Common’hood is a community simulation game that confronts us with the challenges of precarity, inequality, and models of economic production. By leading a community of squatters occupying an abandoned factory, you are tasked to re-generate a neighborhood that has fallen in decay leaving many members of the community at the edge of homelessness. The project is an attempt to connect the social reality of economic inequality pervasive in our cities, with a creative gamer audience with a strong literacy towards building games and community management strategies. By playing a character at the edge of homelessness, the player is invited to consider how self-provision and ‘Do it yourself’ initiatives can become the economic income of a community.
Common’hood challenges the ‘tycoon’ and ‘god-game’ genre by portraying a protagonist that belongs and is entangled with a community. Instead of engaging in an economic relationship with your community members, you are tasked to develop trust and care, understand the perspectives of each member and help them fulfill a role in the collective.
Common’hood offers online tools for creating and sharing blueprints for ‘Do it Yourself’ solutions, believing that the game could become the digital infrastructure for the creation of real-world constructions such as tiny-houses or homesteading projects. This allows for players not only to share creations but also to share knowledge hoping that the online repository will grow over time finding members that could steward it as an online commons. Finally, Common’hood aims to portray the new value systems that emerge from organizations that operate under mutual aid and solidarity. The game is not about optimizing the economic output of your community, but rather caring about the role that different members might be able to contribute to a prosperous community, being those economic, social, and cultural.
