Deadlines and Dragons game is an initiative of Common Places: new imaginaries for European peripheries, a project by Cherimus, LaFundició and Prostoroz that aims at sharing and reflecting on situated cultural practices that put play, conviviality and grassroots urban regeneration at the center to boost the autonomy and critical capacity of its residents to collectively build resistances and new imaginaries that break the stigmatization of peripheral territories.
Throughout the project, the three of us have been exchanging, debating and thinking about different issues that cross our practices and bring up challenges to us on many levels, even questioning the very meaning of our ways of doing things: organization,vicinity, funding, ethics, form, purpose… The opportunity to talk, to share strategies, and to open sometimes difficult debates has given us the possibility to think better and reconsider what we do and how we do it.
In the framework of these rich conversations, the proposal arose to invent a device that serves as an activator of collective reflections with the aim of facilitating other collectives, institutions, cultural organizations, citizens… can face debates significant both for them and for the contexts to which they join with their practices.
The artifact has taken shape in this role-playing game whose aim is to promote the meeting and the generation of collective knowledge, in a situated way, which can be used to raise and give perspective to one’s own practices, bringing life to a real or imaginary scenario.