Is Registration Possible?

Is Registration Possible? is a weird publication, a broken machine in the shape of a classic computer roleplaying game. The player controls a digitally fossilised goblin wandering through a virtual iteration of Charlois, the Rotterdam neighbourhood where the artist has lived for seven years.

This is a Charlois reassembled from publicly available datasets and populated by glitching and twitching pieces of detritus. Like the residents of the real Charlois, they are worried about gentrification, surveillance, and how to assemble a linguistic subject position in the wasteland of neoliberalism.

This project was kindly supported by a research and development grant from CBK Rotterdam

Early writing for some characters was done during the Résidence Internationale de Fontevraud hosted by NEF Animation in l’Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, September 2021.

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NOTES

Being more a directory of text works than a game, this work is unfinished and will likely always remain so. New characters may be added, dialogues revised, the map expanded, etc.

It's not really intended to be played to exhaustion and has no real narrative arc, so if you've wandered around for about half an hour and chatted to a few people then you've sort of "seen" it.

However, the game has some known technical issues:

-Intuitively you'd think clicking the phone or wallet icons a second time would put these things away again. That doesn't happen, and it's surprisingly difficult to make it do so. Sorry. Maybe one day I'll figure it out.

-Generally using your phone and wallet at the same time produces some strange behaviour and should be avoided.

-Picking certain dialogue options causes the game to shut down. This is intentional.

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC license 4.0.