We Gave Everyone Five Rocks
Then we asked what value means, who gets to belong, and what kind of economy a game can reveal.
Goblin Market at Watershed
On June 5th, 2026, I hosted an iteration of Goblin Market at Watershed in Bristol, UK, inside the Pervasive Media Studio. It was the culmination of a year of research, play, travel, conversation, false starts, and strange little economies made with my son, Tristan Winger-Bearskin, through our Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellowship. [This write-up uses AI and was edited and co-written by Tristan Winger-Bearskin. We have included a links section at the end of this document to help you follow the trail.]
I keep thinking about how a market is never just a market. A market is a theater. It is a ritual. It is a place where people agree, for a moment, that certain things have value.
Goblin Market began as a question about how artists survive inside economies that do not always know how to value them. Over the past few years, I have watched artists, cultural workers, and small organizations be asked to become more entrepreneurial, more marketable, and more optimized. At the same time, the very things that often make artwork meaningful are resistant to being made into a product.
The question that kept returning to me was simple:
What if we played the economy instead of only describing it?
At Watershed, that question became a live-action role-playing game and a social experiment. People entered the space and were invited into a game of barter. They encountered goblins. They negotiated. They made offers. They had to decide what a thing was worth, and also what they were willing to become in the process of wanting it.
The project is about alternative economies, but over the course of the fellowship, I realized I was also asking about inclusive economies. What would it mean to design systems where more people are included in the making, holding, and circulation of value? What if our economic imagination included anyone who has ever had to navigate a benefits system that treats survival as a maze?
How do we make homelessness rare and brief? How do we build systems where help arrives before catastrophe? How do we value care, attention, prevention, and repair?
These questions were underneath the goblin masks, the rocks, the bargaining, and the jokes.
Before Bristol, the market was already moving
The Watershed iteration was not the first time Goblin Market opened its strange little doors.
Before Bristol, Goblin Market was already moving through the work of Luisa Ji, UKAI Projects, and a growing network of thinkers considering alternative arts economies. Luisa describes Goblin Market as an artist’s economic lab inspired by the magical quality of fairytales and fables, built through a place-to-place network of global creatives responding to an increasingly volatile world.
I love that framing because it makes the market feel less like a single event and more like a living system. The work grows by moving. It learns from each city, each group of artists, each neighborhood, each strange room where people gather to ask what value could mean.
The project’s core ideas include circular mentorship, artists learning from artists and sharing knowledge back into the community; prototyping abundance, where artists design their own models for financial sustainability; and art in every neighborhood, where artistic research is shared in everyday spaces and unconventional community hubs.
Goblin Market was never meant to be a fixed artwork. It is a roaming artists’ economic lab. A place-to-place network. A temporary world where small acts of kindness, mischief, generosity, bargaining, and refusal help us relate differently to the world we already live in.
In Toronto, Goblin Market partnered with UKAI Projects and Friends of Allan Gardens for two nights of magical exchange. Visitors traded jokes for art books, snacks for memories, and mapped friendship journeys. In Montréal, in partnership with GU, the market transformed a former mechanics’ garage in Mile-Ex into three evenings of neighborhood activity and exchange. In Hsinchu, Taiwan, the project partnered with Artsite Hsinchu and HOK Market, bringing artists to General Village for a lab and a public market focused on arts economies, resource sharing, and future international collaboration.
I was part of the Toronto and Montréal editions as a Parlor Parrot. We (Jessica Moon, Wendy Woon, Maria Fang, and I) were “the old birds,” carrying songs, stories, gossip, warnings, and little fragments of market lore. I loved that role because it let me enter the market sideways, not only as an artist or organizer, but as a creature of atmosphere. The Parlor Parrots were part witness, part chorus, part mischief, part memory system.
Those earlier markets shaped what happened later at Watershed. They taught me that the market works best when it gathers texture from the place it lands. The merchants, objects, songs, and rules all become part of the economy.
