Abstract
What would one publish if multimodality had already reconfigured the social sciences? The value of non-textual and other multimodal work is repeatedly argued for, but the multimodal works themselves continue to be created and circulated outside of existing academic frameworks. Following the decision to create a board game as one of the research outputs in a study on depopulation in Sardinia, Italy, I wondered how I might engage an academic community and invite academic rigour early in a making process. This piece experiments with an answer to these questions. After a description of the thinking and making that has gone into the initial game concept, the reader is asked to play with an early prototype of the game. This prototype has also received comments by game experts and academic peers, which then form the basis for a discussion on how the game might be further developed. The text ends with the final game still largely undefined. In doing so it shares with the reader the burden that multimodality places on a work: to create a form that fits the research. The result is a piece that is both part of the game making process and a documentation of it, hoping to spark new experimentations with how multimodal processes can both be embedded in, and transform existing academic frameworks.

Keywords: multimodality, games, interactive ethnography, migration, depopulation, experimentation, future

 

 

 

On the walls of my study hangs a poster by Costantino Nivola, an artist from the tiny mountain village of Orani, Sardinia, who moved to New York and became famous for his sculptures and public art installations. Absentmindedly staring at the poster, I start to imagine being inside it. It feels like a labyrinth. I want to rebuild the village, make the streets connect differently and I want to enter the houses, see what is going on inside. The poster has a game-like quality, and every time I look at it, I want to play. 

It is the poster that plants the seed to make a game as part of a research project on depopulation in Sardinia. Though still a relatively new form of research output, it fits in the long-evolving trend of multimodality that has been slowly reconfiguring how social scientific research is conducted and presented. Multimodality is said to entail a paradigm shift that will affect all aspects of academic work; research, teaching, evaluating, publishing, peer-review and academic appraisals. Exactly what this change entails remains an open-ended question (Westmoreland, 2022). It has led to interesting debates discussing the merits of multimodal work (e.g. Macdougall, 2020), the relations between text and non-textual modes (e.g. Elliott & Culhane, 2017; Howes, 2019), and the tension between the structures and systems of traditional academic practice and those that are needed to support arts-based processes (e.g. Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2015; Loveless, 2019). 

Despite these promising debates, multimodal works themselves generally continue to circulate outside of existing academic frameworks; in film festivals, exhibitions or online. If they are published in academic journals, it is usually through an act of ‘translation’ where the work is an object that people reflect on after it is finished. The workshop series that formed the foundation for this special issue, as well as the experimental character of Sensate Journal provided the opportunity to explore an alternative making and review process. I asked myself: what would I do if multimodality had already reconfigured the social sciences? Having decided to make a game, how would I have continued to develop it, engaged an academic community, and invited academic rigour in an arts-based process? Rather than just imagining what the future might be, such ‘imagining backwards’ makes this piece an experiment with a possible future in the present moment. 

I have taken inspiration from my experience of working in arts-based disciplines where experimentation, testing with (expert) peers occur early in the making process, when it is still possible to change the core elements of a work. I used ‘rapid prototyping’ to test what I perceived to be the central element of the game; interactive storytelling. This piece starts with a description of the thinking and making that has gone into creating the prototype, which was then discussed in a workshop, received comments in a peer review process, and is presented to the reader as part of this piece. I then discuss how my own reflections and the comments received changed the way I envisioned the core game mechanics. It follows the trace of my thinking through making, thus responding to Ingold’s call to ground anthropological study in practical activity (2013:6–9). The result is a piece that is both part of the making process and a documentation of it. Different from most other reflections on multimodal work, it enters the game design mid-process. Readers are made part of the struggle with open-endedness, without the comfort of knowing that it resulted in an effective final work, and where the benefit of hindsight has not yet been able to do away with the messiness of a creative process. It is hoped that this will encourage others to experiment with how multimodal research can be better integrated in existing academic practice.

