Teaching My Mum How To Play Elden Ring
About
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Teaching My Mum How To Play Elden Ring was an event I ran as part of Now Play This 23 - a festival of experimental game design. The theme of the festival was love, and I pitched the event as a way of talking about games as a radical act of love, and how they can help people better understand each other in their relationships.
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For this event, I spent significant amount of time with my mum (not a gamer) teaching her how to play Elden Ring. We documented our time together, and then at the live event we talked about how me teaching her had impacted her understanding of both games and our relationship, and what the act of me teaching her had felt like. She then played some of the game at the event, culminating in her taking down (rather impressively and unexpectedly!) the game's first main boss.
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Role
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I developed this project because it encapsulated lots of my interests; about how games as a medium can bring people together, and how that experience can be facilitated by the design of the games themselves. Even though Elden Ring has this notoriety as a difficult game, I chose it because having played it I thought there were aspects of its design that were fundamentally about bringing people together. This was something that was explored during the talk, and really helped me develop my own design skills as I picked apart the design ethos of this game.
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