The Ground XR

Edit
Publications
2010-2020

2020

Pushing a conclusion to Edit Publications, in a pandemic season I built “The Ground XR”—a mixed-reality space to facilitate virtual play with the brilliant tabletop RPG The Ground Itself by Everest Pipkin (available here). I added a simple rule to the game: using Mozilla Hubs, all world-building elements must be summoned as 3D objects into the shared virtual space. 

 

In Pipkin’s world-building game, players are encouraged to tell the story of a place over time. As they have it:

 

Focusing on place—one specific place, chosen by the group—The Ground Itself unfolds over radically disparate time periods that may range from 4 days to 18,000 years. By casting wildly into time, it considers how places both change and remember themselves. Fundamentally, The Ground Itself is about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone.

Palimpsestic by nature and procedural without overdetermining play, Pipkin’s game quickly recast the aims of this publishing initiative. 

Teaching The Ground Itself in my classes (see GEMS) and writing about it in my scholarship (see, forthcoming, “Fetch Quest”), tracks this editor’s trajectory from editing to gaming. Or, toward the gaming of writing and the inscription of play. 

 

Letting go of Edit Publications—moving from poems to games, from lines to rules, editing to playing—blurring between while holding to each differential edge, EP now seeks extended play, beyond the bounds of the editorial impulse. 

With this, EP aims to morph into a more expansive ruleset, a wider set of concerns, a wilder cast of the die. Like any good editor, its echoes and traces often remain invisible, while nevertheless creating new routes into the present, drafting unseen passages in the lines left unexamined.. .

For now, feel free to make use of your copy of The Ground Itself  in “The Ground XR” via Mozilla Hubs here.