The challenge of change

The poster at the beginning of this piece is Nivola’s 1953 design for his hometown Orani. Just as many towns in Sardinia, Orani struggled with a sense of unity, with community conflicts dividing people in the village. Through pergolas Nivola wanted to symbolically connect people and homes, while the green canopy would offer shade from the relentless Sardinian sun to create intimate spaces for people to be together. By building, or even simply imagining the pergola village, the future was no longer conceived as the continuation of a past where, in this case, people were divided. Nivola’s design is a response to the challenge of change. 

Today, arguably the biggest challenge of small villages in Sardinia is the depopulation that is emptying out communities by taking away people, services and social life. Residents say the problem is the lack of work, while business owners complain they cannot find people to work. People look at local councils for solutions, but councils say their hands are tied and what is needed is structural change. European and Italian funds are financing community activation projects or offering bonuses for moving to a small village or having children, but it seems to do little for people’s choice to reproduce or relocate. When I point out to residents that people are arriving, they often draw a blank. There are asylum centres where the increase of (young) people have helped keep open the local sports club or keep the school bus running, and there are migrant workers filling the gaps in the workforce, doing the demanding, precarious or underpaid jobs that Italians don’t want to do. The Italian residents convince me that those people also do not want to stay. The history of low fertility and a high out-migration has given residents the feeling that the past is predetermining a future of depopulation and abandonment. The villages are essentially struggling with the challenge of change; how to recover a sense of agency in a situation that is neither in your control, nor of your own choosing.

Not only did people rarely believe in the possibility of change, they also said nobody wanted to risk change. The stagnation that many felt characterised rural life in Sardinia was the feeling that nobody wanted to ‘mettersi in gioco’. Literally the phrase means to put oneself in the game, but it is used to explain that getting involved in something means to put oneself on the line, take risks, to achieve a still uncertain end. Yet the stakes are high, because what is in gioco, what is at play, is the future of these villages themselves. If nothing changes many rural villages are projected to become ‘extinct’ (Centro Regionale di Programmazione, 2013). Why then is the prospect of ‘death’ not motivating people to act? It puzzled me until one participant explained it as such: “preferiamo morire da sardi che cambiare qualcosa che non sappiamo”, we prefer to die Sardinian than to change into something we don’t know. Change or no change, the stakes are equally high.

In the case of Orani, it was Nivola who made change possible. He himself never moved back to Sardinia as he married and raised his kids in the United States and passed away in New York in 1988. Over the course of a lifetime, he however continued to be present in other ways. Today, Orani boasts a Guggenheim-like Nivola museum looking excitingly out of place on the top of a hill. Murals and sculptures made by Nivola can be found throughout the village as well as photos of the artist creating his work surrounded by curious villagers. Finally, in 2021, almost 70 years after it was conceived, the Pergola village design was partially implemented in the town’s centre by residents planting vines and painting houses a uniform white. Nivola’s greatest legacy is arguably not the individual pieces of art that he left in and to Orani, but that he continued to believe that, and act as if, Orani is a place where change is possible. 

His Pergola village could be considered a kind of future design intervention that explored the possible, by assuming the open-endedness of the world (Boffi & Halse, 2016). The present moment, that only moment in which one could actually change something – passes by without any space for change. To express this challenge of change, I wanted an audience not only to understand, but also to experience it. Sparked by the notion of mettersi in gioco and inspired by Nivola’s design, I decided to create my own intervention: a game. 

Games are like life, but different. Throwing dice or drawing cards creates an element of luck that, together with the unpredictability of other players’ choices, mimics life’s uncertainty. Game strategy meanwhile allows players to influence the gameplay, take responsibility for any losses or wins and find ways to recover, from the uncertainty, a sense of control on how a game unfolds. Games are thus a good way of experiencing the tension between determination and agency that characterised life in depopulating Sardinia. Moreover, playing a game evokes similar feelings of frustration or achievement that one experiences in life, but without there being anything ‘real’ at stake; it thus allows players to experiment with life choices that they might not risk in real life. As well as mettersi in gioco there are many more Italian expressions that include the notion of play or games, and that are commonly used by participants: se giochiamo, vinciamo tutti (if we play, we will all win) was used by a depopulation expert facilitating a community project urging people that all that was needed to change the status quo was to commit. Or, cosa c’è in gioco (what’s at play), which was frequently used to explain the many aspects of community life that were at stake in depopulation. The more I attuned myself to the language of games, the more I noticed its use in everyday language, suggesting that also emically there was something in playing that resonated with living. What finally convinced me however were the responses of participants and friends. Everyone I spoke to was excited and immediately provided ideas and contacts that could help. Within days I was interviewing game designers, connecting with potential collaborators, and enrolled in two game making courses that were starting nearby. This was the validation I needed to know this form had its roots in the research site, not just in my mind. 

