WORLDPLAY

WORLDPLAY is an opening move for a network that explores the revolutionary potential of play: What changes when we treat games as ways of organising, not just expressing? How do those changes expand from one gathering to many, carried by people, through their practice?

It's also the title of a new event series, conceived as a pop-up hub for prefiguring radical futures – economic, social and cultural – through fiction, design, performance and play. The first edition of WORLDPLAY issues a call to game designers and players, artivists, weird economists and utopian dreamers. Together, we will:

• Design and play upon the canvas of the world
• Scribble futures and materialise speculative artifacts from parallel presents
• Compose living archives of/for radical imagination
• Devise ways to hijack public spaces, cyberspace and realities themselves.

Part experimental playground, part aspiring peer-to-peer guerrilla futuring network, WORLDPLAY channels underground postcapitalist desire by sowing counter-hegemonic fiction engines as seeds and games as social organisations.

Where and when

The inaugural edition of WORLDPLAY takes place between June 7–13, 2026, at the Commons Hub, a co-working, co-living and event venue in the Austrian Alps that harbours artists, digital movements and decentralized communities.

Built for a peer community

The event will feature a programme that is partly curated and partly self-organised in unconference style, with a strong emphasis on establishing lasting peer support and collaboration networks:

● Participants can shape the programme in advance and on-site by pitching sessions and co-labs

● Digital publishing with partner organisations like the Institute of Network Cultures

● Selected games will be prototyped, resourced for production, and shared as open designs

● Distributed nodes of practice stay connected after the event through shared project threads

● We’ll explore alternative revenue and self-sustaining models for keeping the WORLDPLAY network alive—co-ops, art DAOs, fiction-fueled crowdfunds, functional guerrilla futuring merch, and more

Venue

Commons Hub (Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria), a co-working, co-living and event venue in the Austrian Alps that harbours artists, digital movements and decentralized communities. Access to 3D printer, laser cutter, sewing station, farmbot, book binding station and various workshop rooms.

Seed programme offerings

Interwoven threads and daily themes will include:

🎭 Playing with reality

✒️ Socio-economic science fictions & open-source worlds

🛠 Parallel economic worlding & guerrilla futuring

🎲 Iterating eutopia on the tabletop & game commons

🌱 Infrastructures for imagination & peerticipation

& any other angles, reality-bending games, unfinished stories, interactive performances, LARPs, experimental films and music, or “fake it till you make it” theories of change you bring with you

More info (further breakdown of seed programme offerings)

🎭 Playing with reality

● Treating culture and social conventions as reprogrammable design spaces

Examples: The Yes Men, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Billboard Liberation Front, Center for Political Beauty, Luther Blisset Project, Situationist International

✒️ Socio-economic science fictions

● Short-form, poetic, and hyperstitional fictions grounded in prefigurative politics and weird economies

● Workshopping and peer-supporting speculative writing in small, care-based constellations

● Co-authoring alternative worlds and futures through games and other experimental formats

Examples: Walkaway, The Ministry for the Future, Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

🛠 Parallel economic worlding & guerrilla futuring

● Creating physical and digital artefacts drawn from parallel or future (eutopian/dystopian) realities

● Soft LARPs, improvisational roleplay and worldbuilding exercises like “Sell Me This Postcapitalist Pen”

● Taking speculative artefacts into streets and social media feeds—guerrilla interventions, flashmobs, appropriations of social media, and aesthetic commonist propaganda/memes

Examples: Futurematic, Tomorrow’s Energy Today, A Night at the Orfelia, The Treaty of Finsbury Park, Queer Embassy of Possible Futures, NOVA: Future Thoughts on Surviving Together, Future 14b

🎲 Iterating eutopia on the tabletop & game commons

● Sharing, playing, deconstructing and appropriating radical analogue (and digital/hybrid) games

● Prototyping a game commons: co-created game artefacts, mechanics, and tools that anyone can remix, contribute to, and play with, collectively owned and sustained as a cultural and design commons

Examples: Utopia on the Tabletop, Game-Changers: The Game, Game Commons Online Platform, Half-Earth Socialism, Post-Growth Toolkit – The Game, The Social Strike Game

🌱 Infrastructures for imagination & peerticipation

● Going beyond conventional models of co-design, co-authorship and participation/interaction

● Prototyping open-source world-making platforms and online anticipatory fiction archives

● Methods for establishing and connecting distributed nodes of reality-bending practice

Examples: Witnesspedia, POCAS, Nordic Larp Wiki, Green Mediaography, Board Game Mechanics Repository, Artists, Activists, and Worldbuilders on DAOs