A massive thank you to everybody who participated in the Applied Hope: Solarpunk & Utopias Game Jam. It was completely impossible to pick the prize-winners so we did it anyway. We hope everyone gets some kind of prize from somewhere.
We also hope folks will stick around and keep doing stuff like this. Some good spaces to find one another: The Utopia on the Tabletop Discord, other Discords like the FKR Collective, Sustainable Gaming Forum, DEV the Solution, Queer Indie TTRPG, Games for Change, Conjured Games, and Storytime RPG Discords, and the RPG Creation subreddit and Solarpunk subreddits. The jam runners are also on Twitter: @utopianplay (Jo) and @steina (Eric).
Drum roll, fanfare, elf-glitch bloops, hacked acoustic cello with on-body transducers, the Applied Hope: Solarpunk & Utopias prizes go to …
1) Best RPG Under Five Pages
subconscious_Routine by poorstudents
- Twitter: @poorstudentsRPG
- Itch: poorstudents.itch.io
subconscious_Routine is a one-page RPG about a team of bots complying with their code on an overgrown, post-post-apocalyptic Earth, exploring derelict infrastructure, helping animals and plants, and creating art. In your microchip ears the birds are still chirping, and you can listen to those songs evolve over centuries: “When all the bots take time to stop and reboot 1d6*10 years pass.” subconscious_Routine creates a mechanically rich space to explore the theme of freedom. Eventually you can transcend your programmed loop of actions entirely, but actually the discovery of free will starts earlier — through imagination, interpretation, and especially through collaboration and connections with others.
2) Best Solarpunk DIY Game
Scraps by Cezar Capacle
- Twitter: @capacle
- Itch: capacle.itch.io/
Scraps is a game about salvaging and crafting in a hopeful world, among the verdant ruins of ancient civilizations. It’s for one to four players, with mechanics partly inspired by the solo RPG Ironsworn, with a touch of Tetris / Battleships to keep things fresh and spicy. It asks you to change your mindset to suit a universe of symbiosis and harmony: to craft and to make, to transform the world around you, yet without asserting mastery and dominance.
3) The Lustrous Effervescing Fontanelle of Luminous Mutable Futures Award
It’s About the Yearning by Lonely Cryptid Media
- Twitter: @LonelyCryptid
- Itch: lonelycryptidmedia.itch.io
The jam had ‘hope’ in the title, but the games had all kinds of tones and moods. Sometimes it felt more like Applied Bittersweetness. Lonely Cryptid's It's About the Yearning is a string of vignettes of the dwindling days of cowhands on Mars. It’s a game about queer time. It’s also a game which invites you to worldbuild through the scarcely reliable format of the enthographic interview ... and to imagine intimate and often difficult conversations across very different worldviews and forms of lived experience.
4) Mx Congeniality
Moon Elves by Maik
- Twitter: @MaikMalaik
- Itch: maik-malaik.itch.io
Slip through the luminous lunarpunk forest, in the guises of elves-cum-descendants-of-crashed-astronauts. Moon Elves is inspired by the likes of Bogdanov's Red Star, Tarkovsky's Solaris and Zulawski's On the Silver Globe. Gorgeous velvety, ziney aesthetics. Rules-free. Wow.
5) The Applied Hope Fruiting Bodies Award
Roots & Flowers by The Gift of Gabes
- Twitter: @TheGiftOfGabes
- Itch: thegiftofdice.itch.io
Roots & Flowers is an elegant and compassionate RPG of solarpunk troubleshooting adventures, built on the salvaged chassis of John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings. The writing and design choices are deft and suggestive. Suggested “snacks,” “beverages,” and “a strong desire to take down capitalism, and all forms of oppression, bigotry, and environmental destruction.” Two pages of safety tools feels very substantial in a total of just eight pages, and it feels appropriate that a game like this should devote considerable space to thinking about its own edges: how it is knitted into the world, how like any game it is (borrowing game theorist Jasper Juul’s phrase) “half real” ... and how perhaps it might become a little more than half real?
6) The Best Adaptation Award
The Transition Year by Affinity Games
- Twitter: @GamesOfAffinity
- Itch: affinity-games.itch.io
After reading the Applied Hope entries, it felt like the most famous RPG of all time was no more Dungeons & Dragons — it was Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year. If you don’t know The Quiet Year, it’s a just breathtakingly beautiful game, all about community struggling to build and to cherish, in the slender isthmus between apocalypse and apocalypse. Affinity Games’s The Transition Year stays unabashedly close to its source material, but the many shifts and nudges show great sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and maybe even something that answers to our kinda grand title, “Applied Hope.” The Transition Year is a game of anarchist post-capitalism in shadow of the ruins of extractive infrastructure. We believe it also has the potential to be a challenging game, inviting players to explore some big themes in the interplay between individual, affinity groups, and wider collective community.
7) Best Game About Something Pretty Specific
Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians! by Wendi Yu
- Twitter: @wen_di_yu
- Itch: wendiy.itch.io/
MMMM! is a game where those extra swarms of fingers and tentacles will come in handy for shredding your big guitar solo, as you adventure across a prismatic landscape that is not so much ‘post’ apocalyptic as just, like, OVER it. A band of adventurers who really are a band, and perhaps a party that really is a party. Gorge aesthetics, with zany ziney collage glued up against RPG roll tables like some kind of meta-bricolage. This goes through the back end of Body Horror, and into Body Delight. Looks it would be really fun to play too.
Special Prize: Big Buzz Award
The Nurture by hannah j. gray
- Itch: hjgray.itch.io/the-nurture
One entry was chosen to get a special commissioned illustration by Ewerton Lua. In The Nurture, you cross perilous landscapes, helping scattered communities or fellow travellers. “THE NURTURE is primarily about helping, healing and making a difference one small act of kindness at a time. There won’t be huge heroic feats every session.” Oh yes AND YOU ARE A BEE.
Notes: The Green Agon and Climate Resilience awards felt hard to hand out, so they were renamed Best Adaptation and The Applied Hope Fruiting Bodies Award. The Best Solarpunk DIY Award was reinterpreted a bit from its original description. The Best Game About Something Very Specific Award became the Best Game About Something Pretty Specific because a band of mutants travelling around with magical instruments having adventures is only PRETTY specific. Folks who got a prize should be contacted in the next week-ish, or feel free to get in touch: j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk / @jolwalton on Twitter.