By Rok Kranjc
Our times are marked not just by a crisis of facts, but a crisis of reality production. Oligarchs, platforms, reactionary movements and attention entrepreneurs have learned to stage fantastic parallel worlds, exploit all manners of anxiety and alienation, and scale their fictions as power, while the once grander fictions of capitalism and democracy are becoming less relevant by the day. The question is (still) whether and how a collective revolutionary subject can produce and enter better fictions together,1 and whether these can become effective sympoietic rehearsal spaces for other, pluriversal forms of social, economic and political life. A play-full “fake it till you make it” theory of change, if you will. That’s one way to understand the word worldplay.
WORLDPLAY is the opening move of a network of avantgarde revolutionaries LARPing as some kind of commons economics activists. Or at least that’s what we’d say if we took ourselves a bit too seriously. More plainly, it’s a new network, event series and pop-up hub for prefiguring and prehearsing radical alternatives through fiction, design, performance and play.
The first edition, convened by Rok Kranjc, Carolina Carvalho and Pekko Koskinen through the Crypto Commons Association, takes place June 7–13, 2026 at the Commons Hub in Austria, constituting our first attempt to channel post-something-worse-than-capitalist desire through co-created counter-hegemonic fiction engines and social organisations as games.
Proposed seed threads for this first edition include:
• playing with reality
• socio-economic science fictions
• parallel worlding and guerrilla futuring
• radical games and game commons
• imagination infrastructuring and peerticipation
The claim is not that this is where these currents begin. Artists, designers, game-makers, writers, researchers, activists, weird economists, culture jammers and stewards of imaginary institutions have been probing these waters for many years.2 There are already directories of unreal institutions,3 economic LARPs,4 game commons experiments,5 sci-fi economics reading lists,6 post-growth games,7 and many other points where imagination meets infrastructure.
What WORLDPLAY attempts is to be one such meeting point. Its initiators believe we need more IRL encounters, but also better ways for distributed peer communities to stay connected after the intensity fades. Anyone who has spent a few days or weeks practising commoning and care face to face with extraordinary human animals knows the feeling. New collaborations are promised, new worlds appear within reach, and the air is thick with commitment. Then comes the harder question: how do we sustain any of it across distance, work, precarity, exhaustion, and the return to our separate little gardens? This is where commoning stops being a buzzword and becomes an actual difficulty. WORLDPLAY is interested in that difficulty. How to generate enough trust, care, structure and shared language for people to lean on each other; how to become less confined to our systemically and self-precariarised corners; how to pull together our coveted, conceptually potent yet mostly performative mutant signifiers, and make something more than the sum of our parts? Not in spite of the present conditions, but because of them.
The revolution will not be gamified. God, no. But it might be that, in some contexts, play is one of the few remaining ways to pierce through worse-than-capitalist realism. At its best, at least for our purposes, play in its many forms can organise imagination into protocols, hold communities of practice, and spring into existence commons of peerticipatory imagineering and imaginaction.
To be defined …
The shape of the first WORLDPLAY pop-up will be co-defined by the people who show up, while acknowledging, plainly, that “showing up” already means having the time, money, documents, health and flexibility to travel to Austria for a week. That is a real limitation, and one we are trying to work with rather than pretend away. The programme will use unconference methods, with enough facilitation to prevent the usual chaordination from becoming either tyranny of the loudest or tyranny of the spreadsheet. The point is not to host a week of just isolated show-and-tells, but to leave behind co-created open designs, living archives, shared project threads, and a peer network for radical worldplay.
We’d also like to experiment with letting formats stack. For example, a collaborative writing or storytelling game session might seed a world. That world might be fleshed out as a set of physical props. Those props might be used in a LARP. The LARP might be morphed into a guerrilla futuring tactic, shareable as a design commons. We may set up a self-hosted living anarchive for its continued distributed practice. One evening, we propose playing out a “parallel economic reality” dinner, with dress codes, odd service norms, alternative currencies, the works. Projects like Alicja Rogalska’s The Feast8 and Alix Gerber’s Lemonade 50¢9 show how quickly economic assumptions become playable and hackable when they arrive through food.
