The first prototype of Commonspoly was created at the 17th ZEMOS98 festival in Seville in 2015, during a working session facilitated by Guillermo Zapata and with the participation of Vassilis Chryssos, Francisco Jurado, José Laulhé, Carmen Lozano, Rubén Martínez, Peter Matjašič, María G. Perulero, Virginia Benvenuti, Natxo Rodríguez, Igor Stokfisiewski, Menno Weijs, Carla Boserman and Mario Munera. The group decided to hack the popular board game Monopoly whose design principles prescribe land monopolisation, rent extraction and driving competing players to bankruptcy as a win strategy.

In contrast, Commonspoly invites players to collectively convert private spaces on the game board to public, and eventually into common holdings. It sets up a struggle between a Speculator – player character who wants to privatise everything at all costs – and the rest of the players, whose objective is to take assets into common ownership and fight against capitalist speculation. The game has four types of goods: environmental, urban, intangible or knowledge-based, and health or care-related – and cooperation is the only way to win. Commonspoly enables playful ways to mediate complex questions.

Focusing on urgently needed changes to existing social paradigms, politics and culture in relation to the commons, it celebrates what Adrienne Rich has called radical happiness: those moments of collective joy that bloom when a group of people share a common understanding of what it means to actively and truly participate in society. We can find radical happiness in an assembly, at a protest or at a party. It takes many forms, but there is always a common thread – people coming together and working as a group rather than as isolated individuals. Commonspoly feeds the players’ desire to cooperate and allows for free experimentation, discovery and learning around socio-economic questions that arise in real, everyday life.

Upon the collective creation of the first game prototype, the ZEMOS98 cooperative began coordinating and facilitating the development of the Commonspoly project. To encourage collaborative game development the game was made available for free, as a set of downloadable and editable files. The game is typically played in public sessions at cultural events where it engages diverse local communities, but it can also be purchased or downloaded for free in different languages as print-ready files and played privately.

New game versions created by players are then distributed under the Peer Production License and their creators are listed as authors, while ZEMOS98 stays listed only as the author of the game versions that they developed themselves. This peer-process ensures inclusion of diverse personal experiences of the commons and creates an open space for the development of a distributed authorship of the game. The emphasis on collective authorship is a key part of the Commonspoly project. The openness to ongoing re-negotiation is designed into the game, which then becomes a commoning artefact on its own. Through these playing formats and development strategies, Commonspoly has already reached people in 23 countries and was released in five different iterations and four different languages.

For instance, a Brazilian teacher adapted the game to the local context for her students; a UK-based Esperanto expert made a game translation. ZEMOS98 themselves has developed four game editions so far, with the latest one – the Commonspoly Green Edition – used in the CreaTures project. Initially, the Commonspoly gameplays within the CreaTures context were supposed to take place in-person in Seville, Spain. After the Covid-19 pandemic started, there was no possibility for physical game encounters and ZEMOS98 started experimenting with an online gameplay format (the first online game board prototype was released in June 2022).

To support game dissemination, ZEMOS98 initiated an international Commonspoly Network of socially engaged citizens interested in the game and its philosophy. A multidisciplinary team of social researchers and creatives were appointed as Ambassadors for the Network to support Commonspoly gameplays in various cities and countries.

Within the CreaTures project, ZEMOS98 organised a series of gameplays in cities across Europe to enable broad access to the project for different groups, including the scientific community and members of the public. These gameplays took place in Thessaloniki, Greece (July 2021), facilitated by Irene Kalemaki; in Helsinki, Finland (July and August), facilitated by Oula Rytkönen and Andrew Gryf Paterson; in Italy (September 2021), facilitated by Angela María Osorio Méndez; in Lisbon, Portugal (August and October 2021), facilitated by Sandrine Cristomo; and in Madrid, Spain (November 2021), facilitated by the Rosalia Gutiérrez.

