Radical Friends: Fostering Cooperative Play and The Gameful Revolution, a workshop with Patrick Blenkarn!

Join Patrick Blenkarn, one of the core artists behind the video game for the stage, asses.masses, for a masterclass on critical games and interdisciplinary performance creation. How might interactive technologies, experience design, and radical hospitality be the key to shaping the future of storytelling and the crucial role(s) that stories will play in shaping contemporary life?

Patrick will share insights from their solo and shared projects—live experiences across a variety of mediums designed to inspire active decision-making and collective leadership. This workshop will offer a mix of practice sharing, practical insights, and hands-on prompts that provide participants the chance to rapidly test their own ideas. Together, participants will create their own paper prototypes, generating gameful performance tactics such as environmental storytelling, custom user interfaces, and emergent roleplay.

This session highlights how framing the politics of participation can provocatively (and playfully) challenge traditions of spectatorship and artist-audience relations towards social transformation.