Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Work
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Otherworldly Games: An Atlas of Playable Realities
Game design, book design, illustration, creative writing2024–ongoing
Speculative Design
Otherworldly Games is a project that imagines speculative worlds not through exposition or description, but through the rulesets that structure the games people might play in alternate realities. The current iteration of the project is composed of large prints, performance texts, and a text-based video game.
Otherworldly Games riffs on the Fluxus experimental art movement. In 1969, Alison Knowles described the Fluxus “event score” as a “one- or two-line recipe for action.” Though rarely described as games, these scores feel like invitations to social play. Ludic event scores have fallen out of fashion since their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, would such scores look like 50 years later in a culture where games are no longer a peripheral art form but culturally dominant? Instead of simply serving as precursors to contemporary video games, might speculative Fluxus event scores have something new to teach us about game-based worldbuilding?
Game Design
One of the rulesets, Adventure Games!, is a multilinear, online video game that includes images, animations, and choose-your-own-adventure-like branching choices that lead to 26 unique endings across approximately 30,000 words of prose.
Adventure Games! explores the colonial legacies of the adventure game genre, whose roots are embedded in resource management and simulation games, as well as the adventure and discovery genre of “AAA” mainstream video game design. The piece uses medium-specific components such as glitches that reroute user-friendly victories, pop-up interruptions that disrupt gameplay immersion, and variable narrative interactions that call Euro-American ideas of freedom into question.
Impact
Several pieces from this project have been exhibited internationally, including in the Rzeszowskie Piwnice Museum in Poland and the Glasshouse Gallery at the Center for Digital Narrative in Norway. We have used the project to conduct an interactive workshop at the University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong.
Collaborator
Sector
Project team
Patrick Jagoda
University of Chicago
Speculative Fiction
Arts & Culture
Game Design
Sarah Edmands Martin, Patrick Jagoda