Fellowship of Fools: The (Friendship) Game Wins the People’s Choice Award at Meaningful Play 2018!
Fellowship of Fools won the People’s Choice Award at MSU’s Meaningful Play 2018 Game Conference!
2018’s theme for Meaningful Play was “Magic,” exploring the Magic of Meaningful Games. To us, this was such an appropriate theme to showcase our game under, after all, we are using the Tarot.
While at the conference we presented a peer-reviewed paper “Games of Fellowship: Affection, Empathy and Making Friendship Games” and addressed our use of the Tarot and its history and evolution over time, the theoretical and philosophical influences on FoF, and how our game (and Friendship Games as well as Affinity Games) differ from Empathy Games and Affection Games.
After we gave the talk, we received a lot of positive feedback and want to make it available for more people to see and engage with the ideas we presented. We’ll be adding the presenter notes and slides here to the blog soon.
During the conference, we found a lot of the other papers and speaker’s ideas resonated with our own, right from the beginning with speaker Tracy Fullerton’s words about walking sims, reflective play and Situational Game Design, games that are more than “a series of interesting choices” but rather games that offer meaningful situations for players to reflect and purpose a variety of alternative and meaningful goals.
Fellowship of Fools, we hope, offers many a meaningful situation with our Situation Cards and Prompts, from “We are starting a project together” (The Lovers card), to “You have lost your job…” (the Death card) to more mundane situations that players can find meaning in, such as “We are working out…” (the Strength card) or “You are having a ‘treat yo self’ day…” (the Empress card, reversed), and even in our more fantastical Situation Prompts, such as “Aliens Exist…” (The Tower, reversed) or “You are part of the resistance…” (the Emperor, reversed).
Our hope is to turn the self-reflection of the Tarot outward, to help players simulate, role play and explore meaningful situations and topics, to find friends, further develop friendships, or to find others with whom they have an affinity.
Thank you to everyone who came to Meaningful Play and engaged with our game, hearing about the many ways to play, the theories underlying its design, to playing a Topic Prompt with us at the Game Exhibition or sitting down to play a longer gameplay mode and play out a meaningful situation with us!