I am pumped to present This Game Is Garbage: How Form Can Inspire Play in Diceless TTRPGs at Narrascope, an annual conference exploring interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players.

Psychic Trash Detectives is a diceless, collaborative TTRPG played with actual garbage. From the game’s opening activity, which invites players to take a real memory of being discarded and transform it into an actual piece of trash, to mini games like erasure poetry, psychic sketching, and exquisite corpse storytelling, players mine the pile of garbage they’ve brought to their gaming table for the clues to solving a mystery abandoned by the rest of the world. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how my unique game system creates ludonarrative harmony by bringing players closer to the spirit of the game through the tools they use to play it. Participants will leave with inspiration for incorporating non-traditional gaming materials into their own analogue games, imagining new, creative possibilities for immersive play.