Primal Clay: Worldbuilding with the New Materialism

Abstract

How can new materialism and non-human agency inform game design research? Through a process of game-design-as-research, the hybrid setting creation game Primal Clay offers one possible answer. In Primal Clay, human players collaborate with Hydrostone and an interactive narrative to produce a fictional game world, engaging in digital as much as material encounters. Relying on notions of material agency, this essay shows the ways in which material can exert “thing power” within the context of a collaborative, co-creative game. It concludes that materials can actively contribute to the play form, and that foregrounding such processes has the potential to broaden the field of digital game design.