This blog was guest written by Anna McFarlane (@mariettarosetta)
As a cyberpunk scholar, there are a number of cool things that I am asked to do for work, but the most surprising so far was being asked to play a role-playing game (RPG) that speaks to my research interests in cyberpunk, the medical humanities, and posthumanism. I don’t consider myself a gamer. I’ve certainly dabbled in video games – I’ve seen three hours disappear when I was introduced to Mass Effect 3 and, more recently, I played Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding until its petro-apocalyptic imagery gave me nightmares. I’ve enjoyed a number of table-top games and taken part in a couple of RPGs with friends, but I am by no means an expert. Despite this, I was invited to play a game developed by artist, Tom K Kemp, for the Universes exhibition at The Gallery, De Montfort University. The concept of the Universes exhibition is to explore the ways in which world-building and universe-creation can contribute to contemporary arts practice, and Kemp had responded to this by developing the RPG, After the Maestro. The game takes inspiration from educational cartoons designed to introduce young people to the inner workings of the body, like Once Upon a Time…Life (Il était un fois…la vie, 1987). In Kemp’s game there is a guiding force for the body, the ‘Maestro’, who has been deposed. Players take on the roles of different parts of the body and must react to the power vacuum left by the Maestro.
The plan was to have a session playing the game followed by a panel discussion; I played the game with Kemp, artist and curator Daniel Sean Kelly, and architect Andrea Gonzalez. Because of the covid-19 pandemic, all of this had to take place online, and this led to some innovative solutions for gaming. The game was played through Roll20, a site that allows people to play tabletop games with friends when they can’t be together in the same room. This worked well and allowed us to collaborate on a sketch of the body that included the body parts we had decided to play. It also allowed us to choose cards at random, and the interface offers a virtual dice roll for games that require it. At the same time, we chatted over Discord – this programme is likely well-known to many readers of this blog, since it was developed as a way of allowing gamer communities to come together and chat, but I hadn’t used it before the pandemic. Discord hosted the Cyberpunk Culture 2020 conference, which led to the launch of the Cyberpunk Research Network, so I had some familiarity with the platform, and here it allowed us to chat and to be recorded while playing the game, rather than using Roll20’s messaging systems which, I gathered, were less reliable for the quality we were hoping for. After our gaming session Kemp, Kelly and I had a panel discussion, and this was recorded via Zoom. Kemp then edited the gaming session and the panel session together, adding some animation to give a sense of the experience of playing the game.
What I found from the experience was that RPGs offer a rich way to think about complex topics. The things that had made me nervous about participating – the imagination and improvisation required to contribute your own strand to the collective narrative – were the very aspects that allowed us to explore the themes of class, work, community and world-building in a kind of structured free association. As Kemp observed, the experience of playing the RPG is a bit like being part of a writer’s room, where ideas are developed collectively. Through the gameplay, and in our reflections afterwards, we found ourselves talking about the importance of unionisation as a means of accessing a collective identity, the ways in which science fiction, fantasy and militarisation rub up against each other in the history of RPGs, and the utopian potential that posthumanism and the medical humanities have for thinking about future human societies. This opportunity to engage with others in a collaborative, creative process is one rarely offered in other media and gave me a glimpse into some of the unique opportunities offered by RPGs, and gaming in general.