Air rib rib by Agata Lucic
A TOWN BY THE SEA
Vodeni-sat by Katarina Matkovic
Mrtvi Kanal by Stojnic Betty
It’s paradise forever?
An online game about sea level rising
A life by the coast is one filled with memories and vivaciousness.
We all have our favorite spots in town or those that we avoid when wandering around.
Our town is filled with landmarks that both newcomers and locals can pinpoint in no time, but everything is bound to change…the sea level will rise and will take away our town, zone by zone, landmark by landmark, memory by memory.
What can we save?
What do you want to preserve? Will you lose the place of your first kiss? Or the place where you grew up? Or will you accept the change and its consequences? How does the shape of our town change with climate change?
In the end, it’s this town a place you will stay faithful to or give up and leave the sunken land behind you?
Join the journey and transformation process and partake in a collaborative effort to prevent our past from being completely washed away by the unavoidable future.
How does it work?
“A Town by the Sea” is an online map-building game with role-playing elements where 3 to 6 players create characters and collectively imagine the identity of their coastal home.
By creating the landmarks of the town, players get involved in complex ways with the town itself.
Later on, in the game, these relationships serve as background for community negotiations on what gets prioritized to be saved from the sea.
Finally, the destiny of the landmarks is rolled and by the end of the game, the appearance, the soul of the town and you, the townspeople, are changed.
The game is set in the sci-fi world of Witness, an open-source fictional world. This world is different from other fictional worlds, in that it pays a lot of attention to its economies, and makes its economies radically different from the one we live in.
(Discover more about Witness here)
The game is not published at the moment, but 10 play sessions will be hosted between January and March 2023.
If you want to attend, sign up below for the prologue sessions: where you will be introduced to the game. The prologue sessions are part of the game experience and it’s mandatory to attend one before the game.
“A Town by the Sea” is played using the group call app Zoom, a topographic map of a coastal town and a virtual whiteboard (Miro) - all links will be provided ahead of the play sessions-
To play you will need access to internet, a six-sided rolling dice and your imagination.
There will be 4 Prologue sessions, every session will be 60 minutes long, and hosted in English.
Signup for the Prologue
A Town by the Sea is part of Playful Futures, a COESO (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) pilot, created by Edgeryders in collaboration with TANTlab at the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen, Denmark and Culture Hub Croatia (CHC), Split, Croatia.
COESO has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020) SwafS-27-2020 - Hands-on citizen science and frugal innovation, under Grant Agreement No.101006325
A Town by the Sea is designed by Matteo Uguzzoni, Allison Crowe Whitney and Viditya Voleti.
