Fellowship of Fools won the People’s Choice award at the game conference Meaningful Play held at Michigan State University!
This year’s theme for Meaningful Play was “Magic,” exploring the Magic of Meaningful Games. To us, this was such an appropriate theme to showcase our game under, after all, we are using the Tarot.
While at the conference we presented a peer-reviewed paper “Games of Fellowship: Affection, Empathy and Making Friendship Games” and addressed our use of the Tarot and its history and evolution over time, the theoretical and philosophical influences on FoF, and how our game (and Friendship Games as well as Affinity Games) differ from Empathy Games and Affection Games. We are planning on submitting this paper to the journal Game Studies, and if accepted it will be available there open-access.
We will be recording our talk and making it available here and on YouTube for everyone to see soon. After we gave the talk at the conference, we received a lot of positive feedback and want to make it available for more people to see and engage with the ideas we presented.
Wands were given to award winners and speakers this year at Meaningful Play to go with the Magic theme. How wonderful to have a magic wand now to go with our magic cards!
During the conference, we found a lot of the other papers and speaker’s ideas resonated with our own, right from the beginning with speaker Tracy Fullerton’s words about walking sims, reflective play and Situational Game Design, games that are more than “a series of interesting choices” but rather games that offer meaningful situations.
Fellowship of Fools, we hope, offers many a meaningful situation with our Situation Cards and Situation Prompts, from “We are starting a project together” (The Lovers card), to “You have lost your job…” (the Death card) to more mundane situations that players can find meaning in, such as “We are working out…” (the Strength card) or “You are having a ‘treat yo self’ day…” (the Empress card, reversed), and even in our more fantastical Situation Prompts, such as “Aliens Exist…” (The Tower, reversed) or “You are part of the resistance…” (the Emperor, reversed).
Our hope is to turn the self-reflection of the Tarot outward, to help players simulate, role play and explore meaningful situations and topics, to find friends, further develop friendships, or to find others with whom they have an affinity.
Thank you to everyone who came to Meaningful Play and engaged with our game, hearing about the many ways to play, the theories underlying its design, to playing a Topic Prompt with us at the Game Exhibition or sitting down to play a longer gameplay mode and play out a meaningful situation with us!
Interested in learning more about the game Fellowship of Fools or ordering a copy? Check out the game’s website to learn more, follow the links at the bottom of the About page to purchase the game through The Game Crafter!
