Dear Ludic Liberators,
This Lab Report is coming out several weeks after the April Lab, because it actually took us several weeks to play the game Arcology World — a tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) set in a solarpunk post-capitalist future. Turns out TTRPGs are complicated and aren’t so easily contained into a single 90-minute time increment! During the scheduled Lab, all we had the time to do was create our Solarpunk characters, so the we decided to meet again a week later to play out a full scene in our Arcology World. The extra time also gave me the chance to closely study the rules of this game system — all 76 pages of them!!!!!!
Here’s an outline of what’s coming up in this Lab Report:
A short overview of Arcology World’s game mechanics
Summary and artifacts from our play
Results — what happened and what was surprising about this game
Discussion of our research question: what does playing Arcology World teach us about building and living in a post-capitalist future?
A Preview of Future Research (i.e., what’s coming up in the next lab!)
1 - Overview of the Game
Arcology World, designed by online artist Dyer Rose, is a “Powered by the Apocalypse” (PbtA) game, which means that it’s inspired by and/or in some ways makes use of mechanics of the game Apocalypse World. There are two key dynamics to the PbtA game framework: relational entanglements and emergent worldmaking. Games built on this system have a lot of freedom to advance their own unique visions. Here are some design elements that I found interesting about Arcology World specifically:
Rather than special powers, spells, or acumen, characters in Arcology World are assigned relational qualities like charisma, aggression, subtlety, analysis, or drama. These qualities influence both what characters can do and the likely success of the players’ moves in the game.
The backstory for each character includes a relational history with others in the game. Players start with a negative or positive “trust” statistic between one another that changes over the course of the game.
Being a guide/game master in Arcology World consists of offering the initial setting and crises and monitoring “clocks” that keep track of progress towards a catastrophe or resolution; unlike other game-master powered games, it does not involve pre-planning an elaborate adventure plot beforehand.
For players, the game involves responding to the shared crisis, while constantly managing relationships and personal mental health via trust and stress stats.
The “Solarpunk”-ness of the game is achieved by suggesting a loose aesthetic moodboard (e.g., green architecture, organic shapes, high-tech) and specifying a set of character occupations. In Arcology World, characters can be Agriculturalists, Zoologists, Doctors, Layabouts, or Mediators. These roles give the players particular strategic orientations as well a menu of possible role-specific moves. What roles are excluded are just as important as those included: there aren’t any warriors or fighters in this game, nor are there violent moves.
The game comes with an online character generator! This tool makes a lot of initial choices for the player, while still allowing them to make the character their own by elaborating a relational history with others in the game.
2 - LLL’s Arcology World
As a guide for our Arcology World scene, I drew on vague ideas about Solarpunk aesthetics and some relational practices I associate with visions of a cool future. Specifically:
Dome-like architecture like at Arcosanti
Advances in Sound Healing (inspired by a book I’ve been reading called The Humming Effect by Jonathan and Andi Goldman)
Sacred Chanting Meditation Practices (inspired by some recent experiences of Kirtan)
Collective Sensemaking Gatherings like Warm Data Labs and The Stoa
Conscious refusal of manipulative technologies and news cycles, similar to the refusal of “Age of the Feuilleton” in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game
There was a lot of room to influence the game world based on my personal inclinations, intuitions, and interests — to create an intentional “taste menu” of the future (a dynamic we also explored in March’s Lab on The Transition Year).
In the Arcology World I set up, the players lived in Harmonium, an autonomous self-sustaining metropolis powered by eco-, solar- and regenerative- technology, especially known for its advanced sound innovations in a number of fields from healing to animal communication to agriculture to music-making. We gathered during the weekly “Harmony Circle” — a mandatory event for citizens that’s kind of like church, kind of like a party, sometimes kind of like court, kind of like a general assembly, kind of like group therapy.
To create conflict and drama, I also had to invent a community crisis caused by a powerful ecological mutation, so I introduced a new species of termites that ate aluminium. These “terminators” posed an ecological threat to Harmonium’s solar panel network, which powered the majority of the city’s infrastructure.
A Harmony Circle made up of a Subtle Layabout, Charming Zoologist, and Dramatic Agriculturalist reacted to the crisis while also managing crushes, tensions, and resentments between each other. What happened and what did we learn about post-capitalism in the process?
3 - Results
The Lab players didn’t solve the termite crisis or “win” the game of Arcology World in any recognizable way, and we didn’t have enough playtime to get to a full catastrophe or social collapse. The experience was more like awkwardly hanging out with a group of acquaintances in a barely futuristic landscape. Players exchanged gossip, worried about being excluded, acted territorial, and made charming amends. They failed to mobilize any meaningful collective action, but somehow hypothesized a potential cat-purr-based intervention into the termite attack, grew a new type of algae that could protect the city’s infrastructural wires, and made time to appreciate the beautiful view on their way to a solar farm.
Despite the lack of major drama or resolution, our play resulted in some valuable insights about social forces that might be important to consider in our quest to build a post-capitalist future:
Our roles influence what we see and don’t see, AND everyone has a valuable way of seeing. One of the more interesting dynamics to observe in the game was the role of the “Layabout,” who, unlike “Agriculturalist” or “Doctor” did not appear to have any obviously valuable or productive function in society. According to the game’s manual, Layabouts “nearly always prove themselves to be assets to the community when the chips are down and crisis rears its head.” In our game, the Layabout player didn’t panic about the impending “terminator” crisis and instead made time to appreciate moments of beauty and wonder in the shared world. Their relaxed perspective created invitations for other players to pause, reset, and imagine new unprecedented solutions to the community’s problems. Interestingly, the role of the Layabout isn’t one of “artist” or “sage” in the game, but explicitly names someone whose contribution is the ongoing refusal of the collective project.
