Convergence
Harry Lee Shang Lun (PlayReactive)
Commissioned by Arts House for Refuge 2021
convergence.place
Convergence is online now – click here to play the game.
Play anytime with 2 to 6 people gathered in-person. You will need a computer, 1 sheet of paper per player, drawing tools (e.g. pen, pencil, markers), a coin of any denomination.
Free
Duration: 90 – 120 minutes
Suitable for 16 years old +
Accessibility
Wheelchair accessible
Convergence is a hybrid web and tabletop game that includes audio, text and moving image.
Optimised for screen reader users;
Dark mode available for more relaxed play;
Closed captions and transcripts available for video content;
Made in consultation with people with disabilities.
Convergence is a game about climate emergency where you build, destroy, and reimagine a city together.
This hybrid web and tabletop experience combines systems thinking, speculative storytelling, and deep time reflection to interrogate our values: the ones that lead to catastrophe, and the ones that are critical for survival.
Created by antidisciplinary artist Harry Lee Shang Lun, written in collaboration with Noongar researcher Cass Lynch, and based on investigations and interviews with dozens of experts, Convergence is a playable provocation that explores our collective course towards collapse – and what comes after.
Let’s play it out.
“The values of our modern society – derived from colonization and capitalism – have led to accelerated climate trauma. Ecological disasters, multiple overlapping emergencies, wicked problems of incredible scale and complexity: how did we get to this point? And how will we survive an unknowable future? My hope is to take a playful and earnest approach to guide us away from fear and towards clear-eyed determination.”– Harry Lee Shang Lun, 2021.
“I find great comfort and inspiration in knowing how resilient land, water, animals, plants and my ancestors have been in previous climate change events. However the colony continually seeks to sever our connections with the past, forcing deep forgetting on us so that the violence of invasion might be buried. This traps everyone in the anxious present, forcing the status quo’s neurotic fatalism in the face of climate change on us all. I’m looking for new ways to inspire people to sink roots into Country and engage in the deep memory of place to find resilience to act and survive the warming world.” – Cass Lynch, 2021.
About Harry Lee Shang Lun
About Cassie Lynch
Artistic Credits
Commissioned by Arts House for Refuge 2021
convergence.place
Convergence is online now – click here to play the game.
Play anytime with 2 to 6 people gathered in-person. You will need a computer, 1 sheet of paper per player, drawing tools (e.g. pen, pencil, markers), a coin of any denomination.
Free
Duration: 90 – 120 minutes
Suitable for 16 years old +
Accessibility
Wheelchair accessible
Convergence is a hybrid web and tabletop game that includes audio, text and moving image.
Optimised for screen reader users;
Dark mode available for more relaxed play;
Closed captions and transcripts available for video content;
Made in consultation with people with disabilities.
Supported by – Arts House is a key program of the City of Melbourne, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Image – by Anu Kumar