The MRPG Manifesto just released!

For a while, I have been thinking on my specific play space and how it's affect by other factors. Where I come from, game culture is much less developed, to the point of almost scarcity, though it is growing slowly. Affected by its own satanic panic in the 80s/90s, a lack of local ttrpgs and a great amount of untranslated imported goods priced in dollars to the point that most people would not consider buying compared with other enjoyment activities. And a social context that allows corporations to push to increase daily work hours to 12 with less weekends.

Add this up and you get a very niche (more than normal) diminished ecosystem. I started making TTRPGs in college with a project that was called Your body is not a fish, centered around mental health and specifically looking to avoid replicating group TTRPGs traditional spaces (AKA. game tables, campaigns, one shots, dice rolling, oracle usage, etc.), preferably, using the body as the main source of mechanics without falling into just prompts for your imagination. To allow accessibility I decided to make them solo, since in this context it would be easier to play if you also didn't have to worry about getting a group (which makes playing a slightly different experience). The best game of that collection ended up being Pareidolia: Evil Eye, my most popular work to date that is played by recognising faces in mundane objects as you walk and destroy them.

So I started collecting my thoughts on my game making philosophy while making this project and THE MRPG MANIFESTO was born. I coined the term MENTAL ROLE PLAYING GAME as different to define a category of lyric, solo games that never quite fit into other tags, but I want to treat it as a very flexible classification to adapt to a broad stroke of games. I want people to engage in what I've written, critique it, tell me if they resonate with the ideas or even better, design something that would fit the frame even if just slightly, so I will leave a link down there. But, here is a brief summary of the manifesto's principles.

INDIVIDUALLY YEARNING: Create personal solo games that also involve a degree of entanglement with other people, create new social habits or that involve sharing your experiences with others and express a part of your personal perspective in emotional, political abstract or any way you want.

ULTRA ACCESSIBLE: Make it very compact, cheap paper or no paper, avoid the usage of additional objects that wouldn't come in daily life, make it teachable in a couple of sentences or translate it into all your known languages (This one is the most subjective).

DAILY INTRUSIVE: Games that are played in daily situations not meant to be played like walking, falling asleep, sitting on a desk, watching tv, taking the bus, etc. and take advantage of this in mechanical and fictional terms.

MENTALLY CONTAGIOUS: Create games that start by things happening in the real world, hearing stuff, activating players like sleeper agents that spread the game.

PSYCHE CAREFUL: Always keep in mind mental health from the player and others in mind, avoid making harmful play patterns, etc.

HOSTILE TO THE OPPRESSOR: No nazis, no fascists, no racists, no zionists, no imperialists, no religious discrimination, ageism, speciesism, sexism, puritanism, classism, puritanism allowed in the movement.

The manifesto has its flaws of course and parts that it doesn't cover as an initiave for accesibility. For example, increasing games exposure despite the language barrier is a useful tool to incentivise growth in the scene and this alternative way of gaming is taxing on memory for people. However, I think that in exploring combinations of these things as a full or a just influences not just for game design and production, but as expression mechanisms, we can experiment into new paradigms of play.

As a reflection on my proccess of thinking for the last couple of years, I hope to engage in a discussion where other people can resonate with all these ideas or just some of them.

You can find the full version on itch.io completely free in both english and spanish with an additional tabloid poster

If you end up creating something based on the principles of the manifesto or just want to identify the game as part of the same ecosystem of ideas, I've included a free logo you can download and add to your work.

I look forward to see what you think about it and I'll be looking for collaborators to start a game jam. If you want to contact me, send me a dm on Discord: julesampere.