Frame 352: Making Folklore

"Frame 352: Making Folklore" presents Frame 352, a solo photo-journaling role-playing game in which players construct a folk story about a cryptid by photographing their surroundings and recording "sightings." Play is driven by a coin-pull divination mechanic and involves moving through a locale on foot or by other means, such as skateboarding, bicycling, or canoeing. The game is designed as a pocket-sized, printable one-page foldable zine, and the paper frames it as part of a lineage of small, accessible zine games intended to intervene in larger game spaces, with an emphasis on reproducibility, experimentation, and artistic vision.

The game originated at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to reframe the repetitive short walks recommended by health authorities. Its core creative move is to transform ordinary objects into evidence: graffiti becomes blood, a broken window becomes proof of a nearby lair, and a portrait becomes a record of a close encounter. The paper reports that the game has been played internationally, and presents example playthroughs published on social media as illustrations of this interpretive process.

For its DiGRA 2024 presentation, the author distributed ready-to-play kits containing zine copies, writing tools, an online play guide, and pocket change, and launched a companion website, bestiary352.com, where players submit sightings that accumulate into a collaboratively written folklore bestiary. The paper is a design and presentation account rather than a quantitative study, so it offers no survey sizes or statistical findings; its evidence consists of the game's design, the presentation format, and the examples of community play.