Actual Play Session: Extension/Reversal, a McLuhan Micro-RPG
“Art is whatever you can get away with.” Drawing its inspiration from the oft-quoted passage in McLuhan and Fiore’s 1967 “The Medium is the Massage,” this session will involve playing a game that explores McLuhan’s theories of media.
“Extension/Reversal” is a project reflecting on Hot and Cool media through the “Micro-RPG” genre. Micro-RPGs (Micro Role Playing Games) use a small ruleset and simple mechanics to allow players to focus on their interactions and the narrative that they create together. Micro-RPGs often skewer and eschew the more traditional RPG tropes of heroes, adventures, and dungeons in favor of humor, reflection, and introspection.
“Extension/Reversal” assigns a medium to each player as their character, and randomly generates a world-changing event. Players will take turns briefly describing how their medium shapes and is shaped by the unfolding events. Will drones discover information that leads to a cure of a world-threatening disease? Will microscopes unseat a fascist dictator? Will social media be the key to communicating with extraterrestrials? By playing as these media and the people who interact with them, players will be immersed in a fiction of inter-mediation that opens the way to reflect on real-world media interactions.
The presentation will explore the game and may include some examples. While this session will be focused on the play and ramifications of this particular game, it is hoped that this session can serve as an example of ways to integrate playful experiences into the conference milieu.
About the presenterGreg Loring-Albright
Greg Loring-Albright is a student in the Communications, Culture & Media PhD program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. He makes tabletop and pervasive games, including a card game about Moby-Dick and a game about art theft that was played (only once) inside the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research interests include games-as-media, non-digital and pervasive games, and the materiality of board games. Find him on twitter @gregisonthego.