My doctoral research project frames games as embodied technologies that enact power relations and have the potential to prefigure emancipatory infrastructures. It addresses the paradoxical scaffolding of the current political impasse: how to anticipate and design the collapse of a complex society while developing frameworks to prevent it.
The history of LARPing, a game methodology that became widespread in times of stagnating Cold War peacemaking, teaches that the absence of a political horizon can be fertile ground for speculative communities to prefigure alternative political economies that emerge after systemic rupture. These anticipatory practices, termed pre-enactments, are simulations that allow participants to rehearse unprecedented scenarios and train decision-making, navigating the irreconcilable tensions.
Today, it is almost impossible to refuse playing with what psychologists call catastrophizing, one of the most normalized morbid symptoms of the interregnum. Deregulation, civil wars, and cold conflicts turning hot escalate the question of sovereignty: Who is actually playing? Answering it from the perspective of social engineering, that attempts to break rules from the top is a re-enactment of Schmittian realpolitik's death-preaching games. However, this research focuses on prototyping new legal fictions from the bottom up, creating new public forms, and scaling mutual aid support structures.
The project stems from a speculative hypothesis that game design could reclaim our collective rule-making capacity from outside of dominant identities and existing oppressive regulative ideas. It searches for alternatives to wargaming and aims to test their capacity to prototype agonistic tensions where excluded actors are recognized as equal under the law. Conceptually indebted to Johan Huizinga, Seyla Benhabib, and Sylvia Wynter, my research revolves around games that combine the contingency of the play instinct with relational repair. It explores ways in which participatory game design attempts to foster civic repair, post-growth, and post-work legal fictions that recognize excluded political entities and model nonexistent ones.
Savva Dudin is an artist, game designer, and writer whose work revolves around serious play, fictioning, and alternative socio-political infrastructures. He explores how participatory art can implicate the spectator's agency to overcome stasis and the numbness of catastrophe-thinking in times of hybrid peace.
Savva Dudin grew up in Moscow and studied political philosophy at HSE University. He was an exchange fellow at Humboldt and Stanford universities. He researched the utopian Soviet cybernetic social-engineering projects of the 1920s and 1960s, asking how project participants’ multidirectional memories formed intergenerational subjectivity.
During years of practice as a learning designer, Savva was focused on tools developing a better capacity to navigate one's attention from easily manipulated fast, semi-automatic judgments to vigilant, effortful, and slow thinking, thus enabling one to tolerate ambiguity through somatic, affective, and reflective awareness. The recurrent query through artistic research goes: How can alienation from the self be designed as a more generative than an extractivist form of attention?
He is recognized for prototyping anti-pedagogical libraries, LARPs, and p2p tools of collaboration, policy white papers, protest blueprints, soundscapes, and theater scripts. Currently, Savva facilitates interactive serious games to teach courses in philosophy and anthropology of seeing in Stradarium school, developing methods from the master thesis about modern iconoclastic crisis and iconology in times of war.