HAZMAT : Hazardous Masculinity P2P Now FREE
TL;DR: HAZMAT: Hazardous Masculinity the print-to-play version is FREE over on our site.
Yesterday we started reading a book, “Colonized by the Data: The Costs of Connection,” in preparation for today’s Quello Center talk by the same name. One of the last questions during the Q&A session was about academia’s place in resisting Data Colonialism, particularly when increasingly the money funding this work comes from the very entities that are complicit in the system. One of the possibilities mentioned was that researchers/creatives/(people with the ability/privilege to), given their position of power and to varying degrees complicity, should make more tools available for free.
Indeed as we discussed and read further in the text we only saw greater/wider connections between Colonialism/Capitalism but most importantly that this order is one based on, “the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously be extracted for profit” (Quote from Nick and Ulises). In part they were drawing on the idea that, “data is the new oil…” to which one of us quipped to the other, “and data is us, which means we are the oil from which to burn for profit” (likely not quite that eloquently in the moment). The goal of Affinity Games (and thus HAZMAT/FoF) is to no commoditize social relationships/friendships/affinities, but rather to enable them, to deepen them. Capitalism increasingly works to isolate us as much as possible to encourage our dependence and to commoditize our social relations to relationships of pleasure or utility, of consumption, influence, and entrepreneurship, inhibiting our ability to challenge it through interpersonal interdependence, to exit the system or build alternatives.
As we sat in the audience, thinking about our own work and its connection to forms of solidarity and mutual aid, we came to the conclusion that, to one degree or another, the more available we make the games/tools that we are making available for free, the more we can further our broader goals within Affinity Games to build real lasting connections between players and better enable resistance.
The greatest irony of Capitalism is that it takes the Colonial logic of, say, Alexander “The Great” who, notoriously, “wept, and made sad mone, because there was but one world to be wonne,” and answers that cry with, “Oh, there are always new ways to wonne.”
This is why print-to-play versions of HAZMAT from today forward will be freely available here. Free as in beer of course. We’ve been trying to think of ways to make them free as in freedom in the more traditional Open Source sense of the word. Unfortunately our production process (because we’re so dramatically tied to print on paper production models) is intimately tied to commercial (Adobe) products. Yes, we know GIMP exists, but something like InDesign does not.
However, we are opening up avenues (much as we’ve already done with Fellowship of Fools for players to submit new prompts for use in future versions of the game. While it isn’t as cool as making everything free and participatorily designed from inception, that remains a long term goal of the founders of Affinity Games.
In the mean time, enjoy exploring HAZMAT: Hazardous Masculinity for free, as in beer on us. Future print-to-play decks will also be free as in beer too. Share widely and Cheers!