By the time we arrived in Bristol, I was not trying to reproduce Toronto or Montréal. I was carrying their spirit into a new context: Watershed, the canal, Bristol’s housing history, the RSC IF Fellowship, my collaboration with Tristan, Tunde Olaniran’s wearable textile currency system, and the question of inclusive economies.
The market travels, but it changes shape each time.
Why Watershed
One of the reasons I chose Watershed as the place where I wanted to be embedded during the RSC IF Fellowship was its relationship to public life in Bristol. It is a civic space on the Harbourside, with a café, toilets, late opening hours, and a long history of formal and informal partnerships with the surrounding community.
At the entrance to Watershed, people gather along the canal. Some are visitors. Some are artists. Some are workers passing through. Some are unhoused. What mattered to me was that Watershed seemed to understand something many cultural institutions forget: access is not only about tickets. Access is also about bathrooms, warmth, Wi-Fi, a place to sit, somewhere open late, and staff who understand that a public cultural building has obligations beyond programming.
This felt connected to my work in housing justice. A building can say who belongs before anyone speaks. A café can become an informal support system. A bathroom can be part of a care infrastructure. A cultural venue can be a place where people are not immediately moved along.
That is a profound design question.
Watershed was founded in 1982 and has long held space in Bristol for film, art, creative technology, public culture, and cross-disciplinary experimentation. It is home to the Pervasive Media Studio, a research and development space that brings together artists, technologists, academics, and creative companies working with experience design and creative technology.
The Pervasive Media Studio felt right because it is built for work that lives between categories. It is a place where prototypes can be unfinished without being unserious. It is a place where technology can be social, spatial, playful, and strange.
Our main producer and connection at Watershed was Victoria Tillotson, who helped make the gathering possible with so much care. Producing a live game is its own kind of magic. It means thinking through the room, the people, the materials, the timing, the risks, the energy, and the little details that make people feel invited rather than confused. Victoria helped hold the container so the goblins could misbehave inside.
Bristol, housing, and the long memory of shelter
Bristol is a city with a long and uneven housing history. The Bristol Cable has written about the city’s council housing history beginning in the post-World War I “homes for heroes” era, when the promise of decent housing for working people briefly became a national priority. Bristol’s first council homes were part of that larger movement, shaped by the belief that housing was not simply a private commodity but a public responsibility.
That history matters because the housing crisis did not appear out of nowhere. It was made over time, through policy, neglect, speculation, austerity, and the slow erosion of social housing. A city can hold the memory of public ambition and the evidence of abandonment at the same time.
I was thinking about that in Bristol. I was thinking about what it means to gather in a cultural space while people outside are navigating housing insecurity. I was thinking about the difference between a market that welcomes everyone and a market that decides who is disposable. I was thinking about who gets to participate in the economy, and who is only allowed to be managed by it.
This is where Goblin Market connects to my larger body of work on homelessness, housing loss, and AI.
Through Good For What?, my research project and podcast funded by the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant, I have been exploring how data, storytelling, and artificial intelligence might help prevent housing loss. The project asks how we can better understand the moments before homelessness happens: eviction risk, climate displacement, benefits gaps, family instability, informal housing loss, and the many quiet failures that happen before someone is counted in a homelessness system.
The goal is not technology for its own sake. The goal is prevention. The goal is to build systems that can help people before they are forced into crisis. The goal is to treat housing stability as something worth measuring, protecting, and designing for.
In that sense, Goblin Market is part of the same research, but in another language.
One side of the work asks: How can data systems help make homelessness rare and brief?
The other side asks: How can games, art, and performance help us imagine economies where people are not abandoned in the first place?
The RSC IF year
This gathering was also part of a much longer arc. Tristan and I began our RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship a year earlier, in June 2025. The fellowship is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s wider thought leadership and research program, supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council. It brings together artists, researchers, and cultural workers, with a focus on historically underrepresented voices, to think about the future of the performing arts sector and the wider cultural field.
For me, the invitation carried both professional and personal history.
