WORLDPLAY

WORLDPLAY

📅 June 7–13, 2026
📍 Commons Hub, Austria
Register Interest Explore Programme
About

What is WORLDPLAY?

WORLDPLAY is an opening move for a network that explores the revolutionary potential of play: What changes when we treat games as ways of organising, not just expressing? How do those changes expand from one gathering to many, carried by people, through their practice?

It's also the title of a new event series, conceived as a pop-up hub for prefiguring radical futures – economic, social and cultural – through fiction, design, performance and play. The first edition of WORLDPLAY issues a call to game designers and players, artivists, weird economists and utopian dreamers. Together, we will:

  • Design and play upon the canvas of the world
  • Scribble futures and materialise speculative artifacts from parallel presents
  • Compose living archives of/for radical imagination
  • Devise ways to hijack public spaces, cyberspace and realities themselves.

Part experimental playground, part aspiring peer-to-peer guerrilla futuring network, WORLDPLAY channels underground postcapitalist desire by sowing counter-hegemonic fiction engines as seeds and games as social organisations.

Built for a Peer Community

Co-Created Programme

The event will feature a programme that is partly curated and partly self-organised in unconference style, with a strong emphasis on establishing lasting peer support and collaboration networks.

🎤

Shape the Programme

Participants can shape the programme in advance and on-site by pitching sessions and "mycollabs"

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Digital Publishing

Publishing short sci-fi stories, tabletop games, LARP toolkits and other formats as an open-access anthology with partner organisations

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Game Prototyping

Any collectively prototyped games will be resourced for production and shared as open designs

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Distributed Network

Distributed nodes of practice stay connected after the event through shared project threads

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Sustainable Models

Exploring alternative revenue and self-sustaining models to support the network—co-ops, art DAOs, fiction-fueled crowdfunds, and more

Seed Programme Offerings

Interwoven Threads

Interwoven threads and daily themes will include—plus any other angles, reality-bending games, unfinished stories, interactive performances, LARPs, experimental films and music, or "fake it till you make it" theories of change you bring with you.

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Playing with Reality

  • Unshackled play with social conventions, aka "reality", aka "the world"
  • Treating culture as reprogrammable design spaces

Examples

The Yes Men Bureau of Inverse Technology Billboard Liberation Front Center for Political Beauty Luther Blissett Project Situationist International
✒️

Socio-Economic Science Fictions

  • Short-form, poetic, and hyperstitional fictions grounded in prefigurative politics and weird economies
  • Workshopping and peer-supporting speculative writing in small, care-based constellations
  • Co-authoring alternative worlds and futures through games and other experimental formats

Examples

Walkaway The Ministry for the Future Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
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Parallel Economic Worlding & Guerrilla Futuring

  • Creating physical and digital artefacts drawn from parallel or future (eutopian/dystopian) realities
  • Soft LARPs, improvisational roleplay and worldbuilding exercises like "Sell Me This Postcapitalist Pen"
  • Taking speculative artefacts into streets and social media feeds—guerrilla interventions, flashmobs, appropriations of social media, and aesthetic commonist propaganda/memes

Examples

Futurematic Tomorrow's Energy Today A Night at the Orfelia The Treaty of Finsbury Park Queer Embassy of Possible Futures NOVA: Future Thoughts on Surviving Together
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Iterating Eutopia on the Tabletop & Game Commons

  • Sharing, playing, deconstructing and appropriating radical analogue (and digital/hybrid) games
  • Prototyping a game commons: co-created game artefacts, mechanics, and tools that anyone can remix, contribute to, and play with, collectively owned and sustained as a cultural and design commons

Examples

Utopia on the Tabletop Game-Changers: The Game Game Commons Online Platform Half-Earth Socialism Post-Growth Toolkit – The Game The Social Strike Game
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Infrastructures for Imagination & Peerticipation

  • Going beyond conventional models of co-design, co-authorship and participation/interaction
  • Prototyping open-source world-making platforms and online anticipatory fiction archives
  • Methods for establishing and connecting distributed nodes of reality-bending practice

Examples

Witnesspedia POCAS Nordic Larp Wiki Green Mediaography Board Game Mechanics Repository Artists, Activists, and Worldbuilders on DAOs
Logistics

When & Where

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June 7–13, 2026 7 days of peerticipatory worldplay
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Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria Austrian Alps, ~1.5 hours from Vienna by train
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Commons Hub A co-working, co-living and event venue that harbours artists, digital movements and decentralized communities
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Maker Spaces & Equipment Access to 3D printer, laser cutter, sewing station, farmbot, book binding station and various workshop rooms
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Financial Transparency Food for the first 3 days will be catered, then self/community organised. Accommodation at the Hub with potential subsidies. See full transparency details →
Commons Hub venue
Join Us

Register Interest

This is the first edition of WORLDPLAY and spaces are limited to 60 participants. Express your interest early to secure your place.

Early registration gets you

  • ✓ Priority booking when tickets open
  • ✓ Pitch sessions and "mycollabs"
  • ✓ Pre-event online gatherings
  • ✓ Programme development updates

Who should attend?

Sci-fi and cli-fi writers, pluriversal worldbuilders, game designers, storytellers, artists, performers, LARPers, commons and degrowth activists, weird economists, solarpunks, participatory futurists, speculative designers, researchers and academics, technologists, open-source developers, and any and all curious others.

Express Interest

We'll be in touch with next steps

Ready to Hijack Reality?

Join fellow dreamers, makers, and reality-benders in prefiguring postcapitalist futures.

Register Now Get in Touch