Enjoy our next lecture in the Transformative Play Initiative Event Series: “Journey into Fear: Horror as a Vehicle for Healing and Transformative Play” by Yeonsoo Julian Kim. In this lecture, Kim discusses how engaging in horror role-playing can help participants approach topics that evoke existential dread with a sense of agency that can be empowering outside of the game context. As examples, they discuss the games Something is Wrong Here by Kira Magrann; Suburban Consumption of the Monstrous by Sadia Bies and Banana Chan; Ten Candles by Stephen Dewey; and their own game co-written with Corinne Taylor, Women are Werewolves. Kim emphasizes the need for consent and safety techniques as key to this supporting empowering potential. The talk concludes with advice for respectfully incorporating culturally significant supernatural elements into role-playing games.
Moderated by Josephine Baird.
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Description of event:
People are often attracted to horror as a genre because of the intense emotional and physical responses it can invoke. This lecture will explore ways in which fear-based play can be utilized to create healing experiences, methods for integrating safety and calibration tools to support emotionally intense play, and how horror can look different across cultures. Finally, we will touch on how to respectfully incorporate (or avoid) supernatural elements that may have religious, spiritual, and/or cultural significance to different groups.
Presenter bio:
Yeonsoo Julian Kim is a game designer, writer, and cultural consultant who works in tabletop games, larp, and interactive fiction. They received a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University in 2015. Some of their games include the interactive horror novel The Fog Knows Your Name published by Choice of Games, and the storytelling game Women are Werewolves published by 9th Level Games. Their best known larps are But Not Tonight, The Long Drive Back from Busan, which won a Golden Cobra Award, and The Truth About Eternity, which debuted at Fastaval 2019.