The challenge of game design

Despite everything I learnt about game design through books, courses and interviews, there was no set plan that would lead to a game idea. As with any art and design process, there was only exploration and experimentation. 

Analysing existing games and sketching out new ideas

I settled on two game elements early in the making process. Firstly, during the research I had collected many personal stories and it fascinated me how so many different lives, dreams and struggles were sharing the same space of the village. I knew many of these stories would not make it to any written academic output. Moreover, I liked the idea that an audience, rather than a consumer of these stories, would have to take an active role in negotiating the everyday experiences and life choices that my research participants were also confronted with. I therefore decided that these stories should form the heart of the game, in a kind of board game version of the Choose Your Own Adventure book genre¹.

Secondly, a cooperative game, where players work together ‘against the game’ and therefore either win or lose together seemed to mimic the reality of depopulating villages who were faced with a problem that could only be solved collectively. Convivere, to live together, and collaborare, to collaborate, were frequently raised as a challenge in the rural villages. This was incorporated into the game as I started to imagine players working to collectively save the village from being abandoned. 

With these two basic game elements in mind, I started researching storytelling and cooperative games on websites such as BoardGameGeek and watching online playthrough videos to understand gameplay². I analysed and played whichever other game I could find and kept a sketchbook to document how ideas evolved. 

 

 

I looked at several different board types (figure 2). A game without a board, such as a card game, would be the easiest to make. However, given that my research was on depopulation, space was important; the abandoned houses, the empty streets, closed shops, the distance to public services, friends and work, but also the views over thousands of olive trees in the valley, or the small villages dotted on the horizon. Navigating through space seemed to be precisely the point. A fixed route on a board (as in Monopoly) was not ideal as it favours pre-determined directions and impedes exploring space; maps (as in Tales of the Arabian nights) gave a clear overview of a space but favoured a bird’s eye view which is not how space is experienced. Games like Micro Macro, Carcassonne, Catan, or Sleeping Gods, make use of a board that either changes with each game, or is so versatile that it encourages exploration of space. These were however harder to create as the materials and design required was more complex. 

 

 

For the game mechanics an important inspiration was the storytelling game Tales of the Arabian Nights (Shlasinger et al., 2009). It revolves around encounters with people and places through which players unlock stories and need to decide their response. Depending on their choices the story unfolds in a different way. I particularly liked the game mechanic of encounters and exchange to drive the story forward, as it fits with the anthropological theory on how change happens through contaminated encounters (Tsing, 2015) or engagement across difference (Faier & Rofel, 2014) and in contact zones (Pratt, 1991). To open up new game ideas, I sketched out how a Sardinian game version based on the research might look (figure 3).

From other games I took the idea of missions and events. I was imagining a combination of a shared group mission, like saving the village from abandonment, with individual missions that might at times compete with the group mission. This would fit with the idea that although everyone cared about the future of the village, people usually acted on their personal life objectives that had little to do with countering depopulation. Event cards could be drawn in each round and include things like a forest fire, closing of the doctor’s practice or the arrival of a group of migrants. Depending on the different characters or missions that an individual player represents, these events might affect them differently. As in the cooperative game Pandemic, the events could also represent time so that when the event cards are finished, time is finished, and the game is over. If the group or individual had not achieved their objective(s) then they lost the game. 

