AT: Who are you and what do you do?

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BP: We’re Bull Press. We make games – conversational tabletop games – for a prison environment. Most of us have spent time in prison, and we’re based in the USA.

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What games do you make and why?

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Oh dang, where to start? We have a variety of games – our biggest are Illadelph (a hip-hop game set in 90s Philadelphia), Corpse Thieves (kung fu and mystery solving) and Stirring Giant (cyberpunk neo-noir). Please see the game printed in this edition of the paper called “Rot”, which was made by a friend in Texas. It’s a blast to play.

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To play the games, you get a group of people and you all work together to solve a mystery or track down a ring of tomb robbers – or whatever scenario the game you’re playing presents. Our conversational tabletop games are basically cooperative storytelling, which everybody knows how to do. It’s inherently pro-social. It's also the only hobby I know of that can bring a crew of five strangers of completely different backgrounds to the same table and keep them coming back every week for years.

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Tabletop games in general are fully analogue: no electricity, no internet, no screens. Our subgenre, conversational games, don’t even require a board or pieces – just people to chat with.

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They’re unlimited in their creative enrichment. The more time a player puts into drawing, writing, designing interesting scenarios for their crew, the better the games get. That’s more time spent building with people, practising creative skills and less time getting up to the bad shit we’re all prone to when we’re bored.

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They force you to take others’ perspectives. That’s the central engine of gameplay: creating main characters – characters who are very different from you – and then putting them in interesting situations. Taking these perspectives and navigating the uncertain social scenarios the game presents is a powerful builder of emotional intelligence.

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What inspired you to do this?

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Back when I was getting in trouble as a kid and in prison, I wanted to get games going inside. Tricky, since it’s not exactly an environment that rewards going around asking people if they wanna play pretend wizards. Also, we weren’t allowed dice, hardcovers or maps – barriers and barriers.

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Are there restrictions on materials or content for people in prison in the USA – and, if so, how do you design games for people in prison?

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Content restrictions vary prison-to-prison and by whoever’s working the mail room that day.

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Component-wise, the big restriction is no dice, since they can be used for gambling. While we sometimes include spinners in games, an easy DIY is filling an index card with all the numbers in your dice’s range. To roll, just close your eyes and point, and whatever number your finger lands closest to is the result.

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It’s also crucial to be able to pitch a game that’s respectable in the prison environment, which can be asking a lot: not too nerdy, not too soft – but also nothing that’s gonna get the game thrown out in the mail room.

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Prison staff familiar with the hobby love it, since they know how the hobby builds community and social skills. Some have been very supportive.

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How are your games distributed to prisons?

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For easy distribution, we design everything into a single book (scenarios, character sheets, spinners etc.) and then mostly send boxes of these books to our friends at the dozen-ish books-to-prisoners workspaces (volunteer run initiatives that send books to incarcerated people in the USA). We also mail sourcebooks directly when prisoners or their people request them.

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What kind of feedback have you received from people inside?

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We get some thank-you letters, which, I’m not such a knuckledragger I won’t admit, I’ve gotten misty-eyed reading at times.

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Knowing you were able to open up a door to better worlds for somebody, those same doors that helped us escape nightmare childhoods and personal tragedies, gave us a connection with hobbyists even through razorwire and concrete – you can’t put a price on any of that.

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What are your hopes for the future of gaming in prisons?

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Conversational games are the most fun you can have just talking with people. It’s just a structured conversation, a method of cooperative storytelling. Because it gets everybody on the same team, gets them solving problems and navigating social scenarios together, it builds social intelligence, creates community, gets people taking others’ perspective and gets everybody feeling all on the same side.

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The hobby's inherent creative element also completely obliterates boredom (perhaps the prisoner's greatest enemy) and throws open endless doors of possibility. There's a specific moment when many first-timers realize the hobby can bring to life absolutely any fiction they can think of – all those years of daydreams and interior stories. You can see how their eyes light up at that realisation and the worlds of creativity it brings out of them over the years – the joy I've seen it create is truly unquantifiable.

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Can people in prison in Australia access these games?

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Our distribution network definitely covers Australia. If you’re interested, just have your people shoot us an email at requests@bullpress.org or send the request in letter via About Time, and, so long as our fund allows, we’ll mail you some sourcebooks.