MIRELIA – Echoes of the Forest
Mirelia is a cooperative tabletop game in which individual player choices shape community and its surrounding nature, inviting people to imagine and grow together. The narrative driven game uses playful storytelling, ecological and social system dynamics and collective decision making to explore holistic sustainability. Instead of centring around the typical competition-based function of most tabletop games, which focus on the goal of individual success, it is structured around communal responsibility.
My project encourages its participants to co-create and form a place for curiosity with care. By sharing stories, practices and rituals, knowledge is spread and an alternate way of living build up by the player. Additionally, the input of sustainable structures, human emotions and creative and cultural practices the output varies from session to session. The general upshot experience is leading to conversation and thought regarding the mentioned principles but also personal development of empathy, reflection on change and practiced resilience, as well as, social and ethical dialogue, awareness and sense of belonging.
The players gather around a table and enter a fictional landscape, the small and cozy village Mirelia. Its wellbeing is presented in two changing values: ‘Nature Health’ and ‘Village Energy’, which are shown through two sliders. Said values are influenced in response to a player’s action. Ecological and social decisions and events are visualized with these sliders, as well as personal sliders tracking every player’s character wellbeing and reputation. In each round, one Event Card introduces a certain environmental disturbance, social tension or cultural event, the villagers must solve a given objective by telling Mirelia’s story with the help of action cards and negotiating between individual impulses and collective responsibility. At the end of each round the consequences of their choices are visible immediately. The successful completion of events and cooperation between players lead to raising numbers on the sliders, neglect and imbalance to decreasing their values. Sometimes luck will influence the story with random elements, like dice rolling and the natural chaos of storytelling.
