Ruination Game A Performance Exploring Collective Dimensions of Authorship Through a Spatio-Temporal Record

Abstract

This study proposes the Ruination Game as a performative method for rethinking authorship. Drawing on critiques of conventional historiography – where authorship often reinforces exclusionary truth-making – the project repositions ruins as generative, spatio-temporal records of marginalized narratives. Ruins, shaped by natural forces and fragmented memory, embody collective authorship beyond fixed authority. By combining the conceptual potential of ruination with the open-ended dynamics of play, the Ruination Game allows players to assume shifting roles – ruined witness, reader, and author – transforming both the ruin and themselves. Through this recursive process, ruins become speculative sites where new narratives and knowledge forms emerge. The game thus becomes a critical design-research tool aligned with non-representational theory, emphasizing relationality, temporality, and performativity. It proposes not a preservation of the past, but a continual re-writing through collaborative storytelling and embodied interaction. The Ruination Game invites us to explore authorship as a situated, plural, and already ‘ruined’ act.

Keywords: collective authorship, ruination game, spatio-temporal