It Could Happen Here - Solarpunk Gaming

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

We talk to two members of the artist collective Solarpunk Surf Club about their new solarpunk game Solarpunk Futures, gaming as a method of education and organizing, and the importance of kinds of organizing that don't contribute to burnout. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is remarkably today not really so much about things falling apart. It is mostly about things about things in fact getting better and how we can do that um i'm your host christopher uh with me today is garrison and we're also joined by nick

and max who are two members of the artist collective solar punk surf club who have released a very very interesting new game that we are here in part to talk about called solar punk futures hello nick hi max how are you two doing? Hey, doing well. Thanks. Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, excited to have you two on.

So I guess my first question is, how did you two get into game design and sort of first have the idea to do a sort of like political gaming project like this? It's a good question so we're not um we're definitely not game designers by profession or trade um we're members of the artist collective solar punk surf club and we're particularly interested in creating artwork and social practice that prefigures these kinds of egalitarian futures that we'd like to see in the world and so this game was something that we've been kind of a project that we've been thinking about and sitting on for a little while and was kind of something that made us excited, got us excited. And we think there's a whole bunch of other reasons that we think it's a really cool project to work on,

an important project. And yeah, so we kind of took a deep dive headfirst into the world of game design and learning how to do that over the past year or so okay so how about we i guess also start with i guess explaining what solar punk futures is and sort of how it works and then we can get into the sort of political aspect of like the sort of game design project so solar punk futures is a storytelling game where players imagine pathways to a desirable future by collaboratively overcoming real-world challenges. The object of the game is to collectively remember one of the stories that grew into our utopia. The idea is that through backcasting,

where you assume within the context of the game that players are already in utopia and merely remembering back to their ancestors' struggle, that players can transcend the idea that what currently exists must necessarily exist, which social theorist Murray Bookchin described as the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. So we wanted to make a system to facilitate collaborative performance, sort of a, we call it a collaborative performance of memory,

but one that combines sincerity with laughter and speculative storytelling. The game also combines a lot of different elements that we saw in other games, collaborative, you know, collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay, some elements of role playing, and different kind of mechanics that we thought would build out that kind of, like I said earlier, those prefigurations of those egalitarian worlds. So we were trying to make a game that had the fiction and the idea of utopia built in uh in terms of the goals of the game but it was also we wanted to build it into some of the mechanics of how the game is actually played too um my question from here is sort of well i mean i

guess firstly is i think what sort of specifically drew you to solar punk as sort of an aesthetic for for this like i know there's been a lot of sort of like the kind of capitalist catastrophe while maintaining a radical optimism about humanity's hopes for a communal ecological future nick was just speaking to this um we see it as a restorative justice process on a planetary scale among people, between humans and non-human nature. So that means reclaiming pieces of the past pre-capitalist culture. That means material accountability for old practices. And it also means radical adaptability towards new ones. And it also means radical adaptability towards new ones. I think it provided a useful way of synthesizing several currents that we had already been thinking about and involved in between new media and social practice. Thinking not just about images and objects in space, but also the

set of social relations that those things produce. Yeah, we're also, we're like partisans within solar punk. I don't think there's, I don't think there's too many pro-capitalists within solar punk, but I think there are some people who are maybe drawn to the aesthetic, but don't necessarily have a politics. But we do think that there's a kind of a latent horizontalism, a latent anarchistic politics in a lot of the aesthetics around solar punk. as an aesthetic that is being defined collaboratively by people online and elsewhere, you know, we wanted to kind of stake out a position about what we thought a really realistic utopian world might look and feel like. Yeah. And I think there's something else I know YouTube, I'm very passionate about is about specifically using games as a medium to do this and sort of this as like this kind of storytelling remembrance as a specifically political intervention.