Before I was born, my father was a Royal Shakespeare Company player. He passed away in 2022. His cousin, my second cousin once removed, is Debra Winger, one of the defining actors of her generation. So the theater was never distant from my life. It was part of my family atmosphere and of my own formation.
I trained as an actor and studied vocal performance at the Eastman School of Music. I performed in theater, opera, and musical theater before moving further into fine art, media art, and performance art.
So returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company through the IF Fellowship did not feel like entering an unfamiliar world. It felt more like returning to a root system from a new direction.
By the time I arrived at Goblin Market, I was not thinking of theater as only a traditional stage form. I was thinking about theater as a social technology. A rehearsal room. A way to test rules, roles, desire, conflict, and exchange in public.
The fellowship gave us time to think about what performance can do when it becomes a game-space. How can theater become a place to prototype new forms of economy, care, and exchange? What happens when audience members are not only watching, but bargaining, refusing, inventing, remembering, and making choices? What kinds of value appear when the rules are temporary, handmade, and visible?
Not quite a LARP
People sometimes call Goblin Market a LARP, and that is close, but not exactly right.
A LARP usually gives players a role, a world, and a set of rules to perform within. A one-off interactive event often gives people a task or experience to complete. Goblin Market is looser than that. It is a setting, a prompt, and a game of make-believe.
We tell people where they are: a market. Everyone already knows what a market is. It is a place to meet people, get snacks, overhear gossip, find quests, make trades, and notice something strange happening in the corner.
At first, there are goblins at booths and guests we call revelers. Then something shifts. The revelers begin to become goblins, too.
At Watershed, there was one centralized evil bank. It was robbed so many times that rival evil banks appeared. Robin Hood(s) emerged. The market was flooded with currency until money started to feel meaningless. People completed every quest they could find, then began inventing quests for each other.
People enjoyed taking portraits with other goblins in their assembled, bartered, and won attire, with our local celebrities (a bowl of fruit, everyone knows ORANGE, such a legend).
Street economies
For me, Goblin Market also belongs to a lineage of street art, performance, DJ culture, graffiti, busking, and informal economies.
As a New Yorker, I think about the street as one of my first performance spaces. The subway platform, the park, the sidewalk, the stoop, the block party, the corner store, the handball court, the open hydrant, the folding table with incense and bootleg DVDs. These are places where culture is made in public, often with almost no permission and very little infrastructure.
Bristol has its own version of this. It is impossible to think about Bristol without thinking about Banksy, graffiti, sound system culture, dubstep, pirate radio, and the way music and visual culture move through streets before institutions know what to do with them.
That is part of what interests me about Goblin Market. It is not only an art event inside a venue. It borrows from the street economy: barter, performance, improvisation, snacks, music, scams, gifts, jokes, rumors, and sudden transformation.
The street is not waiting for the museum. It already has audience, myth, beef, devotion, theft, and weather.
A DJ set is a temporary government. The beat decides who moves, who gets brave, and who finds each other.
Graffiti is proof that the city is contested. Every wall is a group chat with landlords, cops, kids, ghosts, and whoever has a marker.
Buskers know the economy cold. Attention is currency. Pleasure is labor. Generosity changes when people have to look you in the eye.
Performance art begins when the body refuses its assigned role: worker, customer, audience, problem, decoration.
That is where Goblin Market lives. Not as a clean interactive experience, but as a messy public economy where value mutates, and the crowd can become the artwork.
What happened in the market
At the Watershed iteration, Goblin Market became a live exchange system. It drew from fairytales, experimental markets, children’s games, theater, LARP, Indigenous systems of record-keeping, and the weird affective charge of wanting something that may or may not be good for you.
The title nods to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a poem filled with appetite, danger, pleasure, commerce, and enchanted salesmanship. I have always loved the tension in that poem. The goblins call out with abundance. The fruit is delicious. The market is irresistible. But desire has consequences. To enter the market is to enter a system that wants something from you.