All events were facilitated and thoroughly documented for CreaTures research purposes in order to look into the hidden transformative potential of such creative practices. The research work was led by the following questions:

• How does the game help players to reflect on commons in real life?
• How can the game stimulate cooperation?
• Can the game create new relations and a ‘ripple effect’ that would grow in
• the long-term, beyond the context of a single gameplay?
• How does this effect travel through conversations and experiences that
• people have after a gameplay?
• What kind of relations does it foster?

The final Spanish gameplay concluded with an intense debate on the difference between public and commons, on the realism of a society of the commons and on the role of the state in the globalised world. The Commonspoly Ambassadors were active throughout the duration of the CreaTures project, collecting data from gameplays, improving facilitation skills, and documenting various game experiences and processes. The Ambassadors Network is still active and new games are being organised beyond the CreaTures context.

Aside from the gameplays, the Commonspoly project was showcased at multiple cultural events, including the Gaming for the Commons Festival (online and in Seville, Spain; November 2020), the at FIBER 2021 festival (online; December 2021), and the CreaTures Festival (Seville, June – July 2022).

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though the language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so. 

The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. 

The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.

The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.

The games that exist on the site are also played at workshops and other co-creative occasions. Examples include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students. The Glossary project was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).

The Glossary has multiple interactive functionalities:

Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”

The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.

Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.

Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.

Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.  

The Treaty project represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants.

“In The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, we are catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. After much unrest, it has been agreed that a treaty will be drawn up, designating these rights, but first humans must learn to better relate to and understand non-humans so they can cooperate better together. Thankfully there has been a new invention – The Sentience Dial – which allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.”

– Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director of Furtherfield 

The project depicts a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in Finsbury Park (and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond). Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gases and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. If colonial systems of dominance and control over living beings continue, we all face an apocalypse. Yet, cities are more biodiverse than we often realise, and urban ecosystems engender more species diversity than some cultivated rural areas. So, what better place than a city park for humans to discover more about what role we can play in growing our understanding and promoting biodiversity where we live?

The Treaty invites participants to reflect on a range of realities and proposals concerning biodiversity and its role in climate change resilience. Highlighting the often ignored biodiversity found in urban settings, and the vital role that urban parks play in our futures, it raises questions about the role that different species play in a thriving urban park: How could our parks be managed differently? How can we better care for everyone? What is the role of culture in social justice?

Based around a set of interspecies assemblies and LARPs, the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action. Players act and think like a dog, bee, or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces and significantly alter community relations with local biodiversity.  Larping was chosen as a creative format as it enables prefigurative experiences, utilising a conscious bleed between fiction and reality.

The Treaty project represents a major undertaking in a long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants

There are 4 parts to the story and the wider project:

• Part 1. The Interspecies Assemblies – these are games where everyone gets to plan the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 – an event that will celebrate the drawing up of the treaty itself.* 

• Part 2. The Vote – once artists have had a chance to gather everyone’s input they’ll present 3 proposals for the Interspecies Festival and everyone will be invited to choose the one they want to participate in. 

• Part 3 – The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park – all the species of Finsbury Park will be invited to join the festival in Summer 2023.

• Part 4 – The Treaty is drawn up and signed by park stakeholders in Summer 2025.

*The first part of the story is realised as part of the CreaTures Laboratory and has resulted in long-term local, national and international partnerships.

The Interspecies Assemblies and Voting 

In the public game of Interspecies Assemblies, human players are matched with a mentor representing one of seven non-human species found in Finsbury Park – a tree, a bee, a goose, grass, a squirrel, a stag beetle and a dog. The selection of these seven species as representatives of the park’s wider biodiversity was informed by Furtherfield’s extensive research and consultation with local experts including Finsbury Park’s own Park Ranger, Ricard Zanoli.

Following the LARP format, Assembly players perform a ritual to enter their mentor species characters and tune into the mentor’s needs and experiences. Throughout the whole Assembly, players only ever play as representatives of another species, wearing either digital or cardboard masks – no human face (or identity) is ever present in the game. This anonymity serves as an important tool for disinhibition and immersion of players. 

