Play as a Commons: Practical Utopias & P2P Futures

The panel will look into how shared visions or P2P practices can be used to construct playful yet possible scenarios for social and urban spaces.

There is more to games than the use of game mechanics and reward systems. If gamification is a capture all strategy which facilitates the datafication and commodification of everything, this does not mean that we are condemned to some sort of ludic decadence. It all depends on whom the game-like elements come to serve; while game-based data aggregation might be raising issues of concern, at the same time a new form of what we can call ‘play commons’ is strenghtenened, which relies on the abundance and sociability of play itself. With the participation of artists who have been using play as a form for their artistic practice, the panel will look into how shared visions or P2P practices can be used to construct playful yet possible scenarios for social and urban spaces. Embracing collective thought and action, the speakers will present how future scenarios and solutions can be collaboratively imagined, built and played. The new politics of play highlight that we need to find ways to start from users’ and citizens’ desires to respond to the urge for a participatory user and citizen-driven world.