Keeping the commons in motion through collective play

Dear Rok, could you walk us through your project and the core ideas that shaped its development?

Game-Changers: The Game is a game show and co-curatorial format for staging discursive battles over economic and governance futures. Two teams, role-playing opposing ideological poles — e.g. Capitalism vs. Commonism — use prompt cards to improvise arguments, storylines, or micro-performances to win over contested playing fields like universal basic services, platform coop, or well-being budget, while an audience evaluates what lands. Around this format, I’m creating a digital Game Commons living archive where prompt cards, fields, editions, and performances become modular, reusable, relational, and open to user contributions.

What drew you to work with blockchain structures in this project, and what new possibilities did this medium open up for you?

Blockchain interests me as a possible tool for commoning infrastructure. As a post-capitalist economics generalist of sorts, I’ve been in dialogue with crypto-commons communities for years, and that space has informed my thinking around attribution, patronage, governance, and value flows. In this project, blockchain opens possibilities for reputation systems, non-speculative support, and financial co-governance: People can help fund card artworks and the archive as public goods, while contributors remain credited, the commons stays open, and users have meaningful say in where resources go.

At what stage did blockchain become essential to your process, and were there moments when its use felt limiting, excessive, or conceptually challenging?

Honestly, blockchain is not essential to the project’s basic functioning. The game, archive, and game commoning can run on good old Web 2, and accessibility is a real concern. If I use it, it would be selectively, to acknowledge participation, recognize labor, support patronage, and timestamp collective decisions. The challenge is to keep it from becoming excessive, exclusionary, or symbolic fluff. I’m interested in lightweight, non-transferable credentials and open-release patronage, so the question is less »how do I put this on-chain?« and more »where does this genuinely help commoning?«

How did the residency shape your practice? Could you reflect on what you learned and how exchanges with fellow participants influenced your work?

The residency gave me the push to move from a long-held vision into an actual working prototype. That shift from imagining and writing to building, testing, and revising clarified the project enormously. Conversations with mentors and fellow participants were especially important in this regard, because they made the project feel less like a private obsession and more like something that could become a shared social organism. It was also energizing to see others bring very different visions to life while collectively unpacking what blockchain might mean for radical futures.

What frictions, constraints, or questions were you aiming to explore or challenge through this project?

One core question is how an open cultural project like this can avoid becoming an »open design graveyard,« that is, a commons in theory, but rarely reused, cared for, developed further, or documented back into a living community of practice and play. I wanted to test what happens if you build not just a game as a downloadable PDF with a Creative Commons license slapped onto it for good measure, but rituals, attribution, lineage, recurrence, co-governance, and creative funding mechanisms around it. I’m also exploring how the game’s materials become relational through use and user contributions, and start to form a living political memory that can be surfaced.

How do you envision the trajectory of your project beyond the residency period?

The next phase is a recurring online series of game sessions. That would give the project a steady form through which it can keep evolving, as each event can reactivate the archive while generating new cards, editions, documented performances, and new relations between these materials. In parallel, I want to keep refining the platform as a living archive and composition studio, where people can create materials, fork them, and feed them back into future designs. The vision is ambitious, but it should grow through repeated use, community-building, and gradual tooling upgrades and tweaks. Thankfully, after dozens of playthroughs over the years, there is already a supportive community in place.

What are your thoughts on the project’s long-term sustainability – both in technical terms and within a broader social or cultural context?

Game–Changers becomes sustainable if it works on several levels at once: as a physical game, an online living archive and composition studio, a recurring game show, and a framework for self-organized editions or editions co-curated with partner organizations. I also want to replace AI placeholder imagery with commissioned artworks and test a non-speculative crypto-commons layer for patronage, contribution recognition, and shared stewardship. The aim is to put the game on the map as one of several ways critical public discourse can be engaged both meaningfully and playfully, and to inspire alternatives literacy, design literacy, hope, agency, and new forms of organization.

Barbara Cueto conducted this interview in collaboration with Sarah Donderer (Solitude Digital Cultures)