About
This game was made in 2022 by Filip Hauer during his research internship at CoFUTURES at the University of Oslo. It is intended to be shared and played freely.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the CoFUTURES team, namely Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Sami Ahmad Khan, Patrick Brock, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Laura op de Beke for valuable discussion, feedback, and play-testing the game prototype. Finally, I would like to thank Gabriela Štvrtňová for her comments on the latest version of the game.
The board game is a spin-off of the larger game series Dreaming About Work, which is part of my Ph.D. research project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
About the author
Filip Hauer is a digital artist based in Prague. He is currently a PhD student at the New Media Studio I at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, under the supervision of MgA. Tomáš Svoboda Ph.D. As part of his doctoral project titled Allegorithmic Work, he focuses on speculative possibilities of the medium of digital games and researches notions of allegorithm, game exchange, and (xeno-)games. He works conceptually with the media of digital games, installations and video, while focusing on the relationship of individual experiences to digital space and meta-politics. He also aims at mapping individual relationships to the future of technology, contemporary work, and social possibilities.
Allegorithmic work
This research project focuses on developing critical and subversive approaches to the medium of digital games and their possible overlaps with contemporary art. The outcome of the project is an ongoing series of original digital games titled Dreaming About Work, paralleled with Filip´s theoretical research on concepts of game exchange, market, and their relationship to game-work as well as their ideologies. The project aims to propose strategies for avant-garde (xeno-)games, based on the politics of alienation, the concepts of negation, and the Laboria Cuboniks Xeno-feminism.
Popular games, such as Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Death Stranding or Genshin Impact, often become allegories of the society of labour and reflection of their relation to modes of production. Within the practice of xeno-gaming, we can hopefully invert the alienating relations and re-purpose the critical and emancipatory potential of the game medium.
What is the social significance of a game that becomes an allegory of work? Can we define games beyond notions of immersion and pleasure? Can we discover new modes of exchange in games? In his thesis, Filip Hauer argues that with the outlined theoretical strategies, the game medium could gain its critical and subversive potential.