In our version, the Goblins and market dwellers are the main characters, not a cautionary tale about purity. I am interested in the marketplace as a site of negotiation. I am interested in the performer as vendor, the audience member as player, and the object as a carrier of story. I am interested in what happens when value is not fixed in advance but emerges through conversation.
The market used rocks as currency. Each player received a small number of rocks, and those rocks became a way to move through the world of the game. Rocks are funny because they are ordinary and ancient at the same time. They can be worthless or sacred, depending on who is holding them and what story they carry.
That is what I love about games. A game can reveal how much of the real world is already held together by shared belief.
Tunde’s garment and the textile currency system
A major part of this iteration was the Goblin Market garment, designed by Tunde Olaniran, an award-winning recording artist and performer whose work moves with such force between music, fashion, choreography, and world-building. I commissioned Tunde to create a garment for the market, and they imagined a semi-modular wearable textile currency system.
The garment is a vest with tokens attached to the front. The tokens can be removed, exchanged, carried, and remembered. Tunde collaborated with Slow Stitch, inviting residents to contribute token designs that could be incorporated into the final garment. The tokens were small, tactile, and made to be handled. They could be any shape, color, material, or texture, as long as they could withstand being touched and attach to the garment with a loop or a hole.
The prompt for the tokens asked makers to think about value as a story. A token could represent time spent making. It could include scraps of valued material. It could hold a true story or a fictional one. It could operate as a one-to-one exchange, or its value could come from the importance of the attached message.
In my own practice, I often return to wampum as a way to think about technology, memory, agreement, and record. Wampum belts are not simply decorative objects. They can hold law, relationship, diplomacy, ceremony, history, and responsibility. I am careful with this reference because I am not interested in flattening wampum into a metaphor. I am interested in what it teaches about material systems of knowledge, and how a record can be held by the body, the hand, and the community.
Tunde’s garment became a way to ask: What if currency remembered the person who made it? What if value could be worn, carried, exchanged, and read? What if an economic system were visible as a pattern of relationships rather than hidden behind a platform?
The Evil Bank: daylight robbery
A bank, as is understood by the commonality of art and goblins, a rare intersection of tastes and viewpoints, is somewhere specific.
A place to go to be robbed of your money.
Various goblins, independently, upon being fleeced or bamboozled by the banks, declared they were robbed. And what is a goblin to do when robbed? Rob right back. To fill one’s pockets with pilfered goods and ill-gotten gains is a unique pleasure, and one available at…
The goblin Bank…
…was the hub of market money and its distribution. Armed with an enormous platter of rocks to stimulate and “manage” the “economy” of the goblin market, the bank oversaw several alleged games of chance, a faux-stock market illustrated through crude marker drawings and a handful of dice, as well as the distribution of quests to anyone who felt their pockets were growing too light.
At the beginning of the game, goblins were given a small pouch to serve as their coin purse. Filled with a small handful of rocks, it acted as the money someone had brought along from their hovels or holes. However, as the festivities went on, or if one had simply lost their money to the fickle markets or another vendor, they went to the bank.
Predatory Loans were one of the advertised services: a free injection of rocks to a player, with promises that their debt would be collected at some unspecified point in the future, with nefarious consequences. These functioned as a narrative buffer for the revelers; no matter how much money you lost, or how much the ‘game’ of the market had taken from you, there was always a reliable way to continue play.
The bank quickly earned a reputation. A monolith of power that could be readily ignored, taunted, abused, or interfaced with. There stood no guards, and there was little law between the goblins, so bank robberies were frequent. Goblins would dip their hands into the coffers and be met with a shrug. No more was the bank a lofty, menacing tower looming over the lives of everyone around it, but a place to guffaw and play, purchasing treats and losing everything- just to get it right back.
The bank’s quests were frequently sinister- or as sinister as dancing with talismans made of shiny trash and walking around plastic butterflies- feeding them tales to interest a ‘bored out-of-towner, who was allegedly of an aristocratic air’. Allusions to the backroom brokerage of souls and bad luck, countless goblins off-screen toiling away in mines, theft, and mismanagement are readily apparent. Thus, the name ‘evil bank’ was born. (The teller is always quick to point out, think of a bank that isn't evil!)
