How do societies change?

Feature

Why make a game about social transformation?

In my previous life - and the previous and now resumed lives of the Mini Mini Golf Golf team - a strong motivating factor for working in arts and culture was to add our voice to the choir of grassroots sense-making. Creating experiences that nudge or sometimes even rearrange our view on each other and the world. Participate in discourse and shape the possibilities for identities and concepts that describe a “good life” - things worth fighting for, things worth being passionate about.

The thought that people have the possibility (and responsibility) to shape their own destiny and take control of their own life was a lived experience in me and my family’s immigrant journey: out of a failed socialist state into the blossoming “meritocracy” of early 80s West Germany.

From this context, this specific history, it took me a considerable amount of time to reassess the limits of my own agency. And it’s a process that is still ongoing (and that I will frequently quarrel over with friends over drinks). There is a lot of space within the grassroots choir for discourse and passion, to push and pull on ideas and ideologies. But there are also singular individuals whose context and place in time allows them to act on history in completely different fashion.

When I first saw the documentary “videograms of a revolution” (about the Romanian revolution) by German filmmaker Harun Farocki, I was absolutely dumstruck by a scene in which, after taking control of public broadcast television, Romanian actor Ion Caramitru told poet Mircea Dinescu while having him wave his notebook in the air:

The revolution created a space that had to be filled with ideas. A place of power that had to be occupied. And those messing about in the cultural choir where the ones expected to fill it.

In late 2019, I learned from one of my students¹ (Tomás incidentally also more recently created the rig for the Obrist Fernbau Anorak Jacket) about the Chicago Boys - a group of Chilean economists who trained at the University of Chicago from the 50s to the 70s as part of US government program. Throughout the terror-regime of Augusto Pinochet - they established a liberal economic context that would last until that fateful fall of 2019, when a price increase for the Santiago subway led to a nationwide protest movement and another space for power and ideas to be filled.

Who are the people that fill these spaces of power? What ideologies can they inject - not at the roots of our shared everyday, but into the structure of power and agency?

a permanent echo - thus is a speculative investigation into a top-down approach of social transformation. Not the story of a grassroots movement that generates vacuums to be filled (I do have a little series about that too, but that’s for a much later time)- but the story of the people that fill the vacuum and the freedoms and conflicts their ideas and ideologies generate.

I studied media theory in Atlanta in the early 2010s, a few short years after the occupy Wall Street movement had all but disappeared, yet a new political party had emerged in Spain after the Indignados Movement. Ideas of change and transformation were clashing against political realities of austerity and conservativism.
And this sentence from the late Frederick Jameson (often credited to Mark Fisher) was on everyone’s mind:

When we create cultural media, when we add our voices to the choir of ideas and ideologies, we can speculate. We can overcome this supposed lack of imagination and propose characters, timelines and social transformation. We can invent people in places of power that impact the trajectory of our ideas.

But in videogames, we can - and should - do more. We can make the player complicit in telling the story, and we can shed light on the fact that all tales of social transformation are also always just that - tales. They are narratives - synthetic memories on how things will have been, carefully crafted and up for interpretation by whoever is in charge.

That’s why a permanent echo is a memory, a dream to be uncovered, interpreted and judged by the player - investigating what will have happened as a dialogue with a witness who is inherently biased - just like the player will be.

I hope you enjoyed reading this bit of context as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Feel free to send me your thoughts and experiences, engage with our discord community, share this with a friend or two - and if you haven’t yet, why not subscribe to get some more thoughts about videogames, culture and social transformation every month.

Dispatches from Neo Baltica

A Prologue

Just before we released the trailer, website and Steam page for a permanent echo, a mysterious character appeared in our community discord (and instagram), leaving cyphered messages:

Those of you already subscribed to this here newsletter have had the cipher identified as originating from a Genc-Olsen onboarding riddle. Or, if you were community member Caspar, you would just infer the cipher yourself, and create your own decipher website - possibly with the help of some machine learning (who knows, really).

It turned out that these messages were from a character called Masha, foreshadowing the clash of two minds. Observant community memebers navigated to apermanentecho.com where they could decide on one of two branching snippets of prologue-story, advancing one of two spheres of a pendulum - until the last community member finally had the two spheres touch each other to reveal our current project.

You can re-read the prologue snippets here.

Inspiration

two worthwhile videogames

Artefacts

a permanent echo

wishlist now on Steam for macOS and windows.

Dive into the mind of subject2184 and uncover the conspiracy that doomed Europe’s first environmental megaproject. Probe her memories to identify the agents of change that shaped our society in the face of political and environmental turmoil. And ask yourself: How do societies change?

Want to know more about the world of Neo Baltica?

Head on over to neobaltica.com to get a look at the timeline, concepts and (soon) Institutions of this speculative future scenario.

Play our first game - Mini Mini Golf Golf

on Steam for macOS, windows and Linux. (and 33% off during steam summer sale)

An indie storytelling experience that goes beyond the lanes of the here and now into distant memories of a future planetary collapse. Destabilize the present and plunge into a neon psychohistory of a bizarre entity in distress. This is not a game about minigolf.