Enjoy our next lecture in the Transformative Play Initiative Event Series: “Disrupting Monkey, Laughing Raven: The Magic of the Tricksters’ Dance” by Allen Turner!
Content advisory: This talk contains descriptions and images of spiders.
Description:
Often, when we explore games and media and consider the process of engagement and growth, there is a tendency to focus on the archetype of the hero. So much in fact that the “Hero’s Journey” is often touted as a treatise of how to make an engaging and entertaining game. But what of the Trickster?
How is it that such an iconic and playful archetype is so often ignored or placed into narratives as foils, forgettable npcs, or adversaries? As we step back from the narratives of heroic fiction, we find that the multidimensional trickster appears in so many other places and might even be integral to a healthy world. Many indigenous narrative traditions center their trickster characters as worldbuilders and benign agitators. As a game designer driven more by what he sees as the nourishing qualities of the trickster, Allen Turner will dive deeper into what he described as the “Tricksters’ Dance” in a keynote at the 2019 Playful by Design conference at UIUC. Turner will explore why the Trickster as worldbuilder might just be the thing we all need to embrace to build more nourishing communities and social/emotional ecologies.
Presenter bio:
As a game designer driven more by what he sees as the nourishing qualities of the trickster, Allen Turner will dive deeper into what he described as the “Tricksters’ Dance” in a keynote at the 2019 Playful by Design conference at UIUC. Turner will explore why the Trickster as worldbuilder might just be the thing we all need to embrace to build more nourishing communities and social/emotional ecologies.