Could Melbourne survive as a megacity? Play this game to find out

The year is 2050. You’re strolling around Melbourne’s CBD, now a sprawling megacity filled with 8 million people. This metropolis, once intact and packed with promise, has been battered by flash floods and extreme heat. Familiar places like the Metro Tunnel have become submerged in water, eels swimming to and fro.

This isn’t the plot of the latest dystopian blockbuster, rather it’s the premise of Open House Melbourne’s first ever citywide urban role-playing event.

What will Melbourne look like in 2050? Troy Innocent’s (second from left) Reworlding Naarm lets you decide.Credit: Paul Jeffers

Conceptualised by urban play scholar Troy Innocent, Reworlding Naarm will invite groups of 16 people to tour Victoria’s capital city alongside experienced game-masters who will describe a future city in need. Combining augmented reality, immersive sound and storytelling, each group will grapple with the question: when one world collapses, how do we build the next?

“It’s a matter of learning from place,” Innocent says. “It’s about accepting there is a crisis, but rather than thinking ‘every person for themselves’, or waiting for somebody to come along and save the day, it’s about thinking, ‘how can we collectively respond to this? How could we bring people together to explore ways to reimagine and remake our cities over the next decade – to be responsive and adaptive to change?’”

Reworlding Naarm came from the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Summer bushfires. While play-testing another project, Innocent says he began to smell the smoke, and suddenly the crises around him felt incredibly real.

But instead of catastrophising, Innocent says he invested his energy into creating an event in which the core mechanics are possibility and hope. Players – who can either play their future selves or someone else entirely – will be given a handful of marbles to represent this hope, which they can lose over time as extreme heat, flash floods and other events occur along the way. If you lose all your marbles, and therefore all hope, the group will leave you behind and your game ends.

Innocent began smaller-scale, creating Reworlding: Cardigan Commons, which physically transformed Cardigan Street in Carlton into a future Melbourne. Now, Reworlding has expanded to encapsulate the entire inner-city.

For many of the participants, Innocent says this could be the first time they have engaged with place in a multisensory, complex way since they were children. This kind of urban role-playing – which blends familiar, contemporary urban settings with fantastical elements – offers an opportunity to bring imaginative play into adulthood, something that has proven to be regenerative and joyful rather than anxiety-inducing. For example, a dilapidated building could be reimagined as an urban garden, or a submerged shopping centre could become regenerated wetlands.

“There’s some stigma attached to play for adults. It’s seen as non-productive – when we’re time-poor and have so many things competing for our attention, play can be seen as a luxury. But it’s important psychologically for a number of reasons,” Innocent says. “A lot of despair comes from thinking things will be like this forever … Whereas play offers this space of possibility. It can also be dynamic and disruptive, so it can give people permission to participate, to break rules and to be active.”

Open House Melbourne’s executive director and chief curator, Tania Davidge, says Reworlding Naarm – which was created in consultation with various groups including Indigenous Elders – grapples with questions we may no longer be able to avoid, including climate change, issues of accessibility, overstrained infrastructure, housing crises and so forth.

“We often think of the city as this immovable object – it doesn’t change. But it actually changes quite dramatically all the time,” she says. “If Melbourne is almost going to double in size by 2050, there’s going to be many challenges to living that way. We will have to live together differently.”

Reworlding Naarm encourages its participants to do just that, banding people together to make the city’s potentially daunting future promising.

“That kind of opportunity is sorely needed at the moment,” Davidge says.

Reworlding Naarm will take place as part of Open House Melbourne between July 25 and 27. Bookings are required.

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