Now Play This

It's the London Games Festival! And there's a really neat experimental strand happening this year: three spots across London where @londongamesfest have supported organisations and artists and curators who are interested in different sorts of playful work to put on something new as part of the festival. Tickets are available from the individual organisations (if you can't find 'em you could go via my most recent newsletter, which has more details on all of these events - linked in my bio) A bit more about the events: On Wednesday 15th, @thisisliveart are hosting an interactive talk from artists @productionsbysymone and @ladydangfua , who have just run a two-day game jam with a bunch of different makers. Their work is SO neat - on Wednesday they'll be presenting an interactive performance mixing videogames, story, and dance. (Main image for this one by @ladydangfua , other images are of the artists) On Thursday, Play Praxis - led by its curator Sindi Breshani and producer Raphael Benros - will be filling Siobhan Davies Studios with a day of roundtables and game demos and workshops and chats and just general hanging out. It's going to be a really lovely day! This is the second edition of Play Praxis, and it's particularly looking at games in relation to the human mind. (Pictures from the first run of Play Praxis in November.) Finally, @_voidspace_zine is running a BUNCH of different events across the week; some great playable shows online, a Strange Play Open Mic on Monday (this one's sold out!), an indie game makers meetup with @gaemzmu on Tuesday, all culminating in a showcase of strange playful work across the weekend of 18-19 April. Absolutely something here for everyone, as long as that everyone specifically wants something quite weird. (Pictures from previous Voidspace events.) (We're sharing this on the old Now Play This account because although NPT has wrapped up, I think if you were interested in what it did, one of these is probably gonna speak to you.)

📡 Now Play This. Folk Games. The stories we play together: Online Section The festival kicks off in just 7 days... And to help you get into the spirit, we're already unlocking a few of the online games so you can start playing from home! 🎮🌍 This year’s online section brings together a collection of experimental digital games, interactive stories, and playful rituals from around the world. All celebrating folk traditions, collective memory, and cultural expression through play. 🎮 From tea ceremonies and Andean spirits, to pixel myths, Quechua puzzles, shamanic journeys, and poetic football… 🌀 These games explore themes like: - Oral traditions & ancestral knowledge - Language preservation - Queer futures & coming-of-age - Decolonial aesthetics - Healing, memory & imagination - Togetherness and shared memories 🧠 Created by artists, students and indie collectives, each project invites you to reflect, play, and reconnect. ✨ You can access all games for free at 👉 nowplaythis.net 🗺️ Let the stories guide you. #FolkGames #NowPlayThis #PlayableTraditions

📣 Ruth Dorothea Eggels and Dr. Philipp Bojah are closing the day on 11 April - with the audience 📣 If you’ve ever wanted to chat folk games with them AND Niall Moody, Anna Blackwell, Pedro Mota & Emily Koonce this is your chance! Join a discussion on what makes a game “folk”. All the speakers will join the open conversation, connecting their perspectives on folk games—from accessibility and shared authorship to cultural re-mediation, re-adaptation, and the potential of emergent play for resilience and community building. Explore the characteristics of folk games and their significance in contemporary culture and digital games. Is “folk” about storytelling, tradition, or tied to vernacular practices of play? What can we learn from emergent and community-driven forms of play? How can the folk in games be translated to digital environments, and what lessons can contemporary game design take from these adaptable, evolving play forms? Ruth Dorothea Eggels is a cultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer, currently exploring sustainable game development practices in the EU Horizon project “STRATEGIES – Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries” at the Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. Folk Games Re-Imagined: Tradition & Change is organised by Prof. Dr. Sonia Fizek, Dr. Philipp Bojahr, Dr David Murphy & Lujan Oulten for Now Play This. Come join us: 🎟️£35 .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025 @colognegamelab @londongamesfest @luoulton @somersethouse #nowplaythis #folkgames

📣 All done with listening after lunch? Well you are in luck! Chicago- based Emily Koonce is swooping in to run a playful session of folk games with everyone at Folk Games Re-imagined on Friday 12 April. 🧶 A curated set of folk games centered around developing connections between one another. Meet each other, learn and play a series of folk games chosen to build trust within a play community, and share our experiences of the games together. 🎟️ Tickets £30, just £10 more to stay for the evening fun 🤩 .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025 🧶Limited tickets still available for the Saturday morning workshops on 12 April for more folk game fun with Emily✨ Emily Koonce is a multimedia artist, writer, and community organizer interested in the intersection of folk games, philosophy, and education. She acts as an event producer at Night City and as an adjunct professor of game development at DePaul University. With her background working at summer camps, Emily frequently travels to different games festivals and events to run folk games workshops. She has also worked at the NYU Game Center, Tender Claws, Babycastles, and the MAGFest Indie Arcade. Emily recently performed “Pause Play,” an alt-control dance piece at the 2024 A MAZE Festival alongside Susie Buchan, and her videogame “crockpot” was released in June 2024. @londongamesfest @somersethouse @kooooonce #nowplaythis #folkgames

