In this episode, Tobias Schank (Saarland University) speaks with Joon-Ho/Ryan Ahn Roden, a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa and former visiting scholar at Saarland University in January 2026. Joon-Ho specializes in Indigenous politics, alternative futures, Critical Ocean Studies, and Border Studies, and brings all four into a tabletop role-playing game of his own design.

Together, Tobias and Joon-Ho reflect on the immersive game sessions conducted with students at Saarland University, in which participants played a collective entity navigating the collapse of human civilization, a crumbling border wall, and the question of what it means to exist in a world defined by foreignness.

They discuss play as a method of knowing, storytelling as resistance, and the next step: presenting their results at the Annual Conference of ...