For such experiments, the Commons Hub10 carries both symbolic significance and serious infrastructure for peer production value to express itself. It is a convivial, semi-off-grid site in the Austrian Alps, with workshop spaces, a conference room, maker equipment, a 3D printer, laser cutter, book binder, sound system, projector, hiking trails and riverside nearby. There is also a self-made wood-fired hot tub lovingly referred to as the Liquidity Pool, and, thanks to the MVP commoners of the annual Hack the Hub event, a newly built outdoor sauna. The Hub’s longer horizon is a regenerative ecovillage. This matters because WORLDPLAY is not only about imagining alternative infrastructures, but takes place inside one that is itself being built – one island in an archipelago of alternative spaces popping up like mushrooms.11
WORLDPLAY’s crypto commons roots
The Crypto Commons Association grew out of the same question that has animated MoneyLab and related INC conversations for years: how do we distinguish genuinely new coordination possibilities from old wine in fancy new bottles?12 How do we talk about money, networks and value without surrendering the field to speculation or libertarian exit fantasies?
WORLDPLAY draws on years of gathering practice at the Commons Hub. The initial Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) began as a modest excuse for Felix Fritsch, then deep in doctoral work on the emergence of the crypto commons, to bring scattered thinkers and practitioners to his own backyard rather than chasing them around the world. Alongside his brother Emil, that backyard became the Commons Hub. The gatherings have been described by Martin Zeilinger as an “IRL structure of belonging,”13 while Sarah Manski’s report14 from the 2021 gathering captured it as a productive mess of cooperative economics, blockchain research, movement-building and lived commoning pressed into the same house. Joshua “the Blockchain Socialist” Dávila’s CCG Chronicles15 recorded another trace of that scene. Since then, the community has conceived and brought to life other event series and one-offs, including Collaborative Finance Gatherings, Regenerative Finance, Playdrive and Solarpunk NOW.
What matters for WORLDPLAY is not only the alternative economic discourses and practices that have met through these events, but the culture and open-ended protocols that formed around them (shoutout to Jeremy Akers and his Liberating Structures). Just as importantly, CCG and its offshoots have also quietly gathered a band of misfit artists and game designers whose work, less quietly, helped inspire WORLDPLAY. Pablo Somonte Ruano’s POCAS16 prehearses self-service collaborative organisation and mutualist economic tooling through research, speculative design, LARP and local AI. Game-Changers: The Game,17 developed by Rok Kranjc, has become somewhat of a tradition at events at the Hub, and is part board game, part peerticipatory theatre, feeding the ideas and insights of the event back into further generative play. The XORG18 community, initiated by Pekko Koskinen, pushes the premise of “games as organisations and organisations as games” into stranger and meta-territories.
Where Crypto Commons Gatherings have helped bring together a mycelium within and beyond “leftist blockchain,” WORLDPLAY asks whether similar international peer communities can form around radical play. Its timing is not accidental. Cultural spaces are closing. Funding is shrinking. Artists, critical researchers and organisers are being pushed back to the ground, back to allies, back to informal systems, back to the mycelium. The question of how to sustain these practices19 is therefore not secondary to WORLDPLAY, but part of the work.
Accordingly, the programme will also invite experiments with art DAOs, game commons publishing ecosystems, hyperstitional merch coops, non-speculative NFTs, shared treasuries, solidarity funds, licensing models, and other experiments in keeping counter-hegemonic collective imagination alive and felt. None of these by themselves are “the answer.” The old answers are visibly failing, or rather have failed some time ago, and the next ones will have to be created by the people who need them.
