CripShip: Disability Saves Society from BigTech
ars_cripship05.jpg | Credits: Eli Kershaw
ars_cripship06.png
ars_cripship04.jpg | Credits: Jon Aitken
ars_cripship01.jpg | Credits: Jon Aitken
ars_cripship08.jpg | Credits: Shamphat Pro
ars_cripship09.jpg | Credits: Shamphat Pro
ars_cripship02.jpg | Credits: Jon Aitken
06_CripShipElise_Huard.tiff | Credits: Elise Huard
CripShip is a Tabletop Roleplaying game about resisting certain types of Generative AI created by BigTech. It's a fun and creative mix of collaborative storytelling, improvisation, dice rolls, and investigation of AI.
Through role-play, players learn how to break Large Language Models by discovering its biases and limitations—building real skills and potential allies in resisting LLMs deployed unsuitably in the real world. The game is inspired by disabled people destroying the systems of power that create and shape AI and building new worlds from disabled imagination.
The game is run by a StoryTeller who helps describe the world while players describe their actions. The game's theme is AI but the mechanic is always led by human conversation. Players play a “Slop Mopper”, an employee at the Ministry of AI Spills, an underfunded government agency tasked with investigating cases of AI spilling “Slop” into the world and the companies responsible for this mess. Character creation incorporates aspects of disabled experiences into the role-play with skills like Criptastic Hacking, Crip-time, Dreaming Justice, World Builders & World Breakers. Being careful not tsimulate physical impairments but to root play in a way that everyone can learn from disabled experiences.
Players choose a case to investigate, based on a real world AI example that focuses on a problematic aspect of LLMs with a challenge for the players e.g. “Find what an LLM thinks it’s good at and disprove it”. Play consists of collaborative improvisation, rolling dice to resolve risky actions, inventive infiltrations and ending with a critical interrogation of a real LLM. The StoryTeller manages this interaction, ensuring players never look at screens and all the gameplay remains driven by player conversation. By uncovering clues about the issues and suitability of LLM players get to role-play actions to take against its creators, whether through official channels or methods of their own devising.
CripShip is a Tabletop Roleplaying game about resisting certain types of Generative AI created by BigTech. It's a fun and creative mix of collaborative storytelling, improvisation, dice rolls, and investigation of AI.
Through role-play, players learn how to break Large Language Models by discovering its biases and limitations—building real skills and potential allies in resisting LLMs deployed unsuitably in the real world. The game is inspired by disabled people destroying the systems of power that create and shape AI and building new worlds from disabled imagination.
The game is run by a StoryTeller who helps describe the world while players describe their actions. The game's theme is AI but the mechanic is always led by human conversation. Players play a “Slop Mopper”, an employee at the Ministry of AI Spills, an underfunded government agency tasked with investigating cases of AI spilling “Slop” into the world and the companies responsible for this mess. Character creation incorporates aspects of disabled experiences into the role-play with skills like Criptastic Hacking, Crip-time, Dreaming Justice, World Builders & World Breakers. Being careful not tsimulate physical impairments but to root play in a way that everyone can learn from disabled experiences.
Players choose a case to investigate, based on a real world AI example that focuses on a problematic aspect of LLMs with a challenge for the players e.g. “Find what an LLM thinks it’s good at and disprove it”. Play consists of collaborative improvisation, rolling dice to resolve risky actions, inventive infiltrations and ending with a critical interrogation of a real LLM. The StoryTeller manages this interaction, ensuring players never look at screens and all the gameplay remains driven by player conversation. By uncovering clues about the issues and suitability of LLM players get to role-play actions to take against its creators, whether through official channels or methods of their own devising.
Created & written: Joseph Wilk
Layout design: Jon Somerscales & Joseph Wilk
Editors: Elise Huard & Elinor Lower
Game design: Jon Somerscales & Joseph Wilk
Play-testing direction: Jon Somerscales, Aminder Virdee & Joseph Wilk
Cover art and illustrations: Eli Kershaw
Additional writing: Elinor Lower
Artistic consultancy and disability justice advice: Richard Amm & Aminder Virdee
Play testers: Mat A, Richard Amm, Emma Boulton, Liv Comberti, Pete Donnelly, Rowan Earle, Kaspar Emanuel, Bridget Hart, Elise Huard, Eirini Lampiri, Zuleika Lebow, Jack Lowe, Jack Orrell, Jon Somerscales, Aminder Virdee, Lucy Wing, Alice Wilk, Jay Woodruff
This work was commissioned as part of Watershed's More than AI Sandbox, supported by MyWorld and funded through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) ‘Strength in Places' fund.
Joseph Wilk (GB) (MEng) is an artist and programmer who uses the digital to explore disability and disability to explore the digital. He often works with automative forms of expression that utilize new interfaces to work with alternative bodies. His experience of disability—living with pain, physical limitations, disillusionment and disconnection—strongly impacts his practice. He deconstructs, misuses, and repurposes software and hardware to challenge notions of ownership, narrative, and visibility.
Joseph Wilk (GB) (MEng) is an artist and programmer who uses the digital to explore disability and disability to explore the digital. He often works with automative forms of expression that utilize new interfaces to work with alternative bodies. His experience of disability—living with pain, physical limitations, disillusionment and disconnection—strongly impacts his practice. He deconstructs, misuses, and repurposes software and hardware to challenge notions of ownership, narrative, and visibility.
CripShip is humorous, generous, and joyful. The game uses roleplay as an empathetic and critical tool, providing players with a means to comprehend and engage with the lived experiences of communities and people who are too often marginalized and undervalued, but also to dissect the technological systems that oppress them. Players engage in diverse rich narratives, tell ‘other’ stories and become alternative heroes. CripShip provides us with a palpable demonstration that the world is better when it’s inclusive. It facilitates players in envisioning and therefore creating the futures we want. CripShip is play as activism.
CripShip is humorous, generous, and joyful. The game uses roleplay as an empathetic and critical tool, providing players with a means to comprehend and engage with the lived experiences of communities and people who are too often marginalized and undervalued, but also to dissect the technological systems that oppress them. Players engage in diverse rich narratives, tell ‘other’ stories and become alternative heroes. CripShip provides us with a palpable demonstration that the world is better when it’s inclusive. It facilitates players in envisioning and therefore creating the futures we want. CripShip is play as activism.