Solarpunk Gaming

How how are you doing? Hey? Doing well? Thanks? Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having us one excited to have you to on. So I guess my first question is how did you too get into game design and sort of first have the idea to do a sort of like political gaming project like this. That's a good question. So we're not, um, we're definitely not game designers by

Ushian 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 pre figures 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 um project to work on an important project, and um, yeah, so we kind of took a took a deep dive headfirst into the world of game design and learning how to 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 features is and sort of how it works, and then we can get into the sort of political aspect of this 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. Um. The idea is that through back casting, 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 theorists Murray book Chain described as the

acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. So we wanted to make a system to facilitate collaborative performance sort of 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, um, collaborative you know, collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay, uh, 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 world So we're trying to you know, we're 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. But my question from here is sort of, well, I mean, I guess firstly is I think what sort of specifically drew d solar Punk is sort of an aesthetic for for this, Like I know, there's been a lot of sort of like the kind of sociocology solar punk fusions, but I'm interested in what you you specifically

to it. So we see solar punk as a visionary utopian politics and aesthetic that critically engages the reality 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 pre

capitalist culture. UM, that means material accountability for old practices, 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 produced. 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 and so uh as a as a collaborative as an aesthetic that is being defined

collaboratively by people online and elsewhere. You know, we wanted to kind of stick out of position about what we thought a really realistic utopian world might look and feel. Like, Yeah, and I think this is something else I know YouTube, I'm very passionate about. Um is about specifically using games as a medium to do this and sort of this as like this kind of storytelling membrance as a specifically

political intervention. So could you talk a bit more about you know, like a yeah, you know, good questions like okay, so why this and not on you know, on this sort of less more like like why this and not a grilla garden? You go, why this and not some other kind of organizing etcetera, etcetera. Um, yamage it here you say about that. Yeah, well, I'm not gonna hate on guerrilla gardening. I definitely think it's a both situation. Um,

it's also in the game. Yeah, that's true. It's it's one of the cards, one of the tools that you get to use 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 that I got a little bit into earlier. But you know, for one, UM, I think it helps reach abroad and often deep politicized 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, education through doing rather than lecture. Uh. Although you know, we were also read a lot of

good political theories, so I'm not I'm not opposed to that. Um. And then I think, uh, you know, games are also fun, and there's a lot of there's a lot of 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 you know, trifling or not going to help us get where we're going and and overthrow

capitalism and build a new world. So um, yeah, those are those are some of the reasons. And yeah, and I think that's especially sert of interesting point because I think a lot of what happens in left to 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, especially just working on something like this, and then I don't know, just playing with your friends and having having things that are like collaborative and joyful and community buildings I think very important as a way to just you know, even just this is not a very basically 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 um, you know performance art too, bring about you know,

to solve a specific challenge of capitalism like deforestation or these are some of the cards in the game. Um. And so I think it can be inspiring, you know, it's also um, it can be educational. I played with

some family. Uh. I think the first time I played, when we got the physical copy that wasn't a play test, 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 from my family.

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, fund based like role playing game elements with like it's kind of structure as a thought exercise, and like a world building game like how how how do you approach trying to get a balance of like fun role playing as well as this type of like

reverse world building. I was kind of I was still a little bit on the y 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 y A game for just a second, um, because I think maybe it will lead into this. 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. Um. There's a game called Senate. There's a game called the Royal Game of Er, which both date to five thousand years ago in ancient Egypt and ancient messo but Amia, respectively. We did in making the game, we did a bunch of research on the history of of games. There's a fifteenth century game called the Game of the Goose from uh well, present day Italy that paired like these gorgeous illustrations, also with like

didactic moral instruction. In the early early twentieth century, the Surrealists created a series of games um with the intention of breaking through traditional thought patterns and unleashing the potentials of the unconscious. They also wanted to subvert academic modes of inquiry um. And then today, you know, some of our most popular table top games. You know, 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 in 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, uh, these things that will be needed, you know, for it actually to transcend the social 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 UM project using you know, the modalities of like speculative fiction, collaborative performance. As I mentioned, the values and more is of a of a desirable future. So games are are very human thing, an ancient human thing. And why do people play games? Uh?

As I mentioned, you know, education is part of it, UM, but also building social bonds is another important piece, and that always is a company. It's a very like academic way of talking about it, maybe, but it is. It is fun. It has to be fun. That's why people do it. 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 were talking about the balance between randomness and planning in in games and the balance

um between structure and free form. And it's definitely something if there's any game designers out there thinking about making, you know, games like this, play testing it will help you so much because you know, 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 n D players, but we've also played with people who play a lot of d n 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 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 and all the people who 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 activists burnout, Um, some people who we've invited to play the game maybe have have expressed this idea of like, well, um, I'd love to, but I don't have time, And maybe maybe they they think of

of gaming. And I know I've certainly been guilty of this too, of feeling like guilt over things that feel like it indulges 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 of feminism, civil rights advocates, others on the left that have talked about the importance of um joy that needs to be integral to our struggles. There's the famous 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 to let go of. UM. So I guess this is kind of coming back to say that there's, as as Nick was saying, there is an ethical, pre figurative case of um of how games can allow people to um 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? On everything I think is sort of interesting about Well, like, I guess this is somewhat less true of tabletop games as in medium because typical games are a lot of sort of cloud storytelling ish stuff. But like I know, like like so like I'm I I put 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 turned