So could you talk a bit more about, you know, like, yeah, you know, the questions like, okay, so why this and not on, you know, on the sort of less like, like, why this and not a guerrilla gardening or why this and not some you know on the sort of less like like why this and not guerrilla gardening why this and not some other kind of organizing etc etc um yeah i'm interested to hear you too say about that yeah well i'm not gonna hate on guerrilla gardening i definitely think it's a situation yeah um it's also in the game yeah that's true it's it's one of the cards uh one of the tools that you get to use, uh, as an ancestor. Um, yeah, I think,

you know, there's a lot of different things that we were thinking about when we were thinking about why a game, uh, that I got a little bit into earlier, but you know, for one, um,

I think it helps reach a broad and often depoliticized audience, uh, broad, and often depoliticized audience with a fun way to kind of engage in some thorny political questions. I think that games as a participatory medium were especially interesting for people who are interested in sort of anarchistic modes of teaching and education, like education through doing rather than lecture although you know we're we also read a lot of good political theories so i'm not i'm not opposed to

that um and then i i think uh you know games are also fun and there's a. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of, uh, political organizing and activism work that happens out there that feels that's hard and that is necessary to do. But just because a lot of the important work to be done is hard doesn't mean everything that's hard is important and everything that's fun is trifling or not going to help us get where we're going and overthrow capitalism and build a new world. So, yeah, those are some of the reasons. Yeah, and I think that's especially sort of an interesting point, because I think a lot of what happens in leftist spaces, you get a bunch of people doing stuff, and they burn out really fast, because, you know, you're doing an enormous amount of work, it's all miserable, a lot of the times you're getting physically assaulted.

And like, I think that's one of the things that's interesting to me about this is you need other forms of sort of community building and sort of like, you need other forms of organizing that do not involve you being repeatedly traumatized over and over again. And that, yeah. other forms of organizing that do not involve you being repeatedly traumatized over and over again and that yeah and especially just working on something like this and then i don't know just playing with your friends and having things that are like collaborative and joyful and community building is i think very important as a way to just you know even just this is not a very basic logistical level but prevent people from burning out. Yeah. And, and I definitely think that there's a role there to prevent people from burning out and, and inspiring people with some of the fun ideas, the ideas that they come up with when

they're not looking at a Google doc meeting notes, but instead they're playing a card game and maybe drinking a couple of beers and they're like, oh, how would I combine guerrilla gardening and, you know, performance art to bring about, you know, to solve a specific challenge of capitalism like deforestation? Or these are some of the cards in the game. And so I think it can be inspiring. You know, it's also it can be inspiring it's also it can be educational I played with some family I think the first time I played when we got the physical copy

that wasn't a playtest was with some family and they don't necessarily identify as leftists of any kind but we had a really fun game where we explored ideas of deconstructing borders and uh you know they were it wasn't like i was guiding them in this direction it was just kind of the assumption of the game that there was utopia got beyond this ingrained capitalist realism that there just isn't that there isn't an alternative and they're like okay well the game says we're already in utopia so that means there's no private property and i was like whoa that's a

that's a jump i didn't expect from my uh from my family welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast

one thing i'm interested in in terms of how it functions as a game is like balancing the actual more i don't know fun basedbased role-playing game elements with its kind of structure as a thought exercise and a world-building game? How did you approach trying to get a balance of fun role-playing as well as this type of reverse world-building? I was still a little bit on the why a game in the first place question, but I'm also intrigued by the balancing fun and politics question. If you don't mind, I wanted to go back to the why a game for just a second.

Because I think maybe it will lead into this. Yeah, yeah. Games are, you know, an ancient form of art. I know I said we work in new media before, but games are actually an ancient form of art, and I would argue social practice. There's a game called Senate. There's a game called The Royal Game of Ur,

which both date to 5, 5000 years ago in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, respectively. We did in making the game, we did a bunch of research on the history of games. There's a 15th century game called the Game of the Goose present day italy that paired like these gorgeous illustrations also with like didactic moral instruction in the early early 20th century the surrealists created a series of games um with the intention of breaking through traditional thought patterns and unleashing the, the potentials of the unconscious. They also wanted to subvert academic modes of inquiry.