Relational histories and tendencies influence how we collaborate with others, which influences how we solve problems and build worlds. Our characters’ randomly designated qualities — subtle, dramatic, and charming — had a lot of influence for how the players acted and how their acts were taken up by other players. The Charming player had a LOT of influence and power, while the Subtle player compulsively avoided the limelight, to the point of sabotaging good opportunities for the group. Playing a game with full awareness that someone has extra charm, avoids attention, or always defaults to drama made us delight in these variations as the players manifested them in the game, and appreciate the way they shaped how to players worked together towards harmony and adaptation.
The solutions already available in the world significantly influence what we see as possible. I didn’t expect the players to solve the termite crisis with music, but because “advanced sound innovation” was already primed as a form of expertise in our world, multiple players suggested sound healing strategies to disarm the dangerous termites (e.g., play a melody to reorient them, tap into the power of a cat’s purr to calm them down). The ideas were radical AND seemed more and more plausible with each suggestion. Watching this happen made me acutely aware of how many creative approaches to current problems we may be foreclosing with our limited set of solution-finding mechanisms.
Allowing randomness to influence the outcome of our efforts invites us to stretch into spaces we are afraid to choose. In the debrief after character generation session, players shared that they loved having characters randomly generated for them via the online tool, because it gently forced them to take on qualities they might feel uncomfortable choosing deliberately, such as being “charming” or “dramatic.” Randomness also came from rolling dice to determine the outcome of moves. When a roll ended up in a “miss,” the outcome was just as revealing, interesting, and thrilling as a “win”— maybe even more so! The randomizing mechanisms of character generator and dice functioned like non-identification with characters in the Transition Year, allowing players to practice some detachment from the outcome.
Finally, the game revealed the thrill of making relational baggage and entanglements visible. During character generation, players nervously asked each other for consent to declare a positive or negative history with them. “If it’s okay with you, will you have a grudge on me from a past mistake? Will you share a +1 trust with me based on a positive memory?” During the game, they declared their changing trust and stress conditions if they felt excluded or considered. By making relational stats uneven from the start, the game motivated players to tend to their relationships at each turn, making the play feel a lot more grounded in messy human drama rather than ambitious techno-utopian visions, which is probably like what the real future is going to actually feel like.
4 - Discussion
Ludic Liberation Lab isn’t just for having FUN. It is, of course, very fun, but our goal is to discover, together, what play can teach us about liberation — the process of becoming free from bondage and oppression. Our oppressions are both systemic — like extractive capitalism, and internalized — like limiting self beliefs. Although Arcology World had a lot of complicated rules (this report doesn’t quite convey the extent of it), the game exposed some taken-for-granted rules of the current world, such as:
DO act as the kind of person you always are — DON’T display new or exaggerated forms of expression;
DO try to be visibly productive or directly valuable to the community — DON’T be “a layabout”;
DO try to control the outcome — DON’T leave your fate to CHANCE;
DO rely on the same tried and true old solutions — DON’T experiment with something out of left field (like cat-inspired sound healing as a strategy to deflect termite invasion!)
DO pretend you’re starting every relationship with a blank slate — DON’T acknowledge the baggage and projections you may be bringing to social encounters.
These taken-for-granted DO’s are subtle yet pervasive limitations to how we play our present game. Arcology World gives us some new roles and moves to try on but reminds us that even in a post-capitalist solarpunk future we are still going to be vulnerable, cringy, petty, and needy relational beings. In other words, even if we manage to adapt to climate change and build a green economy, humans aren’t going to become perfectly wise or emotionally mature overnight, but that’s okay.
Arcology World is another example of a Peace Game that can help us expand our repertoire of aesthetics, technologies, civic designs, and relational modalities by inviting the following questions into consideration:
In imagining future worlds, are remembering to make room for and value people who do “nothing” or nothing “productive”?
How much are we aware of relational and affective tendencies in ourselves and our worldmaking collaborators? Do we accept others’ talents, fears, and needs and know how they influence our own reactions and responses?
What solution biases are we imagining for the future based on our current “taste menu” of available possibilities? Do we default to solutions by technology? business? surgery? war? What other kinds innovations are we foreclosing that we want to put on our future taste menu?
Will the future make room for ways to reinvent ourselves and our worlds, to try on new values and goals? As the demand for adaptation increases, how can we cultivate the capacity for detachment from our current selves and desires?
Are we acknowledging the relational baggage we are bringing into encounters with others, even with those we’ve never met before? Do we ever start a relationship on equal terms, as blank slates, or are we always undoing and repairing some kind of relational karma?
These are big and serious questions but a great way to explore them is to play games because games give us a safe space to try on new rules and experiment with different possibilities!
5 - Future Research
We’ve got one more game in our solarpunk post-capitalist Spring series! During May’s Ludic Liberation Lab we will play Solarpunk Futures designed by artist collective Solarpunk Surf Club. I’m very excited to try this game because it has a mechanic for channeling our future ancestors and dialogically revealing our path to a solarpunk utopia! The game is influenced by cartomancy, afrofuturism, social ecology, and more!
Come reverse engineer the future you want to see in the world — register for the Lab here!
Thank you Darby, Hoyt, Adelyn, Bella, Lupe, Carmen, and Bobbie for your delightful differences and decisions during the game, and for sharing a moment in the world of Harmonium with me 🎶
Grateful to Be Harmonizing into a Solarpunk Future With You 🕉,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer ♾️🎲