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This playful mirror of reality outlined an inherent understanding that the monopolized power and wealth of a bank, alongside its predatory practices and integration of wealth into the wider society of commerce and livelihood, are, almost implicitly, a de facto villain. Not that this reputation is deserved or not, the simple declaration of banking and allocation of funds and commerce- even if directly and unambiguously weighted in the player's favor or address- was commonly understood to be sinister, even before the games were afoot.
The sound of the market
I also live DJed the market from a Spotify set list, which became its own kind of game mechanic.
I wanted the room to feel like a place of exchange before anyone fully understood the rules. Sound helped do that. It gave the market a pulse. It let people know they had entered a temporary world, one with its own tempo, appetite, and weather. The playlist moved through tracks that felt mischievous, bodily, strange, playful, and a little unstable. Not exactly background music, but atmosphere with opinions.
DJing from Spotify was intentionally casual and slightly scrappy. I liked that. It fit the spirit of Goblin Market. This was not a sealed theatrical illusion.
I have been thinking a lot about music as social infrastructure. A beat can organize a room without telling anyone what to do. A song can make a group of strangers feel like they are inside the same spell. For Goblin Market, the DJ set helped the market become porous. People could enter through the sound before they entered through the rules.
In a project about alternative economies, the playlist also mattered because music is one of the places where artists know the contradictions of value so intimately. Songs circulate everywhere, but musicians still struggle to be paid. A track can hold memory, labor, community, desire, and survival, while the platform turns it into a fraction of a cent. So even using Spotify inside the market carried that tension. It was convenient, imperfect, and part of the same economic world the project is trying to examine.
Playing value
What I learned from the Watershed version is that people understand experimental economies quickly when they can touch them.
You do not need to explain scarcity if someone only has five rocks. You do not need to explain speculation if someone realizes a token might become more valuable later. You do not need to explain institutional power if there is an evil bank in the room. You do not need to explain desire if the goblins have something beautiful and strange to offer.
The game lets people encounter ideas before they have to name them.
That matters to me because so much of the conversation around the arts economy becomes abstract. Funding models. Sustainability. Monetization. Audience development. Platform strategy. Market access. Benefits eligibility. Service delivery. Prevention. Case management. These words are useful, but they can also become a fog.
Artists live inside the material reality of economic systems. So do people experiencing poverty and housing insecurity. Rent, time, travel, childcare, health, debt, tools, documentation, grant cycles, rejection letters, ticket sales, algorithms, benefits forms, waiting lists, and exhaustion.
I wanted Goblin Market to make room for the emotional truth of that. The funny part. The painful part. The part where people are asked to prove need over and over again before receiving help. The part where we want to be generous, but we also need to survive. The part where we make beautiful things from scraps, favors, memories, and impossible timelines.
Inclusive economies
When I say alternative economies, I do not only mean cute barter systems or artist-run markets. I mean economies that can help us ask better questions about survival.
What would a benefits system look like if it were designed around trust?
What would housing support look like if prevention were valued as much as emergency response?
What would happen if the labor of staying housed were recognized?
What would it mean to build an economy where care is not treated as an afterthought?
These questions are central to my work with Good For What? and my housing loss research. I am interested in how AI and data might support people at risk of homelessness, but also in how stories and games can help us understand what the data misses. A dataset might show that someone received a service. It might not show how hard it was to access that service, how humiliating the process felt, what was lost while waiting, or what informal care networks kept someone alive before the system noticed them.
Games can make those invisible rules visible.
A player with five rocks understands constraint. A player facing an evil bank understands arbitrary power. A player who has to bargain for a token understands that value is relational. A player who invents a new rule understands that systems are made by people, and can be remade by people.
That is why the market matters to me. It is playful, but it is not separate from the world. It is a rehearsal space for economic imagination.
A market as a rehearsal
I do not think games solve these problems by themselves. I do think they let us rehearse.