And then today, you know, some of our most popular tabletop games, you know, you, I think Nick was mentioning this earlier, how they can sometimes inscribe oppressive logics. So, you know, rather than a game where you're competing against other players to drive them

into poverty, or a game where you're trying to colonize other players' land, you know, for the purpose of world domination, we wanted to make a game that actually practices the cooperation, interdependence, care, consent, these things that will be needed, you know, for it actually to transcend the social and ecological crises of our day. And kind of to that point, you know, I would say that games always reflect the beliefs and norms of their historical context. So with Solar Punk Futures, we wanted to kind of flip the script

and project using the modalities of speculative fiction, collaborative performance, as I mentioned, the values and mores of a desirable future. the values and mores of a desirable future. So games are a very human thing, an ancient human thing. And why do people play games? As I mentioned, education is part of it,

but also building social bonds is another important piece. And that always is a company. It's a very academic way of talking about it maybe, but it is it is fun it has to be fun that's why people do it yeah in terms of the to get a little deeper into the balancing question you know every game is a balance between a bunch of different competing factors there's a lot of people who would talk about the balance between randomness and planning in games and the balance between structure and freeform. And it's definitely something, if there's any game designers out there thinking about making games like this, playtesting will help you so much because the game in a rough form existed in the spring of last year,

but playtesting really helped us refine a lot of those questions and find that kind of balance between structure and freeformness. We wanted it to be accessible to people who aren't D&D players, but we've also played with people who play a lot of D&D and GM and all this stuff. And they took it in a lot of fun and wild directions that we didn't expect that helped inform kind of new ways that we could, you know, we added some optional rules in there for people who want to take it in a different direction or, or add more complexity or, or even, or for other people who, who need a little bit like a handhold and want to flip a coin to decide

something rather than, um, you know, come up with it totally on their own. So I think, um, yeah, it's a hard,

it's a hard thing to balance, you know, all the different factors that go into a game, but I definitely think play testing, all the different factors that go into a game. But I definitely think playtesting and all the people who played with us in those early games really helped, helped us figure out the right balance. And to your earlier point about burnout, like activist burnout, um, some people who we've invited to play the game Some people who we've invited to play the game maybe have expressed this idea of like, well, I'd love to, but I don't have time.

And maybe they think of gaming, and I know I've certainly been guilty of this too, of feeling like guilt over things that feel like an indulgence. Like you should be doing the real work all the time. But, you know, I think it's important to hold that in the perspective of the tradition of feminism, civil rights advocates, others on the left that have talked about the importance of joy that needs to be integral to our struggles. There's the famous Emma Goldman quip, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. So perhaps, you know, these ideas of like guilt and shame or martyrdom or whatever are kind of toxic parts of the old world that we need to let go of. are kind of toxic parts of the old world that we need to, to let go of. So I guess this is kind of coming back to say that there's, as,

as Nick was saying, there is an ethical prefigurative case of, of how games can allow people to express themselves through play, but there's also a tactical one and that games can be a structured way of thinking about how do we create a liberated society one other thing i think is sort of interesting about well like i guess this is somewhat less true of tabletop games as a medium because tabletop games are a lot of sort of cloud or storytelling ish stuff but like i know like like so like i i play a lot of video games right and it's like it's like a lot of the

structure of what gaming is is sort of like It basically just turns into another job that you have. And it's interesting. You get the same... You even get a crossover between the terminology of... I think grinding is like...

