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?

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. 

We are currently working on an expanded version of the project that is entitled Otherworldly Games: An Atlas of Playable Realities. This book includes 20 short stories about speculative realities and their games, as well as an extended series of images, glyphs, and puzzles.