playtesting (and the gelato legacy)

tassosstevens
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Here in Montreal on Wednesday morning, I made a first playtest for the game with my friends H and Y; a makeshift parcel of goodies for the heart of the game, together with a rough script of the experience to follow. Here are their hands unwrapping the key parcel.

Bernie and I are imagining the game as a performance, a ritual, made around a table where players are gathered. It is a surprise parcel containing a series of parcels to be unwrapped in turn, inside them the means to conjure the presence of Bernie our absent host, and a sequence of games to play. All together, we end up making something we hope resonates.

All week in Indianapolis, we talked about a key quality of the game as resonance. How can the experience of us playing resonate in the present moment with the real situation? The situation of a gathering of friends with their absent host, of the exchange between the two of us, of a legacy passed between us.

The playtest went well, usefully, moments both beautiful and sticky, as you’d expect for a first go. I loved especially the stories it provoked between H and Y, as two childhood friends. I took a sequence of photos to share with Bernie, for us to talk about the experience together over a skype later. With this shared experience in mind, easier for us together to imagine how to strip and grow the game past the sticking points.

Bernie had a drink in hand at the top of our skype, a root beer ice cream float, a post-chemo treat. I joked that this trip — my Montreal friends and Bernie too — has made me eat more ice cream than ever before, a gelato legacy…

Myself and Bernie De Koven are making a game of legacy, as one part of his brilliant playful legacy. Please spread the word on our kickstarter in this last week, 3days to go -> www.bit.ly/agameoflegacy

Written by

Ex-psychologist, wright, wrangler. Director of @agencyofconey.

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