Playable Stories

Vibe Coding Meaningful Games

SPACE4, Finsbury Park · with Outlandish · 6 August 2026

You'll leave with a published, playable link to a game that's yours.

The big idea

The mechanic is the message.

A game's real story isn't the words on screen — it's the rules. Change the rule, change the meaning.

Tonight
Pick a card

Pick one. Two minutes to write, then we'll go round.

  1. Something that made you angry this week.
  2. A time you had to choose between two things you cared about.
  3. A place, a person, or a routine you miss.
Name + your answer · about 40 seconds
  1. Something that made you angry this week.
  2. A time you had to choose between two things you cared about.
  3. A place, a person, or a routine you miss.
Games that mean something

Passage

A narrow strip. You always drift right. Take a spouse and you move at half speed but score double. Five minutes, then you die.

You can't see far ahead, you can't go back, and love costs you mobility.

Loneliness

A small black square. Approach the others and they scatter. No goal, no ending.

Reaching out is what makes them leave.

Dumb Ways to Die

Cheerful cartoon deaths, a song you can't shake, then: stand behind the yellow line.

A safety message people chose to share.

Florence

Conversations are jigsaw pieces. Early on, many and fiddly. As the relationship settles, two pieces. Later, hard again.

Talking to someone gets easier, then it doesn't.

A whole scene doing this

Game Poems Magazine

Short interactive artworks that borrow the language of videogames — not five one-offs, a whole scene.

gamepoems.com

And at our scale

Boardroom

Four meters, all at 50. Every decision pleases one group and angers another. Leadership is an impossible balancing act.

Office Chair Racing

Pump the keys to go faster. Stop, and you're fired. Every promotion makes your rivals more aggressive. Climbing the ladder doesn't make you safe.

Made small, made fast, made the way you'll make yours tonight.

A rule creates a feeling
In pairs, five minutes

What do games train you to expect?

A health bar goes down when you're hurt. A locked door needs a key. Your score goes up. The timer counts down. You have three lives.

In pairs, five minutes

Now break one.

Pick one from your list. What if it didn't work that way?

What would that make a player feel?

You're not the first

Pill Match breaks matching earns points.

Memory of Home breaks a matched memory is whole.

The framework

Message → Experience → Mechanic

Don't ask what game should I make?

Ask what should my audience feel? — then find the rule that creates it.

Three rungs
  1. Reskin — keep the rules, change the words and the look. Most people start here, and it's plenty.
  2. Remix — find the expectation the game relies on, and break it.
  3. Rebuild — describe a whole new game from scratch.
Your one sentence
My game is about , and I want the player to feel .

You wrote most of this at six o'clock.

Worksheet

Pick your launchpad

The game whose feeling is closest to yours.

Catalogue

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