Game-Changers: The Game
Game-Changers: The Game is a storytelling-driven board game and a game co-design springboard that engages players and “peerticipants” in generative discussions about post-capitalist strategies and the mutually conflicting discourses that underlie the “new economy” buzzwords of the day, such as sharing, smart, circular, collaborative, regenerative and many others.
In the game, two teams that embody seemingly opposite discursive poles – for example Commonism vs. Capitalism, Green Growth vs. Degrowth, or the Hacker Class vs. Vectoralists – compete in creating compelling storylines about transformation in order to lay claim to playing fields consisting of real-world initiatives and related ideas.
To create these stories, the teams must use the Challenge and Intervention cards available to them at a given time or respond to the cards already linked to particular playing fields. This leads to various chains of events, including co-optation and Trojan horse scenarios. Another, third set of cards, Wildcards, is composed of “external” events which can offer unique windows of opportunity for either team or skew the balance in a number of ways.
Audiences (peerticipants) evaluate the players’ storylines in real time and, in doing so, affect their chance of success. They may also submit new Challenges, Interventions and Wildcards, which get fed into the game while it is being played. Thus, the game is or becomes a modular and generative knowledge commoning tool, both on-site and accross its many playthroughs (using a dedicated platform to be developed).