Johannes Sich is author and illustrator of MicroMacro: Crime City, the award-winning cooperative detective game series since 2021 (Spiel des Jahres 2021, As d’Or – Jeu de l’Année 2021), transforming a sprawling, hand-drawn city into an intricate narrative system.

In MicroMacro, characters function as anchor points within a dense visual field: players follow their movements across a large-scale ‘busy picture’ city map, reconstruct timelines, and piece together interconnected crimes. Through these figures, fragmented scenes resolve into coherent narratives. Guided by minimal rules and card-based prompts, the experience unfolds through observation, deduction, and collaboration.

At Pictoplasma, Johannes will speak about how characters can structure complex visual systems – enabling storytelling as an active process of navigation, reconstruction, and discovery.