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Convergence

Harry Lee Shang Lun (PlayReactive)

Presented in Season 1 2021

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

disability access symbol wheelchair black

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.

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About Harry Lee Shang Lun

Harry Lee Shang Lun (李尚倫) is an antidisciplinary artist with a background in medicine and commerce. He is the director of PlayReactive, a Melbourne-based studio making bold interactive experiences, from videogames to immersive theatre. His artistic practice centres games and play as a way to explore complex systems and respond to wicked problems.
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About Cassie Lynch

Cass Lynch is a Noongar writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Perth. She has recently completed a creative writing PhD that explores deep memory features of the Noongar oral storytelling tradition; in particular stories that reference the last ice age and the rise in sea level that followed it. Her Noongar language haikus, published in Westerly 64.1, won the 2019 Patricia Hackett Prize. Her story 'Split', a creative impression of deep time Perth, can be found in the Brio Books publication Stories of Perth.
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Artistic Credits

Creator – Harry Lee Shang Lun; Writer/Collaborator – Cass Lynch; Website – Public Office; Creative Producer – Sarah Rowbottam; Inclusion Dramaturg – Tom Middleditch; Access Consultant – Jonathan Craig; Research and workshop participants – Christine Drummond, Tony Birch, Hanna Cormick, Rev. Salesi Faupula, Professor Jodie McVernon, Thea Snow, Alexei Trundle, Lauren Rickards, Ida Kubiszewski, Cheryl Durrant, Mohamed Nur, Rawcus, Signal.

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

disability access symbol wheelchair black

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