It turned out that ideas came easy. The difficulty was making them work in a coherent, fun and easy to learn gameplay. I was still confused on how I might combine the genres of cooperative games, choose your own adventure literature, and game mechanics that involved resources, missions, events, encounters, character cards and a simple version of a place-based board. Keen to include participants in the game design, and using game design as a research method, I nevertheless continued with my half-constructed ideas.

Game workshops and interviews

I devised a number of activities that I carried out in group workshops and during one-on-one interviews. To inform the board design I conducted (photo)walks in the villages, asking participants to guide me to the places where they had memories or stories³. In another setting, I asked a group of participants to sketch the places that make up a rural village, and tell stories around those places. I learnt for example that as well as a doctor, a pharmacy, a bar or a corner shop, each place of encounter was also a place for gossip. In yet another setting I used photo elicitation to collect stories and memories based on places that had initially seemed insignificant to me. 

To inform the missions I started asking people about things they wanted to achieve in life. In one group activity (figure 4) we jointly listed life dreams and obligations. They were then asked to ‘vote’ for the ones that they felt most affinity with, using monopoly money.

 

 

I then asked them to work in smaller groups on an activity called ‘journey mapping’, where they sketched out the different steps involved in achieving that objective, the resources needed and the people that actively or passively supported or hindered them. This journey mapping exercise I also conducted with individual people to gain a better insight into what and who was involved in achieving a particular life goal.

Lastly, I started keeping track of events that affected multiple people but in different ways. For example, for some men the start of the hunting season in autumn was an exciting time whereby they joined their friends twice a week to hunt boar, share lunch and drink beer. Other people hated the hunting as it meant that areas of the forest were off limits due to aggressive dogs and men firing guns. Other events included the war in Ukraine, a change in local administration, or an increase in the prices of flights. Noting down such ‘events’ I then asked different people how it affected them.

Rapid prototyping

The game activities had brought me new research insights and game ideas, but they did not by themselves result in a playable test game. Every time I sat down to bring the ideas together, I would get stuck with the many possible ways of playing the game. One of the game designers, Simone, had said that he started each game with a simple idea, and then he would test, test and test, often for over a year. My problem was I still had too many and too complex ideas to enter a testing phase.

Simone invited me for an event he was organising in his village, where parents and schools would play the many games he would have on show there. This was the necessary pressure to force me to put something testable together. Rapid prototyping they call it in design disciplines, where a basic, quick and cheap prototype means a designer is not too financially or emotionally invested to test and change core ideas. 

Based on the journey mapping activities I wrote out three different stories. I created a very basic board with a stock image representing different places of encounter in a village, including several event or timecards (blue), story cards (green) and special status cards (grey), as shown in figure 5 below. The story cards form the beginning of three different stories, to be played with three different players who would develop their stories throughout the gameplay. I printed it out, stuck it on the back of an existing board game, and brought this very crude version to Simone’s game event.

 

 

Simone quickly read the first story card in a monotone voice, played two turns and drew his conclusions. I was briefly disappointed, but reminded myself this was the purpose of rapid prototyping: to learn what works and what doesn’t in a short amount of time. The players had been slightly confused about the role of the stories as they felt inconsequential to the gameplay. One could equally play while ignoring the story and only read the conclusion: move two steps forward, one step back, gain a skill, or lose some money. “To get the stories meaningfully connected is going to be extremely complex and a lot of work”, Simone said. It was only when I explained that the stories were real-life experiences collected from their fellow Sardinian residents that they got visibly excited and a discussion broke out on the experiences they had just read about. “That should be the role of the stories”, Simone said, “to discuss them, not to resolve them”. This idea felt significant, but I did not know yet how to rework this into a new game version. 

Soon after, a second opportunity for rapid prototyping came up in the form of a workshop series that resulted in this publication. Simone had enjoyed the stories, but he was not encouraged to properly engage with them. So I took this as an opportunity to simplify and strip back the game to test its core mechanic: an interactive story. I focused on one story only and ensured that it could be played quickly and easily by a single person to test people’s thoughts when they did go through the story from beginning to end. I created an online version in Twine, an open-source tool for writing interactive stories⁴. This prototype was presented during the special issue workshops, submitted for peer review and is included here for readers to experience. Before continuing, readers are invited to become players and reflect on their experience after this short 5-10 minutes prototype gameplay. Additionally, readers can consider the interactive experience in relation to the more linear and traditional presentation of the same story in Giannetto & van der Maarel (2024).

