Fiction Friction
storytelling tool
The Fiction Friction cards are made by two wanderers who spent a fair amount of time thinking about healing, witchcraft and (contemporary) witch-hunting, rituals, and Tarot culture. This approach can be seen as a way to create a ritual or a (personal) journey into a collective representation. The cards are carriers of our identities, individual past, memory, momentary frictions and fictions. We intended to reclaim the tarot reading ritual and reconsider the relation between the given card interpretation and the figure of the fortuneteller by reversing it.
A group of players is invited to explore each card and reimagine its meaning as a collective. We are keen to see how similar or completely different experiences can be shared and new insights learned through each round of exercise. This game serves as a tool that gives the possibility to write together, meet, connect, talk about unspeakable things, share, interpret or even get into conflict. Each card is a starting point, an interface for an opening, a promising healing, a collective moment.
Fiction Friction is a tool for (hyper)textual conversations on (via) abstract/symbolic/surrealistic collage cards. We based our collaging on political events that we have experienced or have been part of our memories, mythological figures from our cultures, collective memory moments, literature that has inspired us, musical references, individuals etc. The main components of the game are: a deck of illustrated cards, a dice with different methods of interpretation, an empty deck to host the new potential stories, along with a deck of questions created by the players.
How to play:
One player picks a card from the illustrated card deck and another player takes a question card. They reveal the cards in the middle. The card is the starting point of a collective story.
Everyone takes an empty card.
In turns, players write their own interpretation of the card, having in mind the revealed question card that works as a navigator for the story. There is the possibility to use the dice in the process to specify the method that a player should use to “write”.
At the end of the round, a small story will be created out of the interpretations of each player.
The player who picked the illustrated card, reads or shows the story to the other players as a part of the game ritual.