In order to achieve this immersion, a narrative device called the Sentience Dial was created to allow human players to tune into the experiences of another species. The Sentience Dial is a new fictional technology that supports communication between all living entities and allows humans to tune into all flora and fauna, to match them with a species mentor, and to then represent them in the game.

At the Assemblies, players learn about the different biodiversity habitats of Finsbury Park – the new forest, the old forest, the wildflower meadows – and represent their species to collaboratively plan the first-ever Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park. This involves choosing the Festival venue (a specific biodiversity habitat in the Park) as well as the activities that the Festival will feature.

At online Assemblies, the planning happens in Zoom breakout rooms, where players discuss the obstacles they face and how they are overcoming them together. Later, they vote for the festival proposal they would like to see further developed and discuss Festival logistics. The session ends with de-roling, debriefing, and reflection on how biodiversity can be best supported in urban green spaces. Minutes of the Interspecies Assemblies are then circulated with an appendix that documents the discussions and players are invited to continue to participate via a discord channel.

By planning the Interspecies Festival together, humans from the locality and around the world have a chance to build empathy pathways to other beings. They learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to truly acknowledge – to the level they expect for themselves – the equal rights of more-than-human beings. Together, they think about what it will take to prioritise biodiversity and take actual steps to achieve this.

The first Interspecies Assembly took place at the IAM Weekend 2021 Festival – Planet Earth edition and was hosted by Ruth Catlow & Bea Xu – full recording is available here. The Assembly was followed by a conversation among the Treaty co-authors Ruth Catlow & Cade Diehm and the CreaTures researcher Dr. Lara Houston, exploring the ideas and motivations behind the project. A live in-person Assembly in Finsbury Park was organised in January 2022; three online Assemblies followed in May – June 2022. Each online Assembly included a rehearsal session that took place a few days in advance, to help participants attune to their non-human roles.

The Interspecies Festival and the Treaty drafting

The Interspecies Festival is a gathering for all species showcases their cultures, their interests and talents. Like a World’s Fair or an Olympic Games, it is a place of discovery, marvels and broadened horizons. But it can only be planned if we help all the species of the park present their ideas. By planning the Interspecies Festival together, players learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to acknowledge the equal rights of more-than-human beings to the same range of freedoms they expect for themselves. 

Later, nearer to Summer 2025, project authors and participants will draft the Treaty and decide how to connect even more deeply with all the species of the park through the Festival. A treaty was chosen as a universal format for establishing agreements between conflicted societies, and for the formation of new configurations of human social relations. It resonates with historic agreements that go back millennia worldwide, while also speaking to the negotiations and signing of more recent climate change agreements. Centering the game on plans to sign a treaty also led to the creation of a scenario in which different species would need to extravagantly exhibit and share their different cultures as a route to multispecies understanding and justice. 

Treaty online portal and Interspecies Meditation

To support the recruitment of players and circulate the project widely, Furtherfield created a call-to-action video providing the Treaty’s context:

The recruitment is further facilitated via a project website with detailed information. On the website, players enter the gameworld where they meet mentor species, discover the Sentience Dial, learn about the Interspecies Assemblies, and are able to access information about technical requirements. They can read FAQs and are directed to Eventbrite to sign up for an Assembly event. On acquiring a ticket, players fill out a Mentor Species Matching form via the Sentience Dial. In this way, they learn about the species who they will represent in the Assemblies, in preparation for the struggle for interspecies justice and more-than-human equal rights.

As part of The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 roleplay, Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield developed the engagement format of Interspecies Meditations to help build empathy pathways to other life forms. Meditation is used as a tool for character development and immersion: participants use their imaginations and engage in a bonding ritual guiding them to (metaphorically) enter the body and consciousness of a different species, to reflect on the nature of their existence.

