WORKSHOP: MAKING GAMES WITH DOWNPOUR (31 MARCH 2026, LONDON)
Workshop: Making Games with Downpour
06:00pm - 08:00pm, Tue 31 Mar 2026
16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F7LW
Nearest station: Oxford Circus
On 31 March 2026, London’s The Photographers’ Gallery hosts a workshop built around a deceptively simple premise: make a fortune-telling machine using nothing but a smartphone. Held at 16–18 Ramillies Street as part of Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft — the gallery’s spring programme mapping the history of online communities and DIY web culture — the event introduces participants to Downpour, a mobile application created by London-based artist and technologist V Buckenham that allows users to design and share interactive games entirely from their phones.
The question at its centre is structural: who gets to build digital worlds?
Professional game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine demand considerable time investment, technical literacy, and in many cases financial resources. The independent game community has been responding to these barriers for over a decade. Tools like Twine, which reduced interactive fiction to branching hypertext; Bitsy, which compressed entire game worlds into a grid of eight-by-eight tiles; and Pico-8, a self-described fantasy console operating under deliberately constrained specifications, each opened the medium to practitioners who had previously been excluded from it. Downpour extends this lineage by removing the final remaining friction: the desktop computer itself. Games can now be conceived, assembled, and distributed from the same device most people already carry.
The logic of the tool reflects its maker’s trajectory. Buckenham first reached wide attention with Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a browser-based platform allowing anyone to build a generative Twitter bot without writing a line of code. At its peak, the tool hosted over 40,000 user-made bots, many circulating through online literary, artistic, and activist communities as acts of playful authorship. The project was less a technical achievement than a structural one: it relocated creative agency by eliminating the expertise requirement.
Downpour pursues the same logic at a different scale, applied to the game form.
Buckenham’s practice moves between making and organising, production and infrastructure. She worked as designer and developer on Beasts of Balance, Sensible Object’s hybrid physical-digital boardgame, and contributed to the narrative design of Mutazione, the acclaimed gardening and storytelling game by Die Gute Fabrik. She served as co-director of Now Play This — the experimental game festival founded by Holly Gramazio and held annually at Somerset House — and has collaborated with the independent events collective Wild Rumpus. Taken together, these roles describe a practice oriented less toward individual authorship than toward the conditions under which creative work becomes possible in the first place.
The workshop’s chosen subject is strategically apt. From the Magic 8 Ball to tarot card generators, predictive devices occupy a peculiar cultural position: mechanically simple, yet capable of producing genuine ambiguity, meaning, and even ritual. By asking participants to construct their own versions, the session reframes game design as an act of cultural production open to anyone. Participants are invited to bring a book or magazine whose text fragments become raw material for the system, embedding personal reference within an algorithmic structure.
Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft frames internet creativity as vernacular practice: homemade web culture as legitimate field of inquiry rather than marginal curiosity. The Downpour workshop is a live extension of that argument. .