of the work comes prominence when the individual’s imagination transforms the objects. To play, the viewers must take the artwork on its own terms, treat it as if its existence were reasonable. The stimulation is what triggers cognitive synergy.