A game can make a system small enough to hold. It can make power visible. It can create a temporary world where rules can be tested, broken, rewritten, and felt. It can let people practice refusal without destroying the room. It can let people notice how quickly they adapt to unfairness, and how quickly they begin to imagine alternatives.
At Watershed, the market was brief. People came in, played, exchanged, laughed, questioned, and left. But the ideas keep moving. The garment will continue to evolve. The token system can grow. The Rock Market can become more elaborate. The evil bank, unfortunately, has many real-world cousins and plenty of future material.
For me, this version of Goblin Market affirmed that the arts need more spaces where economic imagination can be both playful and serious.
We need markets where the currency remembers.
We need systems where people are not punished for needing help.
We need economies that do not treat homelessness as inevitable.
Thank you
Thank you to Watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio for hosting this iteration in Bristol. Thank you to Victoria Weitganant for producing and holding the many details that made the day possible. Thank you to the Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellowship for giving Tristan and me a year to follow this research across performance, game design, family history, and artistic survival. Thank you to Tunde Olaniran for creating the Goblin Market garment with such brilliance and care, and to Slow Stitch and the makers who contributed to the token system.
And thank you to Tristan, my son, collaborator, co-conspirator, and designer of evil banks.
The goblins will return.
Follow the trail
If you want to keep walking through the woods with me, here are some of the projects, ideas, and texts that shaped Goblin Market.
Housing, care, and making homelessness rare and brief
Goblin Market is part of my larger work on housing loss, prevention, and inclusive economies. The rocks, banks, tokens, and bargains are playful, but the questions underneath them are very real. How do we build systems where care arrives before crisis? How do we make homelessness rare and brief? How do we design economies where people are not punished for needing help?
You can learn more about that work through Good For What?, my project on housing loss, storytelling, data, and AI:
https://goodforwhat.org/
I also recommend spending time with Community Solutions, the organization behind Built for Zero, a movement of communities working to measurably and equitably end homelessness:
https://community.solutions/
https://community.solutions/built-for-zero/
For a UK context, Crisis has been working with Built for Zero approaches and publishes clear research on homelessness and housing policy:
https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/built-for-zero/
https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessness-monitor/
My housing work has also been shaped by conversations with New America’s Future of Land and Housing team, whose work looks at land, housing, displacement, climate, and the systems that decide who gets to stay:
https://www.newamerica.org/programs/future-of-land-and-housing/
For readers who want a Bristol-specific frame, I recommend this piece from The Bristol Cable on the history of council housing in Bristol, from postwar promises to the present housing crisis:
https://thebristolcable.org/2019/04/from-homes-for-heroes-to-a-housing-crisis-a-potted-history-of-bristols-council-housing/
For US context, the National Alliance to End Homelessness is a useful place to start:
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
Watershed, RSC IF, and the project context
This iteration of Goblin Market happened at Watershed in Bristol, inside the Pervasive Media Studio:
https://www.watershed.co.uk/
https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio
The project was part of my year with the Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellowship, an AHRC-supported research fellowship bringing together artists, researchers, and cultural workers to think about the future of the performing arts and the wider cultural sector:
https://if.rsc.org.uk/
You can also read more about the larger Goblin Market project here:
https://www.studioamelia.com/goblin-market
Goblin Market, Luisa Ji
Luisa Ji’s page on Goblin Market as an artist’s economic lab, including the project’s core pillars, co-creators, and the Toronto, Montréal, and Hsinchu editions.
https://luisaji.com/goblin-market
Goblin Market project page
The larger research and prototyping project around alternative arts marketplaces, artists’ financial sustainability, fairytale economies, and relational exchange.
https://goblin-market.ghost.io/about/
Artist prototypers: Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Tricia Enns, Luisa Ji, Adrian Layner, annais linares, Jerrold McGrath, Abbey Richens, Emil Woudenberg
https://goblin-market.ghost.io/about/
Among friends
- Prachi Khandekar, Albéric Maillet, Kasra Goodarznezhad, and Husna Farooqui’s care and expertise, particularly regarding local creative ecosystems in Montreal and Toronto, have been vital for this project.
