To play or be played? De-gamification workshop

Sunday 28 November 2021, 14:30 - 17:00 at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Cost: €8 · Language: English · Tickets

Part of the conference Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice (26-28 November 2021)

To play or be played? De-gamification workshop

With: Agnese Trocchi (Digital Communications Manager, Educator, IT) and Jacopo Anderlini (Researcher, Systems/Operations Engineer, IT/DE)

A ride through classic video games to today’s socials and apps

We all knew, somewhere in our brains, that social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, weren’t good for our social and physical health. Even before the Cambridge Analytical scandal, even before the Facebook Papers disclosures… still we are not really able to stop using these devices. Do you ever scroll the Facebook timeline or the suggested video section of You Tube well past the point where it was fun? Why?

Many video games capture our attention so much that they create forms of addiction, masterfully built on the vulnerabilities common to all humans. In a similar way we are induced to participate and contribute relentlessly to online “communities”, built according to gamification techniques.

Every experience of social interaction becomes a complex race, with lots of points and rankings, levels and champions. We know from direct experience the rules of these “games”: if we behave well we receive many “likes”, like, strikes and notifications, ie sugary for our brains (in the form of dopamine), if we are scarce, we stay dry-mouthed. In any case, it’s never enough to “win”, we always have to work harder, the “game” never ends…

In our experiential workshop, using the Hacker Pedagogy methodology, we will have a chance to reflect on our behaviour and our automatisms in relations to digital mass technologies. We will do a ride through vintage videogames, and through interface analysis of social networks platforms, we will uncover gamification techniques.

There will be no points to gain and no prize to conquer. We are gathering to play together to win ourselves back.

Workshop leaders

Agnese Trocchi (Rome, Italy) is an italian writer, artist and social media manager. Coming from a media-hacking background (Candida TV 1999/2003), she has been in the field of social media management since 2009, and currently also works as Digital Communications Manager for the Disruption Network Lab. In 2017 she co-founded the interdisciplinary research group C.I.R.C.E. to promote a self-aware approach to technology and social networks using the hacker pedagogy method. She runs workshop and laboratories for kids, adults and affinity groups to “follow the threads of our connections”, to uncover the hidden elements of everyday digital automatism and to invent together new procedures for an ecological relationship with machines. She is the author of the book Internet, Mon Amour (Ledizioni, 2019) .

Jacopo Anderlini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Education Studies at the University of Genoa, as well as systems / operations engineer at Tactical Tech. His main research interests are border studies, refugee studies, migration, critical theory on technologies, social and political philosophy. His work mixes qualitative methods and ethnography – with both multi-sited and digital fieldwork – and critical theoretical reflection. He is currently investigating the transformations of the government of mobility, its infrastructures and logistics, at the southern borders of Europe. He is part of the international academic network on critical migration and border studies Kritnet, of the international academic network at the crossroads between Science and Technology Studies and Critical Migration STS-MIGTEC and is co-founder of the research group on the analysis of digital technologies C.I.R.C.E..

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