This is our ritual: every Monday we sit around this table, covered with paper and pencils, books, and dice. Six of us. We talk, share jokes, and catch up until the sky behind the window turns black. Then we begin, we take on our roles. Five of us become someone else, we become actors playing a character we’ve designed. The other leads us in the ritual. They knit together a fictional world and all the people within it.

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Ritual: An Essay was commissioned for Peabody Essex Museum’s Playtime exhibit. The piece explores the ways that we play storygames, games were we use mechanics to create shared fictional worlds. It talks about their radical potential, situating them within the exhibit’s themes. Storygames allow us to explore subversive narratives, rebel in a safe space and inhabit characters that allow us to explore our own identities.

The piece was published on the exhibition’s website and was one of the articles selected to be published in a printed collection.