Games we play

Looking to cybernetic art movements and gaming for network societies’ digital product problem

One of the things I’ve noticed while tapping into different network states is the difficulty to maintain a similar connection online to the in-person pop-ups.

The digital product is one that’s upheld as an important part of the network state process, particularly before a project has found a fixed location. It’s a tool to build community and maintain community when you’re no longer in the location.

And yes, there are the group chats. Since leaving Ârc, I have stayed in somewhat of a connection with the group that I was there with, even meeting new people via the online group chat. We had a regular social media support group, where everyone would post at a certain time and support others’ posts. But since the holidays, attendance and engagement has dropped off (my own included).

That’s not to say organisers are doing anything wrong, more often than not they’ve created all the tools in group chats to maintain engagement. That, on top of upholding and organising the in-person experience.

But the question still stands, how do these societies that are looking to the internet as a tool for recruitment and building of community maintain online engagement?

It’s something that I’ve looked at before, turning towards the original meme and crypto communities for inspiration. On my Telegram, there are a number of groups that drive engagement using the price of their token as a catalyst. That doesn’t work for everyone. Not everyone is motivated by price action, not everyone wants a token to be the reason they stay engaged.

Of course, one answer could be the values that these societies uphold. As The Network State theory goes, people will be bound together with their similar attitudes to life. But when you’re far away, surrounded by friends and loved ones in your IRL life, distractions filter in – how motivated are people actually by these virtual values when they go about their day to day lives?

The thought process I outline below has already been met by a couple of stares but I thought it worth writing down should it spark an idea or conversation. If you read it and are shaken to your core, tell me why in the comments below – who doesn’t love a debate?

Open circuits

Although these ideas have been bubbling in the background, the thing that sent me down this rabbit hole for the newsletter this week is a piece of art writing that touched on the theory of cybernetics.

In a nutshell, the cybernetic theory that I’m talking about is the idea that we are locked into a system of feedback loops with everything around us. You can see this reflected in AI a lot in the sense that it mirrors back what we put in, but it goes beyond that too. Cybernetic theory first surfaced in the 1940s within attempts to explain the regulatory feedback process in biological and technical systems. Within this system, a participant (whether a machine, animal or person) looks at what is happening, compares it to what they want then changes what they do accordingly.

One of my favourite quotes that brings this theory into the present day is from Norbert Weiner, who wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society, “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.” This is, fundamentally, what I see network states doing – responding to the belief that the cities we live in were made for another era, and have to be reimagined for this one.

The early ideas of cybernetics developed into “second order cybernetics” which emerged around the 1960s and is where the idea of the observer being part of the system itself really came into its own. This idea inspired a lot of artists into creating artworks that responded to the audience and the environments they’re in, making the feedback the main subject of the artwork rather than the aesthetic.

Nicolas Schöffer, for example, created huge structures that looked different depending on where the viewer stood and responded to weather and lighting conditions. In more modern art, you can see the ideas resurface in interactive pieces like Emanuel Golob’s “Doing nothing with AI 2.0” which responds to audience members’ brain waves, measured by a headband.

“Fun palace” was one of the early cybernetic-adjascent artworks conceived around the 1960s. It was an architectural project (a “laboratory for fun”) envisioned for the East End of London by architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood, helped, in part, by cybernetic pioneer Heinz von Foerster, who brought second order cybernetics to light.

Designed to have a flexible framework, the ultimate goal was for the Fun Palace space to change according to the desires of its users, autonomy and sovereignty over the space being the main theme.

“No need to look for an entrance, just walk in anywhere.

Choose what you want to do [...] try starting a riot or beginning a painting, or just lie back and stare at the sky. What time is it? Any time of day or night, winter or summer – it really doesn’t matter.

A university of the streets [...] a playground for adults, built like a big shipyard with no walls.

A laboratory of fun.” - wrote Littlewood and Price of the project.

Programmable spaces could be plugged in to realise these fantasies, encouraging both participation and performance.

The idea was never realised, blocked by a lack of funding and local authorities refusing to donate land. However the concept behind it has extended far beyond, now surfacing in the sandbox/world building games like Minecraft – it’s much easier to shape a world that is virtual.

Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also saw this idea being magnified in blockchain. In a conversation with the CEO of Outland, featured in the book “On NFTs” he said second order cybernetics and the ideas Fun Palace presented could be read as “an alternative intellectual history of blockchain [...] concerned with building the groundwork for effective collaboration and mutual support.” – an interesting idea when thinking about community creation.

One of the premises that “Fun Palace” was conceived on, was that fun and play was a good vehicle for interaction and learning. It evolved into a movement that focused on cultural democracy and participation to create stronger communities and work against isolation.

Play as a community builder

I remember when Minecraft came into being. I was in the final year of my architecture degree and on a trip back home I noticed my brother (12 years my junior) had deviated from his usual shooter games. “What ya playin’?” I asked (or words to that effect this was a while ago) and he showed me the wide, green, pixelated plane that made up Minecraft’s world.

I didn’t really get the appeal, especially to someone who’s previous gaming habits had involved so much action, until he took me through the world he had created with his online friends. They had built castles and pagodas, a thirteen story skyscraper, and had a kind of magic dungeon underground. “Who do you make this with?”I asked. “Oh some people from school and some I met online,” was the answer. The group built things, went on made up missions, and went on daily raids on other team’s buildings for materials.

The concept of meeting and playing multiplayer games with people online, of course, at that point wasn’t a new thing. For years already games had demonstrated their worth as a point of connection.

For Minecraft it was all that plus the open sandbox approach that made it so compelling – the ability to create worlds as a group and how that brought together community.

Research shows that collaborative gameplay encourages teamwork and cooperation leading to the creation of social capital. When gamers collaboratively take on tasks such as raids and battles, they develop emotional bonds for their teammates who have gone through the same high stress situations. The same kind of thing can be found in memecoin communities that have weathered multiple bull and bear runs of the crypto cycle.

The act of co-creating something persistent also creates collective achievement that strengthens ties. Studies of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and sandbox games show that players who engage in cooperative building activities develop trust networks. Researchers found that games with creative construction elements foster deeper relationship formation than purely combat-oriented games.

Players who build together demonstrate stronger connections to their gaming partners and are more likely to maintain those friendships outside the game environment. The act of co-creating something persistent creates a sense of shared ownership and collective achievement that strengthens interpersonal ties.

The digital product

So now onto how this could impact network society projects. Remember that time where Zuckerberg made that $77 billion bet on the metaverse and went so far as to rebrand Facebook? And then it just kind of quietly disappeared? Heh, yeah that was crazy…

But what if the whole metaverse thing just didn’t get very far because it hadn’t found the right use case?

Kraken’s CEO explained in a podcast late last year that something that looks like a game now could be the next frontier of financial markets – that the tools we have and are developing right now could meaningfully shape online interaction.

“In gaming, communities emerge around the product, right? People play, they form guilds, clans, marketplaces. The community is the outcome. Communities don’t just consume the products, they’re co-creating them again, very different than having it one versus the other [...] There’s a game loop, there’s a bigger immersion community and communities are here and bounded by that product. You need the game to exist.”

So what if the metaverse was approached, not as a commercial enterprise, but as a tool for co-creation and collaboration on the worldbuilding of the future network state, albeit in virtual form. As a platform that holds and develops the governance of the community, allowing it to create a mechanism for voluntary exchange and the organic development of a society.

It could be used to test out governance systems, encourage sustained interaction, spark the formation of guilds that have a purpose in this virtual world that can leak out into the real one. It gives a certain tangibility to what the network society is working towards, an understanding of what it might be.

Upping sticks

Of course, the first hurdle, as in the creation of physical new cities, is getting people to move there. Already, our digital lives are saturated by the 2D feeds of social media that are oh so easy to scroll through. Tapping out, or even just using some of that time in a new platform risks missing out on news and the latest post from industry leaders, or worse, reducing our own social posting on the global stage.

It’s here that the belief element outlined in The Network State community formation theory could have a part to play. Now the people who align with a certain network state project actually have a place they can go. They have a visual reality to step into and act out their alignment with the future city. Depending on how far one wants to go with it, they could even create a virtual life with their community, all within the confines of the digital sandboxed world.

The 2D platforms have their role to play, as a communicator of the ideas that are explored in the virtual city. The 3D world can support this with videos of gameplay, and the productions of break downs in how the virtual entity is developing (while the real world building and negotiation goes on in the background).

One platform that I’ve noticed demonstrates this well is Kekspace. There are mini-games to enhance engagement, rewards based on streaks of saying “hi” in the messaging channel. There are regular “drops” of limited edition items and additional items are available from buying NFTs or completing quests. There’s talk of setting up in-game trading marketplaces for the bartering of items, and even the creation of an in-game news channel. Videos from the game have gone on to create online buzz, attracting the attention from crypto leaders and attract more players. From the launch of a basic-looking habbo-hotelesque platform in mid 2025, already, an online society is forming.

What is different with this approach is that the “digital product” stops being content you consume and starts being a practice you share. The world itself is the group chat, you log in to do things with people, not just read about them.

The next question, I guess, is how do they use this tool to instigate physical action (i.e attendance to the next pop-up or event).