Dear Ludic Liberators,
At the last Ludic Liberation Lab, we played Solarpunk Futures, a new game developed by the artist collective Solarpunk Surf Club. Solarpunk Futures is a Role-Playing Game (RPG) set in a utopian future world called “The Free Earth.” The game uses four decks of cards (Ancestors, Values, Tools, and Challenges) to guide a collaborative storytelling process about how this idyllic world was formed.
The gameplay is centered on enacting an important cultural tradition — “The Festival of Remembrance” — a ceremony in which we honor our ancestors for their struggles in the effort to build the shared utopia. To perform this ritual, each player embodies a randomly-assigned Ancestor (such as Grower, Builder, Reveler, Facilitator, etc.) motivated by a randomly-assigned Value (such as Interdependence, Freedom, Consent, etc.). Each Ancestor then describes how they experienced one randomly-selected collective Challenge (Ableist Infrastructure, Mass Surveillance, Gun Violence, etc.) and the players jointly recount how they eventually solved this massive crisis with several randomly-distributed Tools (Parks, Memes, Unions, Graffiti… etc.).
I emphasize the randomness of the card assignments because each card stack had many possible options (between 12-46), but our actual card draws didn’t feel random at all. Instead they felt mystically sticky, like mirrors reflecting the already existing games we brought to the table. The player who announced they were skeptical of the game’s premise randomly pulled the “Critic” Ancestor card to embody. The player who is a real life farmer drew the “Grower” Ancestor with Agro-Ecology as their Tool. At least one of the players came in really preoccupied with the Russo-Ukranian war, and it just so happened that the Challenge card we pulled to tackle for our Festival of Remembrance was the problem of “Borders” — which also happens to be the focus of another player’s scholarly work. In other words, the card draws felt divinatory rather than random, like a Tarot spread that seems to reflect the question back to its Querent.
Unlike the other post-capitalist/futurist games we played this spring at the Lab (The Transition Year and Arcology World), Solarpunk Futures actually had a clear win condition: to arrive at the ending of how our ancestors overcame the challenge and achieved our present utopia. In other words, we had to resolve the crisis rather than just explore it for a while. However, just like at the previous Labs, we failed to resolve anything. After almost an hour of play, our pathways out of the problem of “Borders” felt fractured and conflicted — each of us floating in our own separate world, either feeling a sense of homelessness or stuckness or defending our vulnerable bioregional commune.
I wonder if the Solarpunk Futures gamemakers have tested every Challenge in the deck and given it a difficulty score, because after playing “Borders” we were ready to declare that challenge the hardest one. With immigrants, anarchists, travelers, and stewards of folk traditions among our group of players, we were all personally concerned with the problem of “Borders” in one way or another but none of us had a readymade answer to what the solution to “borders” could even be. Some of us didn’t want borders to exist, others wanted to protect them from violation, still others grieved their impending loss. As a result, the pressure to end up in a Utopia where we had already resolved these conflicts paradoxically didn’t give us enough space to properly unpack them and explore their contradictions. While one Ancestor player imagined building a strong local economy, another Ancestor floated in a borderless vertigo after a massive land-changing event. When I lamented that in our border-free utopia travel is no longer the same, because many places have changed or disappeared, another player protested, “Why can’t you travel? I don’t think it’s a utopia if you can’t go somewhere else and see what it’s like!” Was that an example of honoring our ancestors for their struggles with each other?
Ironically, trying to solve problem of “Borders” through forced utopian thinking made us feel more separate in the process. “We aren’t talking about the same utopia,” we realized after a while. If for a moment, a utopia — a society we’re all forced to agree on — was achieved at a global level, it would certainly become quickly contested or conflicted by those who have some inkling of dissent.
In a previous Lab Report, I proposed that the other previous games we played this spring — Arcology World and The Transition Year — could be called Peace Games. Unlike War Games, I see Peace Games as focusing on the messy process of coexisting in community rather than simulating a competitive strategy aimed towards victory and avoiding defeat. But I felt like Solarpunk Futures (at least the way we played it this time) was actually more similar to a War Game — it involved reverse-strategizing against challenges that were seemingly imposed by others, when in actuality the “problem” of “Borders” lived inside all of us just as much.
At the end, Solarpunk Futures didn’t really feel as much a game than as a kind of societal oracle spread that left us ultimately unsatisfied — “your future is stormy and uncertain,” it suggested, as if we didn’t know already.
I still really liked many aspects of the game: the iridescent aesthetics are gorgeous and the cartomancy dynamic was thrilling to experience. I also really enjoyed coming up with my Ancestor character using only a few little hints (I was an Internationalist Reveler with Protests and Memes as my weapons). The experience of weaving a collective story together from many different threads was challenging but unifying. But if I was to play the game again, I would release the pressure to have us end up with a certain utopia. Instead, I would start the game by inviting all the players to describe what our Future Solarpunk World feels and looks like — assuming that it’s still challenging and conflicted — so that we could have a shared compass to orient us. Perhaps in this process we would also define a limited size and scope of our share community rather than try to solve massive challenges at a global level. Finally, I would invite the Ancestors to consider how they themselves contributed to perpetuating the Challenges of the past, and what helped them uncouple from those practices as they moved towards our (still imperfect) solarpunk future.
“We cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world,” writes Donna Haraway in Staying With The Trouble, “We become with each other or not at all.” I appreciate the hopeful spirit of imagining a Free Earth in which all conflict is in the past, but I know too much about living with difference to think that conflict can be eliminated. Conflict is inevitable and in fact necessary for Peace.
Perhaps by lurching towards utopia* inside Solarpunk Futures and other games from this Spring experiment, I’ve realized that I don’t actually want to impose a utopia on anyone — including myself! — but that there are still so many other ways to arrange worlds than are interesting, beautiful, stimulating, thrilling and certainly worth playing with.
Thank you Mars, Zenovia Zemliachka, and Spartacus Chiffon for playing Solarpunk Futures with me! And thanks to Solarpunk Futures for providing a print-and-play gamebook and cards that I was able to convert into a playingcards.io room for virtual play. (Download the .pcio file here and import it here).
I’m still finalizing the plans for summer Labs, but they’re going to be tangled and problematic and relational, inspired by Donna Haraway and some other trickstery troublemakers. I’ll let you know very soon, but save your 2nd Thursdays of the month for me anyway!
Happy to be imperfectly yours in our messy complicated world,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer