Critical game-making collective Molleindustria have just announced the release of their webgame Free Culture Game, which is a “game about the struggle between free culture and copyright”. Molleindustria, based in Italy, have made a series of games about social issues, such as Enduring Indymedia, a commentary on the FBI’s seizing of computers owned by citizen media group Indymedia, and McVideogame, a critique of the industrial practices of food giant McDonalds.

The new game itself appears to be an argument about the perpetual nature of the struggle between cultural values of sharing and welcoming new ideas, and a “vectorialist” function that drains those ideas out of the commons. Defeating the vectorialist requires constant, active re-negotiating, and there does not appear to be a victory condition in sight :(

The release notes follow:

Hello,
we’ve just released a tiny abstract pretentious game called Free Culture
Game.

It can be considered an experiment of procedural rhetorics, a playable
theory or an advergame for a Spanish collective called exgae
(http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/whats-exgae).

The goal is to provide a simplified interactive rendition of theories
and propositions about knowledge capitalism (es. Negri, Lessing, Wark).
It’s a game you cannot lose. Even if you stop playing the game always
tend to a dynamic equilibrium between market and Common. The basic
assumption is that there will never be a complete privatization of
shared knowledge and without a strong opposition (represented by the
player’s action) the forces of the market will indefinitely exploit the
innovative ideas emerging from the society.

Link:
http://www.molleindustria.org/freeculturegame-eng
warning: it’s quite hard for non-gamers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.