Magic Circles

Abstract

This paper explores the connections between utopian approaches in performance studies, queer strategies for community building, and the world-creation tools made available by tabletop “pen and paper” role-playing games (TRPGs). Particularly, drawing on the varied modes of reality offered by each of the above, and they ways they can support experimentation with alternative societies, relationships, and political ideologies.

Beginning with a contextual analysis of Dungeons & Dragons, it outlines the structure, history, and current iterations of tabletop roleplaying games, towards an understanding of how the form can be used in the construction of playful, microcosmic utopias sensitive to queer experiences of solidarity within marginalisation. To illustrate this usage, Avery Alder’s queer, post-apocalyptic TRPG Dream Askew (2019) is later explored as a particularly appropriate case study to illustrate this usage.

The paper goes on to look at how the conception of Utopia as a world apart (as in Thomas Moore’s ‘No Place’), the establishing of a ‘Magic Circle’ (coined by Johan Huizinga) as a zone of shifted possibility in both game and performance contexts, and the genres of science fiction and speculative fiction, can be used together to facilitate a form of collaborative storytelling. This type of storytelling is noted as being politically significant in the ways it consolidates the roles of performer and spectator, engaging with Augusto Boal’s critiques of passive spectatorship, and framing of performance as possible “rehearsal for revolution” [1974(2008): 135].

In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz treats the utopian impulse as a force driven by experiences of marginalization – a methodology contingent on being responsive, adaptable, perhaps even chaotic. He asks, how is it possible to stage small moments of utopia that meaningfully engage with its potentially radical politics? Furthering Muñoz’s suggestion, Katherine Cross posits that one such way to ‘stage’ these performative glimpses of utopia is via the mode of science-fiction and fantasy (SF&F) tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) (such as, popularly, Dungeons & Dragons [D&D]). With their well-established genre relationships to utopia, dystopia and performance, Cross states that these TRPGs ‘render social construction richly visible through their heavy emphasis on character, imagination, and story, which all work together as part of a process of constant enactment and engagement; a perpetual process of “becoming”’ (2012: 72). Both Cross and Muñoz are speaking specifically here about the links between queerness, play and utopia, and how these concepts bolster and complicate one another when held in concert.

This paper will explore the ways that these three elements are linked in the form of the tabletop role-playing game, and how this connection opens a larger vision of training for, in and towards, utopias. It will outline a conception of training that does not prioritize an increase in technical skill or proficiency, but instead orientates itself towards the kinds of performative social languages and worlds facilitated by the structure of the TRPG – something akin to what Boal refers to as a ‘rehearsal for revolution’ (2008 [1974]: 135). These interactive fictional worlds, co-created via collaborative world-building and storytelling, have the potential to support uniquely utopian, queer, performance strategies, and their instrumentalization within performance training practices could provide additional means of collapsing traditional theatrical divisions between the conception, preparation and public presentation of performance. TRPGs offer a way of establishing a generative, performative space that is anti-hierarchical, experimental and process-based, privileging agency and emergent collaboration over a predetermined product or outcome.

I will begin with a brief outline of the history and mechanics of TRPGs, and their proposed relationship to utopian thinking, moving into a discussion of the intersections between queer theory, dys/utopian theory and the ‘Magic Circle’ in play theory, exploring a case study that implements some of the theoretical models discussed (namely Avery Alder’s 2019 TRPG Dream Askew), before closing with an overview of iterations of performance practice within TRPGs.

TRPGS: A BRIEF HISTORY AND STRUCTURAL OUTLINE

TRPGs are a form of narrative-driven, collaborative play, usually thematically related to the literary genres of science fiction and/or fantasy. They are typically played in-person, used as contexts for socialization as well as gaming. In his 2006 article ‘On the role of the die’, Joris Dormans provides a basic breakdown of typical TRPGs, including the presence of a static assistive text (in the form of the rulebook/sourcebook/ guidebook), and the designation of a Game Master (GM) who runs the game, providing information about the plot, environment and non-player characters (NPCs) for the rest of the players to interact with. Sean Hendricks highlights the importance of balancing the gaming elements of the GM, ruleset and ‘randomising element’ (like dice), in order to produce an experience that provides a challenging, entertaining and potentially surprising push-back for both the players and the GM, while holding the developing plot within the established in-game universe (2006: 39).

