Can you feel the oil spill?

Year:

2013

Can you feel the spill is political geolocation based game. This is a mental, environmental, and sociopolitical board game; a micro-social practice and a piece of theory all rolled into one. It is conceived as a turn-based strategy game for two players, that deals with a 'glocal' ecological issue of offshore oil drilling and its environmental impacts. The board game is firmly tied to a specific Neringa issue that explores the /potential/ impact of the Kravtsovskoye /D-6/ oilfield on the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Curonian Spit. It is a detailed game system that stimulate the decisions and processes inherent to the management body of the D-6 oilfield - the Oil Tsar (player 1) and the Environmentalist (player 2). At every location you can encounter a new oil spill related problem that makes your task more difficult.The goal of the game is to collect spilled oil in the region of Curonian spit before your time runs out. You have an indicator of how far your next location is, how much oil you have collected and how much time you have left on your clock. The primary object of the game is to occupy every territory on the board and in so doing, eliminate the other player. In that way the game can only be played around the Lithuanian region of Neringa especially in the town of Nida. By using a playful/ironic language and a conceptual framework, most of the mechanics/strategies in the game are chosen to reflect the notions of subjectivity and the capitalistic power formations. The board game is therefore an Ecological praxis (Guattari, 136), a mind-game that creates new solidarity, creative and personal-ethical alternatives. It refocuses the goals of the emancipatory struggle against the capitalistic power: it doesn't take up a position of an absolute external opposition, but rather confronts it on the mental ecology of daily life - it invites you to play!