📣 Meet Pedro Mota, speaking at our symposium Folk Games Re-imagined: Bridging Tradition & Change, Friday 11 April 📣 ~ How can folk games serve as tools for cultural remix and communal storytelling in a globalized world? That is the central question of ‘Anthropophagic Play: Folk Games as Cultural Remix and Remediation (or How to Develop Folk Games Inspired by the Latin American Philosophy of Cultural Cannibalism). Pedro Mota joins us from University of São Paulo, Brazil & Cologne Game Lab, Germany Folk games are dynamic acts of cultural anthropophagy—a Latin American philosophy of critically devouring and transforming external influences into something new and locally rooted. Inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s concept of anthropophagy and Janet Murray’s theory of remediation, this session explores how folk games remediate cultural elements, techniques, and narrative discourses from other cultures, incorporating and remixing them through collective play. By blending tradition with innovation, folk games become living, dynamic, and collective expressions of cultural synthesis. We’ll illustrate a few Brazilian and Latin American indie games that embody anthropophagy in their development, showcasing how they remediate cultural narratives and mechanics to create unique, creative, and locally rooted experiences. We’ll also explore how narrative design principles—inspired by thinkers like Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Greimas, and Joseph Campbell—can be applied to folk games, emphasizing their emergent, improvisational, and communal nature through the lens of anthropophagy. Tickets £30 🎟️ and just another £10 to stay for the evening fun! .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025 @somersethouse @colognegamelab @londongamesfest #nowplaythis #folkgames

📣 Meet Anna Blackwell - speaking at our symposium ‘Folk Games Re-Imagined: Bridging Tradition & Change’ on Friday 11 April 📣 ~ ‘Playing With Your Imagination: The Intersection of Folk Games & Role Playing Games’ will delve into Role Playing Games as an evolution of both Dramatic/ Fantasy play and Solitary or Co-Operation play as defined by child development studies and discuss the power of roleplaying as a psychological tool and the benefits and potential dangers thereof. Anna Blackwell, the designer behind the popular solo Table Top Role Playing Games DELVE and Apothecaria, explores the connections between imagination, role-playing, writing, drawing, and folk games. This talk explores writing, drawing, and imagination as a form of play and how Table Top Role Playing Games can facilitate that. It will also examine the concept of folk games and how Role Playing Games can/ have utilised existing folk games to better guide the player experience. e.g. The act of drawing maps of imagined places as a gameplay mechanic as seen in DELVE, The Quiet Year, Ex Novo, and Microscope. ~ Tickets 🎟️ £30, stay for the evening for just another £10 .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025/friday 🎲Anna’s Make Your Own Solo RPG workshop on Saturday afternoon is now Sold Out 🎲 ~ @colognegamelab @somersethouse @blackwell_games #nowplaythis #solorpg #ttrpg #apothecaria #DELVE @londongamesfest

📣Meet Niall Moody - Speaker at our symposium ‘Folk Games Re-imagined: Bridging Tradition & Change on Friday 11 April 📣 ~ Niall will be opening the day with the audience for the ‘WHY FOLK GAMES? Manifesto’. Expect printing live on-stage and an interactive talk where we explore why folk games matter in a world suffused with videogames and technologically-mediated interactions. Using the Bread and Puppet Theater’s WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto as inspiration, Niall will draw parallels between how we talk about games and how we talk about art, and talk a bit about why folk games matter to him personally. From there, the talk will open up: first, we will attempt to create a new folk game together, and then we will collaboratively write our own WHY FOLK GAMES? manifesto, printed live and distributed at Now Play This. ~ 🧩 Niall will also be running a family friendly workshop ‘Making is up as we go along’ on Saturday morning 🧩 ~ Niall Moody is a lecturer in game audio and design at Abertay University. He obtained a PhD in music technology from Glasgow University in 2009, and spent a number of years as an indie game developer before returning to academia in 2017. His research interests are focused on game design and play, and specifically treating players as game designers. His recent work revolves around analogue games, and an exploration of what happens when you attempt to flatten the traditional hierarchy between game designer and player. He is interested in folk games for the ways that they are open to change and modification, how they are shared by word of mouth, and how they can become linked to specific places and personal histories as a result. Outside of academia, Niall is an artist and game developer. He is a member of Biome Collective, a Dundee-based digital arts collective, and helps organise the Dundee tabletop playtesting meetup for local analogue game designers. ~ Symposium tickets 🎟️ £30, stay for the evening fun for an extra £10 .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025/friday ~ @biome_collective @somersethouse #nowplaythis #gamedesign #folkgames #niallmoody @colognegamelab