In A New Performing Art: The fantasy role- playing game (2001), Daniel Mackay adds to this definition, noting the varying time-spans common to TRPGs, which can be played out over a series of ‘sessions’ to constitute a longer ‘campaign’/storyline lasting any number of years, or simply remaining a one-off adventure (16). These games have existed in their current incarnation for about forty-five years,¹ with their forms, genres, popularity and player-base shifting steadily over time. Critical studies around TRPGs have made significant strides in the last thirty-six years, with Alan Fine’s Shared Fantasy coming out as one of the first substantive academic accounts of the form in 1983.

In Shared Fantasy, Gary Fine traces the origins of modern Dungeons & Dragons to the combined practices of war-gaming and historical re- enactment societies (HRS) (1983: 8), which can go some way to illustrating its future political hangovers regarding its approach to race, gender and conquest. War games can be a way to experience an element of the thrill of tactical combat without a significant recognition of its consequences, and the historical re-enactments preceding and linked to what would eventually become D&D were centred on settings such as an idealized, overwhelmingly Eurocentric, Middle Ages (Fine 1983: 3). Adding magic to the mix here brought the games closer to a realization of a world governed by Tolkien-esque principles, what reigned as the ‘standard’ of High Fantasy. Jennifer Grouling Cover identifies the growing popularity of the fantasy genre (via Tolkien), and the tradition of war-gaming as twin antecedents of TRPGs (2010: 8).

Via the influences of war-gaming and HRS, D&D inherited attributes of aggression, competitiveness and a focus on rules and technicality. So, the origins of D&D do not come solely from the imagining of a fantasy world – they also come from a practice of strict obeisance to a particular vision of the past (via Historical Reenactment), and detached strategic domination (via war-gaming). The inclusion of broader science fiction and fantasy themes occurred after the fact, in response to the growing immersion in these hobbies, and the popularity of genre fiction among HRS and war-gaming communities (Fine 1983: 11). In the most cynical terms, D&D largely stems from a series of power fantasies, where pleasure is derived from exerting control or a show of excellence – the ability to defeat monsters and win battles.

Tabletop role-playing games have a particular relationship to ideas of training, progress and mastery, where, in their most traditional or iconic form, players, enacting through their characters, perform in-game actions that earn them meta-game ‘experience points’, allowing their characters to become more competent and powerful. The ways in which these experience points are gained varies, but are often associated with the slaying of monsters, the acquisition of treasure and the completion of quests. Understanding the mechanics of a particular game may also present a learning curve to players, and, in some cases, act as a form of gate- keeping.

Moreover, TRPGs suffer from a similar reputation to mainstream science fiction for being the province of privileged, white, cis and heteronormative men and boys (Grouling Cover 2010: 7). These reputations are certainly not representative of the creative contributions made to either field. Rather, they are representative of the social, political and economic conditions of their respective industries, and the groups they have been marketed to.

This history, and this approach to game-play is not, particularly, utopian, to say the least. Despite this, both forms hold a kernel of something utopian within them. In the case of TRPGs, this is partly inherent in the adaptable structure of the games, and partly evident in their particular generic relationship to SF&F settings.

TRPGS AND UTOPIAN POTENTIAL (STRUCTURE AND CONTENT)

Any game that involves shifting power dynamics, and more so one that grants its players a degree of self-determination and agency, is already a political space. Players do not come to the table with a blank slate – they come with their oppressions, privileges, cultures and socio-economic statuses imprinted on their understanding of and ability to play and collaboratively contribute to a narrative. This loaded space and history of the TRPG game is explored in more depth by Antero Garcia in their 2017 article ‘Privilege, power, and dungeons & dragons: How systems shape racial and gender identities in tabletop role-playing games’. In it, Garcia uses Dungeons & Dragons, the antecedent of most modern TRPGs, as a case study to begin unravelling the racism and sexism that informs the structure and content of the game (2017: 232). They investigate the complex interplay between the racist and misogynist tropes included in the D&D source material, and the racist and misogynist attitudes brought into the game by the players themselves (233). These prejudices are present both in what is included in the game, and what (and who) it excludes. Among the examples provided, Garcia notes the racial coding of fantasy creatures like orcs alongside their characterization as being savage and violent (240), the pervasive use of he/him pronouns as ‘neutral’ in instructional material and limitations put on women characters’ strength attributes (238).