After WORLDPLAY
WORLDPLAY is just one gathering at the Hub in a wider 2026 sequence. Later in June comes the 4th Collaborative Finance Gathering,20 bringing together a multigenerational group with decades of combined hands-on experience in mutual credit, community currencies and other monetary experiments. In August, the 6th Crypto Commons Gathering21 returns as the annual meeting point for commons praxis and cryptographic technologies, a space for revisiting, among other things, Joshua Dávila’s recent question: why should co-ops still care about crypto?22 After that, the Commons Hub hosts Valley of the Commons,23 a four-week pop-up ecovillage for longer-format communal living and cosmolocal production prototyping.
But WORLDPLAY is the opening move of its own series.
Besides features in GameScenes (shoutout to Matteo Bitanti) and the blog you are reading now, the team has been busy weaving an underground-ish cybernetic grapevine through which the call could travel. Early partnerships and virtual handshakes include Bread Cooperative, Class Wargames, Furtherfield, International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP), Regeneration Pollination, Economic Media Lab, Economic Space Agency, School of Commons, Society for the Promotion of Radical Analogue Games, and Sybil, among others. Whispers of foreseeable future pop-ups in Berlin, Slovenia, and a certain theatre in the forest in Sweden are already at play.
More information and registration for the first edition of WORLDPLAY: https://worldplay.art
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1 Davies, W. (ed.) (2018). Economic Science Fictions. Goldsmiths Press: London.
2 Chambers, J. (ed.) (2025) Utopia*Art*Politics: Experimenting with Artistic Practices in Radical Imagination and Politics. Urban Futures Studio, Community Portal @ BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Stichting Moira: Utrecht. URL: https://zenodo.org/records/14930485.
3 https://www.janvaneyck.nl/calendar/outpost-for-unreal-institutions
4 https://www.disco.coop/2024/01/disco-governance-syncretic-economies-and-economic-larps
5 https://mauvaiscontact.info/kop/gamecommons/index.html; https://waag.org/en/article/gaming-commons-online-repository; https://www.akademie-solitude.de/de/game-changers-the-games-crypto-commons-layer.
6 https://edgeryders.eu/t/economic-science-fiction-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582
7 http://www.postgrowth.art; https://play.half.earth.
8 https://vimeo.com/772029670
9 https://designradicalfutures.com/Lemonade-50
10 https://www.commons-hub.at
11 See, for example, Liminal Village (https://liminalvillage.com), Island School of Social Autonomy (https://issa-school.org), The Outpost (https://theoutpost.network).
12 Gloerich, I., Lovink, G. & de Vries, P. (ed.) (2018). MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam, p. 8. URL: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/moneylab-reader-2-overcoming-the-hype.
13 Zeilinger, M. (2023). Structures of Belonging. Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art: Ljubljana, p. 15. URL: https://aksioma.org/pdf/aksioma_PostScriptUM_44_ENG_zeilinger.pdf.
14 Mansky, S. (2021). A Post-capitalist Guide to the Future: Crypto-commoners Only Want the Earth. Shareable. URL: https://www.shareable.net/crypto-commons-gathering-2021.
15 https://theblockchainsocialist.com/category/podcast/interview/ccg-chronicles
16 https://pocas.store
17 https://aksioma.org/game.changers
18 https://xorg.how
19 Gloerich, I. (ed.) (2025) Artists, Activists, and Worldbuilders on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: Conversations about Funding, Self-Organisation, and Reclaiming the Future. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam. URL: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/artists-activists-and-worldbuilders-on-decentralised-autonomous-organisations-conversations-about-funding-self-organisation-and-reclaiming-the-future.
20 https://collaborative-finance.net
21 https://cryptocommonsgather.ing
22 Davilla, J. (2026). Why the Cooperative Movement Should Care About Crypto Still. Platform Coop. URL: https://platform.coop/blog/why-the-cooperative-movement-should-care-about-crypto-still.
23 https://www.valleyofthecommons.com