Creating Strange Worlds Together

In thinking about how to make children think creatively and poetically for my lessons I’ve been (re)watching a lot of Art Assignment video’s. There were a few video’s in there that made me think about things other than class and how to imagine weird and interesting places, about collaboration and about creating randomness without using any kind of number/table generation. And I have an idea. I thought about posting it in Game Design since it seemed like a game design thing, but it would be collaborative and Game Design seemed to have a warning against recruiting players, so that’s why I’m gonna post the idea here. If moderators find it suitable for another forum I can move it or they can move it or however this works.

Anyway. This is the idea:

Describe a single room in your house. Try not to describe it realistically but rather how it makes you feel. Post the description here (or elsewhere if that is preferred by the administrators) so that someone else can pick it up and make a “room” or area from it that can be used as setting/environment for a game. This can be very surrealistic. It’s about giving form to the emotional map of a place rather than trying to recreate the original room.

Variation: Rather than describing a room in your own house, try remembering a room from a previous place you lived in, visited, … in the same way. How does it make you feel and why?

The idea is that afterwards all the rooms/area’s are “stitched together” or combined into a strange setting. Something like a wizard’s tower or a science fiction multiverse or something. A complex where each room is different and where you never know where you’ll end up if you open a door.

Is this something that would be OK to the admins to do as a project on here? If not I can always make a discord or blog for it or something.

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Well, seeing as there’s no opposition to the proposition I’ll go ahead with it and become still and think about a room or place in my house and how it makes me feel.

“This room is a room that is hard to navigate. There’s obstructions everywhere, but if you know the way, things are easy. It makes me feel comfortable and made my own. It’s like a safe nest in my own shape on one side of the room and a hard to get to and hard to navigate to treasure trove on the other side, filled with forgotten treasures and creative potential. It feels soft and fuzzy and dusty in here, with a temperature that’s just right for dozing off and a silence that soothes.”

Now it’s another person’s turn to either interpret this description into a strange room or world OR to provide their own emotional interpretation of a room either from their house or from a memory.

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