While TRPGs can certainly magnify these intersections of power and privilege, they can also be used as tools to interrogate and challenge them. Katherine Cross explores the political applications of tabletop role-playing games in her 2012 article ‘The new laboratory of dreams: Roleplaying games as resistance’, outlining the unique storytelling potential of TRPGs. She writes about her own experience with RPGs (both tabletop and computer games) as a queer trans woman, and how the opportunities they afforded to design avatars and determine her character’s gender were crucial in the process of understanding and expressing her own (76). Role- playing, she says, is ‘something that instantiates what “utopian” cyberfeminists dreamed of: creating a character of your own design that you then perform and embody in virtual social space’ (72). This ‘virtual’ space may be digital, as in the case of computer RPGs (CRPGs), or imaginatively co-constituted with fellow players, as in the case of TRPGs. Cross explains that while TRPG and CRPG spaces are not historically famed for their feminist environments, they can, and do, have ‘off-label’ uses as sites for gender experimentation and expression (73).

She specifically notes the significance of physicality in pen-and-paper/tabletop role- playing games, and the ways in which their tangibility offers unique forms of customization and ‘proactive game design’ (80). What makes pen-and-paper role-playing special, says Cross, is that they are ‘a site of creation that necessarily expands in the mind of the player’ (85). She highlights the ways in which role-playing offers opportunities for queers and other marginalized people to create characters that we wish we could see (or be) in popular media, as well as the ways in which it can be used as a space to experiment with potential futures, new forms of society and complex political scenarios (87). Having agency over the narrative of the game, navigated via characters created for and by its players, establishes an environment in which queer people don’t have to wait for representation or inclusion – we implement it by virtue of the fact of our playing, and the choices we make in-game.

Customization is a queer survival skill. The process of taking on a system that may begin as hostile or exclusionary, and making it habitable, creating spaces within it to exist and sustain othered identities, is one of resistance. This creative flexibility characterizes how the imagining of new worlds might be engaged with from a position of marginalization, drawing on a conception of hope within a specifically Utopian framework.

Utopian hoping, as understood by Ernst Bloch in his Marxist text The Principle of Hope (1954), is a method of optimistically and pro-actively looking into the possible shapes of potential futures. Ruth Levitas expands on Bloch’s idea of docta spes, or ‘educated hope’, in her article ‘Pragmatism, utopia, and anti-utopia’, explaining his desire to nurture the utopian seeds within Marxism by encouraging the imagining of a ‘world otherwise’ (2008: 43). Bloch argues that the ‘utopian impulse’ is pervasive in human cultural and creative works, furnishing examples from ‘fairytales, fashion, alchemy, music and literature’ (cited in Levitas 2008: 43). Hope, says Bloch, ‘requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’ (1954:3).

This utopian impulse is also woven into the fabric of TRPGs, which fundamentally engage with collaborative world and scenario building, taking as their baseline the inhabitation and exploration of realities that, for better or worse, depart from our own. This does not always (or often) translate into a creation of utopian worlds within tabletop role-playing games, however. In fact, many games engage explicitly with various forms of dystopias as their thematic point of departure.² It is against these fictional dystopias that players can mobilize their utopian/resistance movements – draconian regimes and institutions, scattered post-apocalyptic wastelands or war-torn societies, giving them shape and focus.

In her extended analysis, Levitas explains (with reference to Tom Moylan) how the dystopian form, rather than acting as purely anti-utopian, may also function within a critical utopian mode. It seems that the distinction being made by Levitas here is in how ambitious its vision of the future is, as she notes that certain kinds of ‘patient hope’ may be essentially anti-utopian in their prioritizing of slow, pragmatic change (2008: 42). This focus on ‘pragmatism’ puts the initial utopian vision at risk by gradually but consistently subjecting it to compromise, eventually rendering its revolutionary properties inert (44). So, conjuring a bold but bleak dystopia, inside of which there exists the possibility for change, may in fact be a more fundamentally utopian gesture than, say, a modest but progressive policy proposal.