📣 All good things must come to an end ✨ The news is out there that this will be the final edition of Now Play This. In the words of Holly Gramazio: “We’ve had a pretty good run of it, as weird little game festivals go: ten years, eleven editions.” “NPT is wrapping up for the same reasons a lot of festivals wrap up: a festival is a weird exhausting anomalous thing, and sooner or later you need to either find a way to make it more sustainable — basically, to find a scale where your ambitions and your capacity to fundraise are in accord. Or if you can’t do that, you have to go: well, we had a fun time, but that’s enough.” “We’re lucky, I think, to be in a position where we know we’re wrapping up before this year’s festival kicks off; it’s more typical to have your last edition, and only realise later that you won’t be able to do it again. But we’ve got advance notice! So why not come along and play one last time?” Visit for tickets and Holly’s full blog post which thanks all our brilliant partners especially Somerset House and London Games Festival, and all the wonderful people who have worked with us ✨ @holly_gramazio @somersethouse @londongamesfestival #nowplaythis #artgames #familyfun #gamesasculture

Now Play This 2025 has officially landed! Join us at Somerset House on 11 &12 April for two days of play all about Folk Games - the stories we create together! On Friday The Cologne Game Lab has partnered once again with Now Play This and Dr. David Murphy to present a dedicated day exploring the concept of Folk Games through talks, round tables, and playful sessions led by game designers and academics. In the evening there is a relaxed meet-up focused on networking and reconnecting with the community, featuring a programme of live music from Sonaris Ensemble, Los Pat Moritas and micro-talks. Plus play-test corners hosted by our University partners. A celebration of playful creation and shared ideas! Saturday is our family friendly day of making and live play. Come and try out a three-hour open creation space where you can alternate between three different workshops. Outdoors there are Tiny Games, Strand Avian and ARCADE's playful dance games. BOOK: .uk/whats-on/now-play-this-2025 @somersethouse @londongamesfest @colognegamelab

We are on the hunt for a new producer to join the Now Play This team! Are you interested in experimental game design and playful arts? Do you have experience producing events? We'd love to hear from you! The selected producer would work with the creative director and exec producer on the 2025 festival programme. Full details on our website (link in bio). Deadline for applications 1pm Wednesday 4th December.

One day left to sign up for Assigned Earth at Birth, presented with @nowplaythis ! This performance launches our first season of interactive online shows about neurodivergent queer alien anthropologists. This is the start of a queer sci-fi series, in an innovative format, and we've got funding to make four more episodes after this one. You probably want to see this just in case it becomes a fascinating niche internet subculture, so that you can lord it over all the other nerds on the subreddit or fan wiki or whatever. If it eventually finds a large enough audience, some website will probably pay you $30 to write an article about it. It could be the Blaseball of chronically ill non-binary neurodivergent folks. Don't you want to get in on that on the ground level? Starring @xandergravesactor , @caitmkearns , and @squinkifer Created by @zoyander @hollyrevellphotography @abstraktpublicity @sheffieldtheatres @csiasu #onlineevents #neurodivergent #queerartist #theatre #interactivetheatre

Autumn is officially here, and to put a bow on our summer programme we want to share two amazing games that start off our Now Play This Presents series! Premiering this Autumn, interactive online queer sci-fi series @intrapology brings communal gameplay to live performance. Episode One launches as part of Now Play This Presents, which champions new exciting game projects in the UK and beyond. Tea (Xander Graves) has discovered that they are not an ordinary human – they are a transdimensional being, assigned to earth to study humans. We influence their behaviour in their first meetings via video call with their otherworldly drag king supervisor, Iris (Caitlin Magnall-Kearns). Understandably, Tea is furious about being assigned to such a horrible project, and demands to be reassigned; but relocation has unanticipated consequences for both characters. Find out more and get tickets to Episode One now (link in bio) @intrapology is a project directed @zoyander Photography by @hollyrevellphotography