Here is the link to the prototype

The challenge of finding form

The prototype resulted in two major comments. Firstly, it raised the question: what really is the relation between chance and choice in this prototype? It was commented that there seemed to be little choice, making the storyline seem predetermined. The irony wasn’t lost on me – this sense of determination was exactly what Sardinians struggled with, and the very notion I aimed to challenge through the game.

The comment initially surprised me as I knew there were almost an infinite number of storylines. Below screenshots of the backend in Twine shows how the stories are made. Each numbered tile represents a story and a place on the board. Each story ends with a request to throw the die, which reveals the Board tile, from where the players move to any of the other tiles. 

 

 

In the backend I colour coded each tile to keep track of the kind of interaction that is taking place. Green tiles involve little interaction, consisting usually of just a few sentences and the request to throw the die to move on the board again. Blue tiles involve a choice and purple tiles involve a chance, by throwing the dice or tossing a coin. Orange tiles contain a story that either sets a certain status, or where the story is different depending on a previously set status. Throughout the prototype there are 5 different statuses that can be gained or lost and based on which the story changes: belonging, loyalty, money, work contract or house contract. The story ends at story tile 39, where depending on the statuses collected, there are 5 different story outcomes. These different game elements, combined with throwing the die and randomly moving across the board, mean there are almost an infinite number of story trajectories so that it is unlikely for a single story-play to ever be the same. 

Why then did the commenter feel that stories were predetermined? It occurred to me that from a player’s point of view it was not clear how chance and choice were impacting the story trajectory. There may be options and alternative pathways, but if these are hidden to the player, then it is indeed as if the story was predetermined from the start. I had wanted players to navigate life’s tension between determination on the one hand, and agency on the other, but this tension never played out because from the player’s point of view there was only one story – the one they had read.

In one of the special issue workshops I was offered the example of another game “My documents, check them out” (Processing Citizenship Project, 2023). Players are representing a migrant who is trying to get an asylum request approved. Through different game elements players develop their asylum application and discuss with other players how to best increase their chances. For example, they might claim to be particularly vulnerable, have a family member in the EU, or are skilled in a desirable profession. Once their application is ready, they ‘submit’ it to one of the other players – the mediator – who enters the data into a specially designed decision software that decides whether the migrant receives their asylum papers. What the migrant players do not know is that the outcome is completely randomised, deciding independently of the submitted data whether they receive asylum or not (Olivieri, 2023:172–76). The result is a frustration stemming from the tension between determination and agency. Players believe they have some control over the asylum decision, while in fact the decision had been completely out of anyone’s control. It was this embodied experience of the tension between determination and agency I had not yet achieved in the prototype.

The second major feedback revolved around the idea that this was not a game, but more of an interactive ethnography, and not even a very complex one. Stripping the game back to what I imagined to be its core mechanic had meant there was little game element left. I had stumbled upon a tension between story and game; the former is linear, even if it is interactive, while the latter is inherently nonlinear, requiring to make choices that are meaningful to the player and change with each play. “To the degree that you make a game more like a story – more linear, fewer real options – you make it less like a game” (Flanagan, 2009:16). More than a critique, these comments were essentially asking me to rethink my form choice. Perhaps an interactive story alone, without a game element, could equally achieve the desired objectives. It would mean that I could develop it further with photography from the research, as for example in “The Long Day of Young Peng” (De Mutiis & Pia, 2022), or videos, as in The Guardian’s interactive documentary on the First World War (The Guardian, 2014). So what is the aim of my game? I wanted players to experience participants’ struggle to create change in a world that felt largely out of their control. In order to achieve this, it was not enough for there to be different storylines and outcomes; there needed to be something at stake. This meant that there did need to be some game element to the stories. 