You have to grind. I think that came from gaming first and then moved over into the weird grind set stuff but like i think you're right yeah yeah and gamification right that's another way that like gaming is being almost like weaponized by capitalism to get squeezed just a little bit more out of everyone yeah there's a really interesting article whose name i am forgetting because i am yeah um but vicky ostowal wrote it like a while ago that was about how like games are like it's you know it's it's you sort of mechanically doing the same thing over and over and over again but it's it's a problem because it's like it's it's labor that's like

too perfect like it doesn't create anything there's no sort of like uh like there's there's no sort of like um like aspect that produces like value that could be extracted you're just sort of you're just doing the thing over and over again and it's like and you know and then that you know becomes a problem for capital in some sense is why there's all these panics about like everyone being addicted to gaming because it's like well okay you're not making money for us and but i think it's interesting playing truck simulator you could be driving some actual trucks yeah yeah but you know i think it's interesting that i i this is a political intervention into that of creating something that's, you know, precisely the opposite of that. That it's, you know, you're not sort of like, it's not just like an incredible intensification of the sort of like reward systems of working.

It's, hey, we're going to come together and we're going to tell, we're going to, you know, make collaborative decisions and overcome challenges. And I think that's a very interesting sort of political angle to come at this from. Yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of tabletop games in particular compared to video games, I think, well, I'll say role-playing games in particular, put you in a driver's seat in a way that i think can is is hard right like sometimes i'm too tired to or i think i'm you know i have a i have a dnd night and i'm like i don't know if i have the energy for this after working all day um whereas i might have energy to play you know a video game rpg that kind of walks me, you know, handholds me through a story. It's kind of more like watching more passive. But I do think that there's,

I just think there's something so important about thinking through what it might be like to live in this utopian society. And it's important, I think, because if we don't, well, for one, a ton of people just don't even think about it. And so to the extent that this game is something that gets bought or played with families of people who are, you know, one of the many people who have been depoliticized in this country. I think that can be really helpful. But I also think that I've played it and I've found really fun and exciting ideas

that I wouldn't have thought about if I was staring at a power map or something and thinking, where can we intervene in my city to, you know, help solve this or that problem. So I think, yeah, I think there's power there. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast so i think one of the other things i think is interesting to me about how you choose

sort of the team put this project together is that it's also like you know so like you can buy the versions of it that have like very very nice art but you also just put the cards and the rules up for free and you can just sort of print and play it so i wonder yeah if you could talk a bit about the decision to do that democratic accessibility is really important to us it's part of the concept that we wanted to integrate into every aspect of the game's production and distribution and so yeah the whole thing is available as a free print and play pdf download um it's all creative commons licensed. Um, so that's, yeah. And, you know, at the same time, as you mentioned, we, we, uh, are interested in materiality and want,

wanted to create, um, something that could, could accompany, you know, a face-to-face interaction as well, which is, you know, frankly, well, I'll just speak for myself, that's probably more my interest. Even though I think, you know, we have a tabletop simulator version too, which I think is really cool. But as far as the decision to make the game

free forever, we want people to play. We want it to be genuinely useful. This is not a capitalistic business venture we're running a break even budget and want to just keep doing projects and you know elaborating like the solar punk tradition and connecting it to social ecological communalist politics so if this can be a catalyst towards being able to do more of that, then

we'll have succeeded on our terms, at least. What's the status of physical copies? How can people, if they want to use cards and stuff, how would one go about getting those yeah so there's a couple different ways people can uh download the free print and play if they like uh if they really love it they want to buy the physical copy we sold out of the kind of first edition that we were able to afford to print but we're raising money on kickstarter for a second edition uh so if people back us at a certain tier there i think it's 45 or higher uh you get a copy of the game uh when we're able to print them uh and so yeah so it's a um and of course as max mentioned you can also

play on tabletop simulator uh but, but yeah, we're, we're really excited about it. I think we're also hoping to take it around to some, you know, political workshops, uh, probably on zoom for the foreseeable future. Yeah. Um,

get maybe game convention, tabletop game conventions and stuff. Uh, and also some art, art shows, um, T T B announced to be announced but uh there's a couple art shows that we're excited to be showing it in so um yeah yeah one one thing i'm really excited about in terms of playing this at some point is the... I think starting from the point of you're trying to build the world now,