TRPGs offer up a space where no revolutionary project is too bold – one that can playfully and ambitiously provide resistance to, relief from and insight into, real-world dominant, oppressive socio-political institutions. To say that these systems are playful is not to suggest that they are frivolous. It is by virtue of this playfulness by virtue of the ways in which it allows an interfacing between reality and potentiality that these utopian seeds of hope may begin to grow.

José Esteban Muñoz echoes this sentiment in Cruising Utopia where, also citing Bloch, he describes utopia as a ‘politics of emotion’ (2009: 97), believing that, in a world without utopia, ‘minoritarian subjects are cast as hopeless’ (ibid.). Muñoz frames hope here as the mechanism that allows marginalized groups to imagine possible futures, and to branch off from oppressive presents. Hope, he says, is ‘the emotional modality that permits us to access futurity, par excellence’ (98). Muñoz’s listed spheres of minoritarian hope include gay bars and punk shows as spatialized social contracts, sequestered from the heteronormative order of the external world.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MAGIC CIRCLE

The queer practice of forming bubbles of suspended, altered reality – pockets of joy, freedom and expression – is rooted in a historical and contemporary necessity to have access to spaces that are not governed by rules that criminalize, threaten, other or ostracize queer lives. TRPGs, although usually not quite as lively as queer club nights, can operate in a similar way, via their invocation of the game world as a performative space apart – a shifted, heightened reality in which the players control the rules and social world of the game.

This concept is discussed in play theory as the Magic Circle. First introduced by Johan Huizinga in his 1955 text Homo Ludens, and later developed by scholars like Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen in Rules of Play: Game design fundamentals (2003), the Magic Circle is used to describe how play space is delineated from the ordinary world. This idea proposes that rules and instructions are insufficient methods of representing the entirety of a game world, which is a compound relational system including formal, social, dramatic and aesthetic elements (expanded in Christopher Moore’s ‘The magic circle and the mobility of play’ (2011: 378)). For example, we begin the psychic and creative process of playing Monopoly before implementing any of its rules – with an agreement to play, and, perhaps, an impression of the kind of game we’re about to engage with, including its theme, content and boundaries. This moment of initial assessment and agreement, entering into a loose social contract with our fellow players, signposts the transition from ordinary space, into game space. Rene Bauer refers to this decision as ‘Transformation into a player’, in the paper ‘Games as a special zone’, saying that, ‘when people commit to a game, they become players, and thus part of the game’ (2018: 29).

The transformative effect that this agreement to play has on players allows for shifted configurations of performative and social protocol. The Magic Circle is not, however, an impermeable barrier between game space and real space. These behaviours and ways of relating to fellow players are both contained within the game space, and, inevitably, bound to seep out of it and impact extra-game behaviours and relationships. They are not divested of wider, relational, and socio-political meaning. This is why I no longer play Monopoly with my family.

With a simple, inflexible board game, the implications of breaking ground in the Magic Circle may not be particularly immersive or perspective shifting. Nonetheless, taking this action induces a way of thinking about a game as a world – a composite of mechanics, imagery, explicit instructions and implicit social cues, scaled up or down depending on the complexity of the game in question. This moment, this choice, to enter an altered system of logic, has profound implications when looked at in the context of purposefully reality-bending modes like science fiction, performance and emergent role-playing games – particularly in cases where a dynamic and meta-textual engagement with these altered realities is asked of those interacting with the works.

Wendy Gay Pearson, in Queer Universes (2008), describes science fiction as a way for queer people to construct spaces of belonging among ‘the seemingly infinite planes of the imagination’ (72). Even as we survive within a multitude of hostile environments in the present, the creative works of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction provide avenues towards other forms of life.

BEYOND DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: DREAM ASKEW, A GAME OF ‘BELONGING OUTSIDE BELONGING’

These creative tools – a playful mobilization of educated hope, a fantastic or science-fictional genre, the establishing of a Magic Circle – are only as queer and revolutionary as their application. A game intending to engage in a critical utopian mode requires a reckoning with its own mechanics as well as with the ways in which its literal social, political and spatial environments may affect players’ engagement with its fictive, imaginary contexts. This can be achieved via a co-option/subversion of traditionalist games like D&D, or via playing and designing new kinds of games that have integrated these elements with the express purpose of fostering spaces to question socio-political norms and draw out creative, collaborative responses between players. Games like these can more directly be understood as kinds of rehearsals/training grounds for enactments of utopia.