The feedback gave rise to practical concerns. Thinking through all the different possible storylines in quite a simple short interactive story had already been very complex. If I were to make a longer and more complex story, with more game elements, I would have to sacrifice the idea of a multiplayer game with multiple stories developing through encounters on the board and discussions between players. That was not a sacrifice I was willing to make.

As well as practical concerns, I now also started having conceptual doubts. In what felt like a lightbulb moment it occurred to me that writing out all the possible storylines did not fit with the open-endedness of the present moment that I had wanted to recreate. Although there were alternative endings, they were imagined by me, not the player. There was no true open-endedness in the present moment as it was all predetermined – by me. I started my ideas with Nivola’s pergola design, and how it was imagination that created the space for change, yet players were not asked to use their imagination in the game. 

Back to the drawing board I started looking into the use of imagination and creativity in games and I found another interesting genre: surrealist games. Created by the surrealists of the mid-20th century, these unusual games often ask players to do away with reason and embrace imagination and unpredictability. The games are often short, strange and challenging our notion of what truly is a game. Variations of stream of consciousness writing, or the ‘exquisite corpse’ drawing game are some of the most well-known examples of this genre⁵. The only documentation I found was “A Book of Surrealist Games” (Gooding & Brotchie, 1991) that listed all the games, preceded by a short introduction that ends as follows:

“We have lived for too long in the dreary region of homo economicus, our lives shadowed by principles of self-interest, utilitarian ‘necessities’, instrumental moralities. But we are permitted to hope; to revive those great and optimistic words of Breton: Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. We must welcome, as did the Surrealists, the re-entry into modern life of homo ludens, the imaginative man at play, the intuitive visionary.” 

Reading these words, I realised that inadvertently I had made a game that required players to be a homo economicus who were rationalising their way through life to achieve personal objectives. And yet, what Nivola inspired me to think about was the need for an imaginative act, not a calculating one. If this game were to recover the open-endedness of the present moment and allow people to play with the risks they felt unable to take in real life, it needed to appeal to homo ludens. Instead of predetermined storylines, perhaps the core game mechanic needed to be imagination where I as the game designer was going to be as surprised by the twists and turns of the game, as the players who create them. 

True to the iterative nature of design processes, I will return to an exploratory phase with a new focus, where the analysis of existing games and mechanics will eventually inspire a new round of prototyping and testing. This is where this piece ends: mid-process. It has not given any answers, guidelines or steps to create a game; it has merely made the audience part of the struggle of finding the form that suits the research insights – a search that does not end with settling on a particular mode, whether that is a game, film, photography or other. If anything, it is a provocation, a question to you, the reader, to come up with a possible end. Roll the dice, grab a card, make a sketch and put yourself in gioco. 

What if multimodality had already reconfigured the social sciences?

With this piece I experimented using the existing academic structures of an academic workshop series, peer review and journal publication as one way of letting multimodal work be formally scrutinised by an academic community – before it is finished. The result is more than a documentation of a process; it is the creative process itself. It tried to make space for a possible future through a backwards imagining that involved a kind of backwards flip. The question ‘what would I publish if…’ was an acknowledgement that the future had not arrived yet, but simultaneously asked to act as if it had. By enacting one possible future in the present, that future is actualised, so that in a single move speculation is turned into reality. Having been given concrete form, it then becomes easier to discuss this speculative future, raising questions such as: is a journal the right platform to invite academic feedback on creative work? The game is clearly still in its early stages; was it too early to invite academic rigour, and when would it have been too late? Does reviewing (unfinished) creative work involve a different approach by reviewers than textual work? Or is in fact any work a creative act and should all review processes be made more transparent, as it has been in this piece? Even better than talk about such questions would be to enact a possible answer. Just as in the game I’m still trying to design, if multimodality is to be the paradigm shift it promises to be, then what is needed is the homo ludens who plays with the unpredictability of experimentation to open up new possibilities for change.

