The Free Culture Game

The Free Culture Game, created byMolleindustria, is a flashed based abstract art piece that attempts to articulate the interplay between the commons and culture at large. Released under aCC BY-NC-SA license, we heard about it first on ourcommunity lists, but it has since been getting some nice tractionelsewhereon theblogosphere. FromRhizome:

Italian artistsMolleindustriapromise “radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment,” and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as “playable theory,” theFree Culture Gameoffers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art.

A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games). People who absorb free, round ideas stay green and happy, while those who only consume square market-produced ones become grey and inverted.

The game never really ends: you can only do better or worse, suggesting by analogy that the fight forfree culturewill be an ongoing struggle without end.