One such game is Avery Alder’s Dream Askew (Buried Without Ceremony, 2019). Dream Askew is a GMless tabletop role-playing game. This means that, from the outset, it is structured to (theoretically) ensure that players have more or less equal control over the narrative environment. Where, in systems like D&D, players have control over their characters’ actions within the game, and the Game Master controls the game world’s responses to these actions, Dream Askew has players select both a character role, and a setting element, to take stewardship of (Alder 2019: 36). For example, a player might choose The Hawker (55) as a character role, and The Digital Realm (76), as a setting element. This player then contributes world-building information relating, loosely, to the ‘digital realm’, while still able to interact inside the game as their character. Other players contribute to the world-building with their own setting elements (such as, Outlying Gangs, or, The Earth Itself (79–80)), creating a composite environment for exploration and play.

This dual role as character and world element establishes a direct connection between individual and collective experience within the fictional world of the game. This is not only an effective way of disrupting the hierarchical GM–player dynamic, but also counters the TRPG tendency towards neoliberal individualism in its separation of world and character. Giving players agency over the environment (more, making them responsible for aspects of the environment), structurally knits together individual and collective creative impact. Beyond designing a character for themselves, players must also consider how their world-building choices will impact on the way that other characters (both player characters and NPCs), exist within it.

In the Dream Askew rule book, Alder describes the mechanism for play as such:

Players sit down together at a table, catching up and checking in with one another. They establish some tools for maintaining trust before they start to play. Players each choose a character role – a template that allows them to create their own unique main character. They also choose a setting element to steward in play. … During scenes, players shift between a few different responsibilities: playing as their main character, playing as their setting element, and contributing to a vibrant story world overall. (Alder 2019: 6)

This means that, in addition to existing as an individual in the game, players participate in a patchwork creation of the post-apocalyptic wasteland they co-inhabit. Dream Askew centres on ‘queer strife amid the apocalypse’ (2019: 46), taking place within a setting where society and its associated institutions are in varying stages of collapse. Players band together to create and maintain a queer enclave, focusing on mutual aid, community support and survival. Alder addresses their use of the ‘queer enclave’ as framing device along similar lines to Muñoz, drawing from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, plus community (LGBTQIA+) histories of community building amidst hostile external forces, threats and catastrophes:

The AIDS crisis was a queer apocalypse, with enclaves formed – and obliterated – as a result of it. That’s not the first or only time. From Radical Faerie communes to post-war dockside communities struggling to keep alive the queer connections people found in the service, from STAR House to tentatively-staked gayborhoods everywhere, the enclave is more than just a speculative device. We are constantly falling outside of the society intact. And so while Dream Askew is a work of strange fiction, it’s also a reflection on what precarity means for actual queer people. (Alder 2019: 48)

Dream Askew is designed, in its structure, mechanics, genre, atmosphere, themes and content, to be ideologically reflective of Alder’s concerns as a queer person living in the world, part of a broader history of resistance, community and escape. This design is enabled by the broad mode of the TRPG, and a cultural discourse concerning dystopia and utopia, customized and bound together to facilitate the development of queer futures in the imaginary.

UTOPIAN PERFORMANCE STRATEGIES IN TRPGS

These games, and their associated utopian applications, have something particular to offer in terms of the ways they connect to performance practice. TRPGs can present fluid conceptions of audience, character, self and world, creating space for exploratory performative exchanges. Their link to conceptions of training, rehearsal and even methods of devising theatre, distils those aspects that are deemed ‘preparatory’ – training processes towards a final product – and allows a version of those processes to continue at their own pace, and for their own sake. This is partly linked to TRPGs being games – nominally recreational activities, played for fun, or as a pastime concurrent to capitalist productivity. Their history is one as an activity taking place in the margins of players’ lives – after work, over the weekend, on days off. Its lineage is that of free time. A choice to participate in this kind of performative, collaborative storytelling that may stem no other reason than a desire for entertainment and/or social engagement, is for this very reason rooted in utopian thinking.