Via the ritual, they get transported to the interspecies multiverse where they sit for a guided meditation. The meditation is followed by a sharing circle where everyone describes their experiences of their new bodies and sentience. Listening to each other, participants have the opportunity to learn and understand more about their place in webs of life.

The Interspecies Meditation was performed by Ruth Catlow at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Uroboros 2022 festival in Prague, Czech Republic (October 2022).

The Treaty project will have an extended afterlife. The Haringey Council London: People need Parks has asked to partner in the longer term on utilising The Treaty as a way to improve and measure impact on the biodiversity of Finsbury Park. After extending the project through 2023, largely due to Covid-19 related delays, it has been decided to run it until 2025 in order to keep up with growing local interest and give time to develop an actual treaty signing element. Haringey Council would then like to invite local residents to sign a treaty of cooperation with park biodiversity and monitor its impact.

Within the Hackcamp project, participating cultural organisations and communities conduct analysis of their internal environment and processes related to eco-social change. Based on this analysis, each organisation identifies challenges that appear as urgent, and core values that might be shared by other organisations operating in similar contexts. Examples of challenges identified in past Hackcamps include: the need for effective and fair incorporation of decolonial perspectives in organisations’ internal practices, the need to identify strategies to combat racism and structural violence against racialised people, or the need for internal strategies embracing ecological responsibility.

The Hackcamp methodology relies on five main principles

• Trust in collective intelligence and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing
• Consideration of all knowledge, avoiding distinctions between experts and non-experts
• Willingness to listen to each other’s ideas and to accept diversity as the intellectual basis
• Prioritisation of practices and experiences that care for and value the common good
• Use of visual and body languages in addition to oral and textual tools.

Collaborative production is key for Hackcamp. The co-creative activities are organised with the help of a facilitator who knows the subject matter of the particular event and guides the participant group with empathetic and non-invasive techniques. A Hackcamp meeting is concluded with a public presentation of results and a feedback session inviting external stakeholders who have professional experiences with the main addressed theme.

The ZEMOS98 team typically documents the entire development and process of the Hackcamp for subsequent evaluation. Previous Hackcamps include: Hackcamp Reclaim the Commons held during the ZEMOS98 Festival in April 2015 for activists, makers, thinkers and hackers from all over Europe; Expanded Education Hackcamp held at Fi2 Tenerife in October 2016; and HackCampIAAP organised in June 2017 with the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (IAAP) – part of the Andalusian Regional Government.

The edition of the Hackcamp run within the CreaTures project was held in Seville, Spain and involved six participants from various cultural organisations. This Hackcamp was divided into two days (30th and 31st May, 2022) and focused on issues around eco-social and decolonial transformation of cultural and creative practices. The objective was to define a roadmap with tips that can inspire development within the participating
organisations and other similar initiatives. The first part of the session consisted of a transparency exercise led by ZEMOS98, showing the cooperative’s internal self-evaluation mechanisms, the status of their current projects and the strategic challenges they have faced throughout their development.

Inspired by the introductory session, participants proceeded to gather learnings, reflections and ideas on how to approach an eco-social and decolonial change within small cultural organisations. To map the possible pathways towards this change, participants compiled their thoughts into the following key areas: micro-policies (understood as non-technical and non-instrumental measures that can be implemented in an organisation in order to address structural changes), tools (understood as technical or instrumental solutions that can be used by an organisation to carry out such
a turnaround), and projects (other projects or organisations whose practices can be inspiring).

From the data collected at the CreaTures Hackcamp event, ZEMOS98 is currently producing an open paper both in Spanish and in English that will be published as an open-source document. The Hackcamp is an ongoing series of events and a format of co-creative gatherings that ZEMOS98 has been using in a long term. There will be additional Hackcamp events happening in the future. The Hackcamp organised within the CreaTures project helped us to expand and further refine the Hackcamp format and future events will build on these findings.