Playing Through Crisis: Games, Stories, and Collective Care
By Francesca de Agnoi
Workshop Round 2 – Entrance Blauwe zaal
Language: English
Abstract
In moments of crisis and uncertainty, play can offer both an escape from anxiety and a way to engage with it creatively. This interactive workshop invites participants to explore games and storytelling as forms of collective care. After a short introduction, participants will work in small groups to respond to fictional crises through collaborative storytelling. Guided by prompts and simple rules, they will create shared narratives that can take a comic or dramatic direction. The session combines imagination, cooperation, and improvisation, offering a playful setting to reflect on how stories can help us relate to difficult situations and to one another.
What to expect:
Participants will be seated indoors, working in small groups around tables. After a brief introduction, they will engage in a collaborative storytelling activity, guided by randomly assigned prompts to create fictional crisis scenarios. The session combines discussion and creative making, with space for sharing ideas and reflecting collectively.
About the maker:
Francesca De Agnoi is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature & Aesthetics at the University of Milan. Her research explores how narrative video games and postmodernist fiction invite audiences to engage with moral complexity and challenging forms of empathy through interactive participation. Bringing together game studies, narrative theory, and empirical reception research, she examines how fiction creates spaces where people can safely experiment with uncomfortable emotions, choices, and perspectives. For the Festival of Unexpected Subjects, she approaches play as a form of care: midway between escapism and catharsis, games can both suspend reality and transform anxiety into something shared, playful, and meaningful—opening up unexpected ways of navigating uncertainty.