artist's statement

How’s Next Week is a solo journaling anti-game that begins, spontaneously, whenever the scheduling for your regular tabletop game session falls through.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself in the ironic position of being a scholar-maker deeply interested in tabletop roleplaying games, and yet struggling to find even a moment of respite to actually play them. My queer friends and I, overburdened by everything imploding all the time amid the rise of global fascism, are always pressed for time.

This is compounded by the bittersweet knowledge that, as I’ve transitioned, some of my tabletop gaming groups--some of which had been ongoing for years—quietly went away. Folks stopped reaching out. More recently, academia took me to Alberta, Canada, where I'm blessed to have a degree of institutional legitimacy, but find myself separated from many friends and family members by a violently policed border.

My experiences here are far from unique. I imagine most of us have stories like mine. When living in transition, it feels like "next week" becomes never, more often than not. What I explore with How's Next Week, then, is how we might find play in not playing. Can we take these feelings, as they are, and make them playful? This is where I find such powerful resonance in anti-game and speculative design movements: they allow us to engage alternate imaginaries for what games are and can be.

Maybe I just made this goofy project to cope with the fact that my friends are busy, or—in some cases—that transition means moving and changing and that some folks inevitably won’t know how to move and change with you. But I like to think of HNW as a way of playing in what is, for me, one of the most painful “side affects” (to quote Hil Malatino) of being in community with other players and makers.

I don’t just want us to figure out how to play games together; I want us to learn how we can not-play games together.

CONTENT NOTES Hazardous Materials: The writing and audiovisual media in HNW references the following: body horror, blood, gore, insects, parasites, censorship, and global catastrophe. It engages themes of gaslighting, alienation, loneliness, delusion, and cults.

Precautionary Measures: HNW is likely to provoke feelings of discomfort. This is probably a good thing! HNW is about wrestling with feelings of disappointment, abandonment, betrayal, and anxiety that surround being in community with other players. The game has intended “breaks” and a built-in aftercare process. That said, be kind to yourself. You can stop playing and call a friend at any time.

PB Berge

Dr. PB Berge (they/her) is a media scholar, game maker breaker, self-described ludoarsonist, and an Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design at the University of Alberta. She is the Director of the Discord Academic Research Community, The CRYPT Lab, and a co-founder of Tabletop Research in Practice. Their research falls at the intersection of trans game studies and feminist platform studies and can be found in JCMS, FDG, New Media & Society, Game Studies, Games & Culture, and elsewhere.

last updated: Tue Jan 06 2026 17:01:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)