Shapeshifters of the web, unite! Become a cyborg RPG fighter

This session is facilitated by Belén Roca

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About this session

We will create an epic story taking the concept of seminal games like Dungeons & Dragons to the next level. “Devices & Cyborgs”, the name of the game, is a way of thinking our contemporary society beyond the modern prisons of data-mining social networks, political borders and bodies themselves. Participants will use a character sheet where they have to choose the basic traits of their hero/ines and go into a quest where their main goal is to build an emancipatory internet based on principles such as openness, privacy, interoperability and feminism. Afterwards at the plenary we will discuss the relevance of these principles in the AI era under two guiding questions: “Which amount of agency do we have against the algorithm empire?” and “How we can escape the boundaries imposed by social media interfaces?”

Goals of this session

Explore the life-changing potential of the Internet on building up a sense of identity that surpasses the limits of gender, race, class and age through a tabletop roleplaying game. The idea is to see what happens when the massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) experience is recreated in the MozFest context or, as I will call it for this purpose, The Real Life Server™ from a queer perspective.