Dear Ludic Liberators,
At last week’s Ludic Liberation Lab, Jon Hook and Michael Laub invited us into the Absurd world of SURREALPUNK! – a Role-Playing Game influenced by psychotherapy, D&D, and Marxist theory. We created characters whose features and traits included things like “objective empathy” – a psychic sensitivity to the feelings and traumas of objects (especially those found in the trash), whose languages are “only spoken and written in the dark,” and whose valuable proficiency might be “making others a warm meal.” The character mechanics also incorporate trauma that accumulates over the course of multiple adventures and begins to express as addiction, chronic ennui, or compulsive side hustling. It’s a world where everyone feels on the precipice of a lurking void, so they wander around in an endless quest to transcend the burden of their own awareness.
As we learned about SURREALPUNK! and tinkered with our character sheets, I invited the Lab participants to ambiently jam on “-punk” as a suffix by changing their display name to the kind of -punk they are. We’ve heard of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Solarpunk, Seapunk, now SURREALPUNK!, but what other kinds of -punk could we unearth and invent, and what aesthetics, ethics, lifestyles, and ideologies would these new punks imply and embody?
Throughout the lab, we proposed at least 20 types of -punks from Softpunk to Philosophypunk to Lipstickpunk to Gleanerpunk, in the process stretching and subverting and revealing the nuance and function of the suffix. After the lab I kept thinking about “punk” as a form of identity performance, and how it relates to other kind of performative modes, such as drag (hypergender performance), goth (a romantic preoccupation with death and darkness as aesthetic, including in ways that actually contribute to health and longevity; see: health goth), or to the related activities of cosplay and LARPing.
What makes punk different from others on this list, I think, is that it necessarily embeds an ethic of refusal of the dominant, the popular, the authoritative while simultaneously embracing and celebrating the marginalized, stigmatized, disenfranchised.
The umbrella “punk” ideology refuses the political and cultural expressions of the status quo – hierarchy, conformity, materialism – while embracing their opposites – anarchy, experimentation, scrappy collective joy. The various subpunks refuse specific aspects of social organization and corresponding aesthetics (“steampunk” refuses the sterility and speed of modernity, “solarpunk” rejects infrastructural dependency on extractivism and planetary exploitation, “seapunk” challenges… the hegemony of above-ground dwelling 🤷?). Following this heuristic, SURREALPUNK! the Game refuses the dominance of the rational, the sensible, the normal, and the certain, making space for the strange, the dreamlike, the excessive. Its refusal is aimed simultaneously at the late stage capitalist realism of our own world AND the fantasy monster battlelands of typical RPG settings. In SURREALPUNK! universe, wars are not fought against dictatorships or dragons with military strategy or magical swords, but conducted in the realm of the psyche, which of course is the illusion machine that creates the totality of the world.
The deeper we dug into the game’s storyscape, the more we found ourselves desiring to embrace the refused and marginalized aspects of our conscious personas. One of us became a trash poet, a mad prophet of historical garbage; another wanted to play someone who, exhausted from the long hours of working class grind, found genuine relief in food (Kitchenpunk!); I found myself wanting to damage my character’s Psyche on purpose to explore being a creature with an extreme neurological “quirk.” Rather than inventing fantasy adventurers with superior dexterity, charisma, and an arsenal of mystic weaponry, we chose to exaggerate our hidden urge to struggle and surprise and self-confuse.
And it was liberating! I felt that through making a SURREALPUNK! self, I could begin trying on identities that I fear and don’t understand, ones that would certainly disappoint my mother, while imagining what kind of advantages my unruly persona might give me in the land of the absurd. After all, you couldn’t win in Wonderland by being normal.
We didn’t have time to embark on a proper SURREALPUNK! quest, but I hope there will be an opportunity to do so in the future so that my Neurodivergent Swamppunk gets to have an adventure in the land of Kilter. To stay updated about SURREALPUNK!’s developments, follow the game on Instagram.
And that wraps up a second year of Ludic Liberation Labs and Lab Reports! Wow! Here’s a rapid reminder of all the things we played with this year:
Surrealpunk character creation (you are here)
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING AND READING THE REPORTS.
And! There is still so much playing and liberating to do!
Is there something you’d really love to explore through Ludic Liberation research in 2022? A topic you’d like to lead a Lab on? I believe that ANYTHING can be played with and I would love to collaborate with people who want to explore the relationship between play and liberation, including by inventing completely new games for us to play together!
Reply or post a comment to let me know what kind of topics you would love to see Ludic Liberation Lab tackle in the upcoming year:
I leave you with these messages from the greats:
“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.”
― Salvador Dali
“To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.”
– Patti Smith
In Playful Refusal 🤘,
Natalia (aka post-soviet punk, soft punk, lipstick punk, ice cream punk, cozy punk)
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer
I want to play with ambivalence! Like what do we do when we are simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by something. I don't have particular ideas about how to play with ambivalence, but I feel like I could come up with something if you want me to.