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^{1. A book genre where the reader is making choices that determines the storyline and plot outcome. The genre is most used in children’s books of the late 20th century. An example of a more recent adult version is the book “Create your own midlife crisis” (Phillips, 2019), which inspired my thinking on the game. ↩}

^{2. www.boardgamegeek.com ↩}

^{3. For more on the way I used this method see van der Maarel (2020:3). ↩}

^{4. Within Twine I used Harlowe, a language created for Twine that simplifies the use of HTML, Javascript and CSS languages to publish Twine stories. More information on www.twinery.org.↩}

^{5. A piece of paper is folded in three and players take turns drawing the head, body and legs, without looking at the drawing the previous person made. Once finished the piece of paper is unfolded to reveal a strange creature.↩}

References

Boffi, L. & Halse, J. (2016) ‘Design Interventions as a Form of Inquiry’, in R.C. Smith et al. (eds) Design Anthropological Futures. Routledge, 89–105.

Centro Regionale di Programmazione (2013) Comune in estinzione. Gli scenari dello spopolamento. Regione Autonoma della Sardegna. Available at: www.sardegnaprogrammazione.it/documenti/35_84_20140120091324.pdf (Accessed: 18 October 2021).

De Mutiis, M. & Pia, A.E. (2022) The Long Day of Young Peng. [Interactive Ethnography]. Available at: http://thelongdayofyoungpeng.com/ (Accessed: 29 March 2024).

Elliott, D. & Culhane, D. (eds) (2017) A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. University of Toronto Press.

Faier, L. & Rofel, L. (2014) ‘Ethnographies of encounter’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 363–377.

Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical play: radical game design. MIT Press.

Giannetto, L. & van der Maarel, S. (2024) ‘Invisibility and (Dis)Integration: Examining the Meaning of Migrant Inclusion in Everyday Lived Experience in Rural Areas’, Social Inclusion, 12.

Gooding, M. & Brotchie, A. (eds) (1991) A Book of Surrealist Games. Redstone Press.

Grimshaw, A. & Ravetz, A. (2015) ‘The ethnographic turn – and after: A critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropology’, Social Anthropology, 23(4), 418–434.

Howes, D. (2019) ‘Multisensory Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 48(1), 17–28.

Ingold, T. (2013) Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

Loveless, N. (2019) How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-creation. Duke University Press.

van der Maarel, S. (2020) ‘In Search of the Unknown. The Visual Essay as a Method of Exploration, Through an Artistic and Participatory Process’, Anthrovision, 8(1), 1–15.

Macdougall, D. (2020) ‘How the Visual Makes Sense’, Visual Anthropology, 33(1), 1–8.

Olivieri, L. (2023) Temporalities of Migration: Time, Data, Infrastructures and Intervention. Università di Bologna.

Phillips, M. (2019) Create your own midlife crisis. Souvenir Press.

Pratt, M.L. (1991) ‘Arts of the contact zone’, Profession, 33–40.

Processing Citizenship Project (2023) My documents, check them out. [Game]. Available at: https://processingcitizenship.eu/my-documents-check-them-out/ (Accessed: 29 March 2024).

Shlasinger, Z. et al. (2009) Tales of the Arabian Nights [Game].

The Guardian (2014) First World War. The story of a global conflict. [Interactive Documentary]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/jul/23/a-global-guide-to-the-first-world-war-interactive-documentary (Accessed: 29 March 2024).

Tsing, A. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Westmoreland, M.R. (2022) ‘Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 51(1), 173–194.

 

Acknowledgements

First, I owe my gratitude to the research participants in Sardinia that have been willing to engage for hours at a time in conversations and activities that I promised would one day result in a very exciting game. I hereby promise to keep my promise. Tomás Sánchez Criado and Julia Yezbick provided thoughtful feedback. The editors Pedro, Nina and Ildikó have done a great job encouraging true collaboration amongst this issue’s contributors. Lastly, I want to thank all workshops participants for their input and thoughts. In starting this piece, I was not quite sure where it would end up and it is truly thanks to everyone involved that it took the shape it did.