Writing in the late 1930s, the Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga emphasized the generative importance of play to human cultures by delineating its fundamentally nested nature. The rules-bound locales of playgrounds, card tables, or board games all provided what Huizinga termed “worlds within worlds,” magic circles inside which a suspension of social reality might afford opportunities for autotelic rapture. While the appeal of such transcendent rhetoric might persist today, it’s increasingly difficult to square with the evolving tribalism and charged politics of contemporary game space, a context that has seen the messaging boards of hotheaded players segue seamlessly with reactionary electoral campaigns, the harassment of feminist critics dovetail with the emergent men’s rights movement, and livestreamed play platforms like Twitch used to document attacks on minority communities, constituting an unprecedented dialogical optics for broadcast terror. It seems apposite, then, that “The World After,” an ambitious narrative project by David Blandy, locates novel conditions for dialogue and the consideration of conflicting perspectives within game space itself. The show includes two works: a collaboratively written role-playing module and an essay film inspired by the science-fiction location in which that module is set. Both are presented in a gallery that has been recalibrated as a …