- UKAI Projects is making space for prototype development and creative exchange, as always.
Research and Prototyping Funding
This project is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
LARP, games, and social rehearsal
I think about LARP as a way to rehearse systems. A game can make power small enough to hold in your hand. It can make rules visible. It can let people practice refusal, bargaining, care, cheating, hoarding, redistribution, and repair before we have to use those words.
If you are curious about LARP as design, research, or social practice, Nordic Larp is a good doorway:
https://nordiclarp.org/
The Journal of Analog Game Studies is also a useful place to wander if you are interested in tabletop games, roleplay, live action games, and game culture:
https://analoggamestudies.org/
For more formal writing on LARP and design research, I recommend:
Why Larp?! A Synthesis Paper on Live Action Roleplay in Relation to HCI Research and Practice
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08526
Larping as an Embodied Design Research Method
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333938077_Larping_Live_Action_Role_Playing_as_an_Embodied_Design_Research_Method
And for a more accessible essay on LARP and social change:
https://aeon.co/essays/can-live-action-role-play-games-bring-about-social-change
Games, rules, and strange little systems
For readers interested in games as systems, arguments, and handmade worlds, these are some useful texts:
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play
A foundational book on games, rules, systems, and meaning.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262240451/rules-of-play/
Mary Flanagan, Critical Play
A beautiful text on games as critique, intervention, and artistic practice.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262518659/critical-play/
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games
Useful for thinking about games as arguments made through systems.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262514880/persuasive-games/
Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
A punk, personal, DIY invitation to make games outside the usual industry structures.
https://sevenstories.com/books/3498-rise-of-the-videogame-zinesters
Theater, performance, and rehearsal
My thinking about Goblin Market also comes from theater and performance. I trained as an actor and singer before moving into digital media, fine art, and performance art, so I return to theater not as a distant reference, but as part of my own body.
A few texts and thinkers I return to:
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed
The classic text on theater as rehearsal for social change.
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339290/theatre-of-the-oppressed/
Bertolt Brecht, writings on epic theater
For thinking about theater as a place where audiences can see systems instead of disappearing into illusion.
https://monoskop.org/Bertolt_Brecht
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction
A good entry point for ritual, play, performance, and restored behavior.
https://www.routledge.com/Performance-Studies-An-Introduction/Schechner/p/book/9781138284562
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire
Essential for thinking about embodied knowledge, memory, and performance as transmission.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-archive-and-the-repertoire
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
A text I love for queer futurity, performance, hope, and the not-yet-here.
https://nyupress.org/9781479874569/cruising-utopia/
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons
For study, refusal, institutions, and the social life that happens beside and beneath official structures.
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516
Technology, justice, and other possible futures
Because Goblin Market is also about systems, platforms, AI, and the stories we tell about value, these books are part of the larger constellation:
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice
For community-led design, power, and who gets to shape the systems we live inside.
https://design-justice.pubpub.org/
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
For thinking about technology, race, design, and the systems that reproduce harm while claiming neutrality.
https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after-technology
Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
For understanding search, platforms, racism, and algorithmic power.
https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
For kinship, making-with, and learning to stay inside complexity.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
For thinking about attachment, survival, precarity, and the promises that keep us tethered to harmful systems.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism
A few of my related writings
These are some of my own essays and projects that connect to the questions inside Goblin Market:
My Medium page
https://medium.com/@studioamelia
Antecedent Technology: Don’t Colonize Our Future
https://immerse.news/antecedent-technology-b3a89956299d
Advice for Artists
https://studioamelia.medium.com/advice-for-artists-c38047c4b003
The Future of Noise Musicians and Sound Physicians
https://medium.com/@studioamelia/the-future-of-noise-musicians-and-sound-physicians-fee4b19998b7
Studio Amelia
https://www.studioamelia.com/