Further underlining the framing of TRPGs as activities that may unfold on their own terms, players do not perform, typically, for an external audience, but within a responsive group – perhaps of friends, or acquaintances. The ‘audience’ of a TRPG is a fluctuating, constant, communally affirmed reception of performance – not passive spectatorship, but active, collaborative witnessing. Boal expresses deep mistrust for the concept of audience, of spectatorship, describing the origins of theatre and its subsequent co-option by hierarchical institutions, by saying,

In the beginning the theatre was the dithyrambic song: free people singing in the open air. The carnival. The feast. Later, the ruling classes took possession of the theatre and built their dividing walls. First, they divided the people, separating actors from spectators: people who act and people who watch. (Boal 2008 [1974]: 95).

He finds the concept of spectatorship deeply troubling, and his first proposition in the project of winning back theatre from the ruling classes is to re-absorb the spectator into the frame of the performance. Spectators must be transformed from passive receivers of theatre, into actants, able to influence, transform and vocalize their opinions of the dramatic action (Boal 2006: 97). In line with Boal’s conjuring of the lineage of theatre lying in carnival, feast and group song, Sarah Lynne Bowman describes role-playing games as ‘modern day ritual[s]’, saying that a ‘true’ TRPG needs to establish a sense of community through a ‘ritualised, collaborative storytelling experience’ among the group of players (2010: 11) – an environment in which archetypical narratives, characters and symbols are mobilized towards a shared story (13). This also, crucially, is a ritual whose audience simultaneously invents and experiences the narrative (14). Evan Torner observes that tabletop games ‘combine performance procedures and improvisation to both tell stories and reflect on the nature of storytelling’ (2016). This combination of improvisation, characterization (playing in character) and the heightened, performative social arrangement of TRPGs also puts it at an intersection with performance and ritual practices.

Further to this re-figuring of audience, the participants of a TRPG are often not performance practitioners (and, crucially, there is no requirement or expectation that they should be). They are expected to be non-professionals. A TRPG is a game, after all. This again is linked to Boal’s ideology of professionalism and training within the theatrical frame, with his proclamation, ‘Anyone can do theater, even actors!’ Here Boal points to the complex power dynamics around training and resources that can hamper physical and psychological access to acting and performance. He critiques the emphasis on formal training and professionalism in acting, advocating instead for it as a universal tool of creative expression.

The re-consideration of the roles of actor, character and role here also provide avenues for a looser distinction between performance and socialization, with players moving easily and casually between speaking for/as their character, and speaking out of character, as themselves. Given that TRPGs are fundamentally a social framing device, they are able to include, in any particular session, conversational digressions from the performative world of the game that are nonetheless part of the experience of playing the game. The structure of the TRPG stays the same whether characters are in dialogue with one another, whether actions are made via reported or indirect speech, whether players are speaking to one another, during a TRPG session, about unrelated social matters – it is able to accommodate any and all of these modes of speaking.

Key concepts in TRPG discourse include an integration of audience/performer roles, recreation, accessibility to non-experts, fluidity between self and character and flexibility in time and space. There are, of course, already rich engagements with these ideas in performance theory and practice. The TRPG form, however, formulates these qualities in such a way as to present a composite, particularly utopian, performance portal.

Utopianism, especially as filtered through a science-fictional lens, casts a line somewhere beyond – whether into the future, into a parallel reality, an alternate history or a completely alien world. The performative nature of role-playing games anchors that line in the present, with the power to creatively critique that present, where individual, moment-to-moment choices can have a significant effect on the ‘beyond’ being gestured to. Their shared qualities of exploration and inconclusiveness relates to Muñoz’s conception of queerness as horizon (2009: 113) – as a potentiality defined by its unfinished state; by its constant mutation and focus on embodied speculation.

The traits, shared by performance practice, critical utopianism and tabletop role-playing games, of customization, collaboration and speculation, together provide a training ground that is less about technical improvement, and more about players exercising their capacity for imaginative, potentially revolutionary, hoping.

Image by Felix Kawitzky, 2021.

Notes

1 After the 1974 release of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons by Tactical Studies Rules.

2 TRPGs like Dystopia Rising (2018, Eschaton Media), Eclipse Phase (2010, Posthuman Studios), The Quiet Year (2016, Buried Without Ceremony), Shadowrun (1989, Catalyst Game Labs), Apocalypse World (2010, Lumpley Games) and Sigmata: This signal kills fascists (2019, Chad Walker/Land of Nop).