Hello from Áron

Introduction and Social
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Dear Trust-in-Players, Edgeryders, and other playful beings,

Excited to meet all of you. My name is Áron Birtalan and I’m an artist based in Amsterdam.
Natalia brought me to this website, after meeting in Bulgaria and I’m absolutely blown away by the initiatives, content and discussions here, micro and macro!

I design and facilitate playful experiences in real life.
I work through Transformation Games: a practice that situates itself somewhere along the intersections of LARP, movement practices, performing arts and everyday life. Games range from small-scale intimate experiences, to large groups and from a few minutes, to even days.
The practice bears a lot of kinship with Nordic-stlye of role-playing, somatics, and is historically rooted within alternative strands of radical pedagogy and youth movements.
In its present workings Transformation Games is framed both as an artistic (a way to undergo experiences that would not happen otherwise) and a political practice: a way to (through experience) understand that we are not merely subjects to our world, but active creators and transformers of it.

I also write, talk and give workshops on playing, politics and playfulness, participation safety, and experience design, as well as running a 3-week children fantasy camp in rural Hungary. You can read all about these things in the first edition of this publication (.PDF download), with the second revision currently on its way.

I wanted to say hi to the Trust in Play community because I think our interest covers many similar grounds. I’d be happy to ruminate around the message board from time to time, see what you guys are up to, and engage with some of the things going on if time and resources allow.
Hope to meet more of you and wishing you a lovely day!

warmly,

Á

2 Likes
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Hello @aronbirtalan, great to see you here (and maybe also in Athens :))

If we were to talk about the transformative and political potential of games - there’s a very interesting tension between empowerment for the right reasons (we want to our best selves, fulfill our creative potential on this planet) and the agency we discover in us that allows us to become good citizens, in a capitalistic order of things. It would be very interesting for me to talk about the way you think about politics while designing games. Maybe during our next webinar.

Also, if you were to recommend people (ideally female) whose focus is mostly on transformative games, who would they be?

I also think that the Albert Kong-related community of players and his collaborators (sorry if that’s a terrible simplification, dear Future Toggers :D) I am also loosely part of in Berlin would enjoy trying your experiences. @AnneLorraine is one of the members of that group who also joined this community. I hope to make you guys meet someday :slight_smile:

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Whoaa, so many tabs of wonderous things to read through!
Thank you for that @aronbirtalan :slight_smile:

I am smiling as I read through your self-description, the links.
What a joy to know you’ve made these things somewhere sometime on this planet.
Would you be up for drinking a coffee across the distance in a video call some time?

With sunshine from Berlin,
Anne-Lorraine