Games For People (the folk game zine)

Today is the last day of the last Now Play This. The theme this year is folk games, and way back when me and Pat Ashe wrote a zine about them. And so we were asked if we'd mind putting it online as part of NPT, and also if they could print a few copies to give away*. We said yes, of course. I wrote a little intro text for it too, and I thought I'd like to post it here as well. So here it is:

In 2014, Pat Ashe and I were at the big gamedev conference in San Francisco together that year. And we were soaking in an international culture of indie game developers who were keen to understand and experiment with games in all directions. Most of us were in our 20s and we had the energy of youth, scrambling over the form to look at it from all directions. Videogames, boardgames, art games, alternative controllers, and of course, folk games. Folk games were built into these scenes. We would meet up at London Indies, a monthly pub meetup, have some pints, and then walk across to a wide stretch of pavement to play Ninja. We would play Lemon Jousting at conferences (bringing lemons and spoons in from home especially). One of the first times I did something that could be described as “consulting” was riffing on some ideas with Holly Gramazio to make some Tiny Games (a project which has had such a long life that it’s being shown at this year’s festival). That conference in SF? Full of people touching each other’s elbows unexpectedly and saying the word “boop” (a fun game until it spread too far and then really wasn’t). Folk games were not just something to look at and study, but something we were shaping and inventing.

So in this spirit of excitement, it felt like a natural thing to try to gather some up some of that energy and fix it to the page. We didn’t just want to include things we knew, but capture more widely. We put out a public call, we asked some people, and we gathered some games. But as we said in the outro, we got more than just games: “But, inevitably, the games included have sprawled out in many different directions, and now includes genuinely moving tales of childhood, and some treasured bits of heritage.” We were aware that the context for the games mattered as much as the games themselves, but, not being historians (or, indeed, having all the time it would take to do this properly) knew we couldn’t document that context fully. That’s a bigger project than a zine could contain. But what we could do was try to keep the wording and sometimes the visual style of the submissions intact. To try to be transparent, and let the individual voices of our contributors shine through. We knew we were just getting shards and fragments… but we wanted to leave the sharp edges on them.

And people liked the zine! I find myself surprised at how it’s still mentioned, still circulating around these particular spaces. I feel like we accidentally made it too long and too nice to to feel like a proper scratchy zine – I’d claim that niceness came because of my graphic design skills, but I think it actually just came down to paper stock and getting our friend Angus Dick to do some gorgeous illustrations for it. It’s only ever been officially available as a hard copy zine – but I think that the wait has been long enough, and now a decade later it’s worth putting it out online as well.

And it’s fitting that it’s getting put up for the final Now Play This. Now Play This is a festival that comes out of that same spirit of wide ranging curiosity about what games can be, can do, all the different forms they can take, how can this thing connect to that. It’s shown a lot of the games that are captured in this zine (it’s shown the zine, too, in the little library). And now, with the festival and with the zine – it’s over to you. Take these games and make new variations, print this zine & hand it to friends. Stay curious. Keep playing.

You can download the zine here. I was wondering about printing some more copies and selling them online. Get in touch if you'd be interested in that.

[* all nabbed already!]