it's really easy to run into ruts. Starting at the end point and then working backwards, I think because that produces that reverse type of thought, I think it's a little bit easier for it to find the path than just starting here and looking at the world and being like, oh, how do we do anything to make it better? Instead of being at the opposite place and being like, what is the way to backtrack? I think can maybe give you some connections and ideas that you may not have had otherwise,

because we're kind of always stuck in the now how do we get to now better so i would be very excited to uh try try this out at some point and uh and experience that backtrack thinking because i think it's uh yeah i'm really uh intrigued with that specific aspect of the game because yeah the i'm sure there's going to be a lot of Solarpunk games within the next decade, probably. And this is one aspect that I think actually is really unique and something that's not just intrinsic to Solarpunk. You know, it's something that's kind of been added on.

So that's something I'm really excited about. And, yeah, would love to pick this up soon yeah thank you for saying that I think one of the things that we hope that the game does is help people break through that capitalist realism

yeah yeah like there is no alternative it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism etc and you know similarly if you's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, et cetera. Um, and you know, similarly, if you ask people to imagine the future, uh,

it's very hard. And, uh, and if they are able to at all, it is often extrapolating sort of the worst trends of today into a dystopian future. Yeah. I remember just slightly. I remember. so when i was in i was in

middle school or something we had this assignment we had to like write a you'd like write what our perfect like utopian society would be and we like did it and like three quarters of the like societies people come up with were just like the worst imaginable dystopia and it was just like it's just such a grim sort of yeah if i was gonna if i was gonna make what i thought was an accurate prediction of the future it it it might be more similar to the first season of this podcast than yeah uh some of the hopeful futures but i don't i also don't think i don't think the door is closed on any kind of solarpunk future. I think it's important.

One of the important aspects that we included that makes solarpunk different than just kind of vague utopianism is that we ask people to also think about the barriers they run into. To think about, you know, who's going to oppose you? they run into to think about, you know, what, who's, who's going to oppose you? Uh, if you're trying to, um, you know, deal with, uh, polluted water and you find some really great, uh, system and improve a region's water supply, you know, Nestle might come in and buy the rights to the whole region, the whole watershed. So, you know, imagining those might come in and buy the rights to the whole region, the whole watershed. So, you know, imagining those, that opposition, the material conditions that might change, uh, and how you'd adapt to them. We hope that's something that people also benefit from, uh, who play this game and, and make some predictions about the strategic decisions

that capital is going to make to oppose your utopian vision. And I hope there are more solarpunk games. Like you said, I hope there is a preponderance of solarpunk art in the next decade. That would be amazing. And to what you were just saying, you're right. Solarpunk doesn't mean the end of politics doesn't mean the absence of conflict um so i think we tried to integrate that into the game

what makes a good solar punk story is that it is plausible yet distinctly anti-utopian, anti-dystopian rather. It, you know, provides a glimpse into a future possibility for, say, the reharmonization of humans with other humans, humans with non-human nature. And that is going to involve some amount of opposition on the one hand and reconstruction on the other in short to to critique by building as the slogan goes all right yeah uh plugs time what do you what do you two have plugs uh so yeah we have an upcoming uh live stream on twitch with veterans for peace they have uh some gamers for peace for Peace. Tuesday night on the 18th at 8pm, they're going to be playing Solar Punk Futures with us.

If people are interested in the game, they can download it for print and play on our website at http://thefuture.wtf http://thefuture.wtf People can also find the link to our Kickstarter on that website. If they're interested in pre-ordering a physical copy, which we very much appreciate.

We're, we're, we're getting close to funded. That's very exciting. I hope, I hope, I hope it, I hope it gets funded.

I want to see more of these because the art is extremely cool and yeah well thank you to you for coming on uh this has been it could happen here and we'll see you the next time an episode goes up i don't know when that's going to be right now so yeah wonderful extras it could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. slash sources. Thanks for listening. by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.