Report from Kellynn Wee, Autumn 2021 Award Recipient
How do we as communities speculate about climate futures in Southeast Asia? Move Quietly and Tend Things is a hopeful tabletop roleplaying game that sets itself in a flooded Southeast Asia in the far future. Through roleplaying game techniques such as collaborative mapping, eliciting answers through prompted questions, and developing characters by making motivated choices, the game offers players a quiet space to create an intersubjective imagination of the future. How can we enter into and practise a politics of tending and reciprocal care? What is the role of games, both serious and unserious, in inspiring reflections and practices around environmental issues? If games are, as philosopher C. Thi Nguyen writes, a crystallisation of agency, then how can they create a space of dwelling for players to “do” a climate future?
Creating this game has led me to ask how multimodal techniques can be used not merely in service of communicating research findings but also potentially creating affective, participatory experiences that open up moments of dwelling and reflection. This game has also allowed me to enter into academic, policy and public spaces where communities are speculating about and enacting climate futures, and offers me an opportunity to centre Southeast Asian voices and perspectives. The game has been playtested both in Singapore and internationally, including at an interdisciplinary conference of climate scientists.
The game is now available to download for free at: https://wildletters.itch.io/move-quietly-and-tend-things. I am very grateful to ASEAS for making this work possible, and to all my playtesters who have helped me immensely in making this game better.
Kellynn Wee is a PhD researcher at University College London’s Department of Anthropology. Her PhD examines sociality, agency, and contingency in collaborative storytelling games in Singapore, while previous research focused on migrant domestic work and migration brokerage in Indonesia and Singapore. Her website can be found here.
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