PROTESTS

How two artists founded an archive of games for protest events for a new era of political activism

The next time you’re walking down a street with friends, try playing a round of “corporate exorcism” game Skcubrats. You score points by shouting out corporate signs backwards. First player to ten wins. Alternatively, keep going until capitalism crumbles. Skcubrats is one of the lighter entries in Casual Games For Protesters, an archive of physical games to play at rallies and marches. The goal is to make “participating in social change [feel] exhilarating, social, intellectually and physically stimulating, liberatory and fun” – though, as the creators acknowledge, “context is crucial”. It’s one thing to ‘protest playfully’ in the UK, quite another to do so in a country where police routinely bear arms.

Launched in 2017, CGP is the work of writerperformer Dr Harry Josephine Giles and Professor Paolo Pedercini, founder of Molleindustria Games. At the time, Pedercini was pondering the implications of the US election. As a videogame developer, he had a track record for anti-capitalist satires such as Phone Story, but these seemed a “dead end” in the face of Trumpism. Giles, meanwhile, had spent years making theatre in “the crunchy places where performance and politics get muddled up”; their past projects include gently subversive games for hikers and city walkers. Pedercini stumbled on the latter during his search for inspiration, and saw potential for a collaboration.