Game-Changers: The Game

Rok Kranjc
Rok Kranjc
Game-Changers: The Game

Event
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
12 November 2022, 10 AM – 12.30 PM

With: Rok Kranjc, Ela Kagel, Pekko Koskinen, Filip Dobranić, Anja Blaj, Gregor Žavcer, Felix Fritsch

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

In the framework of Tactics & Practice #13: From Commons to NFTs


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).

THE AUTHOR

Rok Kranjc is an eco-social transformations researcher at the Institute for Ecology and a translator and editor at the Journal for the Critique of Science. Internationally, he is affiliated with the P2P Foundation, the Participatory Futures Global Swarm and the Shared Futures platform, and is the founder of Futurescraft, a research and design studio for experiential futures, generative games and other forms of engagement with alternative (regenerative, post-growth, commons-based) economies. He has translated several books in the fields of political ecology and ecological economics to his native Slovenian. His original publications include the chapter Commons Economies in Action: Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems, co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos for Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities (2022) and the article Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons, published in Frontiers (2021). He is currently co-writing a university textbook about and co-developing a VR experience of commons-based economies with Dr Peter Bloom.


CREDITS

Author: Rok Kranjc
Mentor: Maja Burja

Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2022

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

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