into like another job that you have, and it's interesting. Yeah, it's like I mean, you know, and you get you like you get, you get the same you even get like bog like crossover between the terminology of like like you know, like I think like grinding is like a grind. Yeah, like grind. I think I think that came from getting first and then moved over into the weird grindset 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 there's a really interesting article whose name I am forgetting because I am yeah, I um, but Vicky Astawall wrote it like a while ago that was about how like games are like it's you know, it's it's used 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. I guess it doesn't create anything. There's no sort of like I 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 that then 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 truck simulator you could

be driving some actual Yeah. Yeah, but you know, I think it's interesting that this is a political intervention into that of creating something that's you know, precisely the opposite of that that it's you. 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 gonna come together and we're gonna tell we're gonna you know,

make collaborative decisions and overcome challenges. And I think 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 if I think, you know, I have a I have a D and D 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. Um, it's kind of more like watching more passive. Um. 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. Um. 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 deep politicized in this country. Um, I think that can be really helpful. But I also think that, um, 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 too, you know, help help solve this or that problem. So I think, yeah,

I think there's power there. So I think one of the other things I think is interesting to me about how you cute sort of the team put this product together. And 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 ownered, Yeah, if you could talk a bit about decision you 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 speaking for myself, that's probably more my interest. Um, even though I think you know like that. We have a tabletop simulator version too, which I think is really cool. But as far as

the decision to make the game, you know, free, free forever. Um, we want people to play, We want it to be genuinely useful. Um. This is not a 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 um, then it's you know, we'll have we'll have succeeded on our on our terms at least. What's this at us of physical copies of how can people if they want to use cards and stuff? What is how how would one go about getting those? Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. People can download the free print and play if they like, 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. So if people back us at a certain tier there, I think it's forty five dollars or higher. Uh, you get a copy of the game 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. But yeah, we're we're really excited

about it. I think we're also hoping to take it around on to some you know, political workshops, probably on Zoom for the foreseeable future, get maybe game convention, tabletop game conventions and stuff, and also some art art shows um to be announced, to be announced, but there's a couple of 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 like you're trying to build the world now, you can really easy, it's really easy to run into ruts. Um starting at the end point than working backwards, I think because that produces that reverse type of thought. I think it's a little bit easier for to find the path than just starting here and looking at the world will

be like, oh, how do we do it? You thing to make it better, instead of being at the opposite place and being like, what's 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

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 a yeah, and I'm really intrigued with that specific aspect of the game because yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of solar Punk games within the next decade probably, um, and this is one aspect that I think actually is really unique and something that's not just intrinsic to Solar Punk. Um, you know, it's something that's kind of been added on.

So uh, that's something I'm really excited about. And yeah, I would love to love to pick this up uh soon. Yeah, thank you for saying that. Um. I think one of the things that we hope that the game does is help people break through that capitalist realism. Yeah, like there is no alternative. It's easier to imagine the end of

the world than the end of capitalism, etcetera. 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. I remember so when when I was in I was

in middle school or something, we had this acietment. We had to like write a you like write what are perfect like utopian society would be, and we like did it, and like three quarters of the like society people come up with were just like the worst imaginable dystopia And it was just like, it's just like grim sort of. Yeah, if I was gonna if I was gonna make what I thought was an accurate prediction of the few uture, it might be more similar to the first season of

this podcast than 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 solar punk future.

I think it's important one of the important aspects that we included that that is that makes solar punk different than just kind of vague utopianism, is that we think we ask people to also think about the barriers they run into, to think about, you know what, who's gonna who's gonna oppose you if you're trying to um, you know, deal with polluted water and you find some really great system and improve a region's water supply, you know, Nestley 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, and how you adapt to them. We hope that's something that people also benefit from who played this game and and make some predictions about the strategic decisions that capital is going to make to oppose your your utopian vision. And I hope there are more solar punk games, Like you said, I hope there's a preponderance of solar punk art in the in

the next decade. That would be amazing. And you know, to what you were just saying, you're right, solar punk 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 stories that it is plausible yet distinctly anti utopian, anti dystopian rather um it you know, provides a glimpse into a future possibility for say, the reharmonization of humans with

other humans, humans with non human nature. Um 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, plugs time. What do you what do you need to have plugs? Uh? So, Yeah, we have an upcoming live stream on Twitch with Veterans for Peace. They have some gamers for Peace and Tuesday night on at eight p m they're gonna be playing Solo Punk Solo Punk features

with us. UH. If people are interested in the game, they can download it for print and play on our website at H T T P colon slash Slash the Future dot WTF UH and UH. People can also find a link to our kickstarter on that website if they're interested in pre ordering physical copy, which we very much appreciate. We're getting close to funded. That's very exciting. I hope, I hope, I hope, 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 this. 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 gonna be right now, so yeah, wonderful extros. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. Were more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.