Let’s Change the Game

And anyway, the game I truly want to help change is bigger than household budgeting. Modern social systems treat forests as resources better than as living systems. They treat caregiving as private sacrifice instead of foundational work. They consider war production as economic activity while peacekeeping, repair, and trust building become secondary, invisible or ignored. They reward extraction more reliably than stewardship and make some forms of leadership spectacular and profitable while other forms of leadership remain quiet, exhausting and unpaid.

The deeper problem is not that people are bad at managing their personal finances. People are animals, we are not supposed to be good at that! It is that the world keeps giving us prices, incentives and responsibilities that do not match the real value of what is being protected, damaged, created, or cared for. It gives us systems that do not allow us to be the beautiful, complex and sometimes internally contradictory animals that we are.

So, if the game is that large, why begin with small groups? Not because households are the problem—we are not—but because households are where consequences arrive.

In a healthier world, people would not have to pay so much attention to personal finance. Hopefully nearly none at all would suffice. Strong communities, trustworthy institutions, mutual support, and sane economic rules would carry that burden.

Money would not need to be such a private source of fear.

Vzna is a small prototype for testing whether a group can make hidden value more visible. It asks whether care can be represented without being commodified, whether leadership can be rewarded without becoming domination, whether shared burdens can be seen before they turn into resentment, whether a group can consent, dissent, block, revise, and reallocated without falling into the illusion that money is the only thing that matters. It asks whether people can coordinate around obligations, future needs, care, stewardship and repair in a way that feels more honest and liberating than private, zero sum, poker-style budgeting.

This particular system is not the whole game change. It is a playable test of one move in a monumental strategy that is destined to be formed collectively or not at all—a path that must be walked in order to find itself.

Before we redesign economics, which it uncomfortably falls upon our generation to do, we need to know whether five people can use different rules without making each other miserable. If a small group cannot make care, leadership, trust and shared obligation more visible, then a larger theory about value remains abstract. But if a small group can do it—imperfectly, and with real consequences—then we have something worth learning from.

I make games because games reveal what rules reward and punish, as well as how humans respond to rewards and punishments. Vzna came from the suspicion that many of our real-world rules reward the wrong behaviors and hide the right ones.

The games I made as a child taught me rules behind the rules. Martial arts taught me that evil can be channeled for good. Rigging taught me that leadership is real when consequences are real. My early experiments with collective allocation—the Sea Leg collective and my family’s practice with my homemade Llovizna ritual—taught me that budgeting can be easier, more fun and more sacred when performed collectively in a certain, unexpected way.

Vzna is the attempt to turn those lessons in to a working, duplicable protocol. In this endeavor, we may find you particularly useful. We are currently looking for play testers.

In game design, play testing is where the truth appears. You find out which rules are elegant, which are confusing, which create loopholes, which create conflict and which unexpectedly help people become better players.

We seek humans who can see the difference between value and price. We are considering families who share care, households under financial pressure, friends groups with shared projects, intentional communities, mutual aid groups, co-ops, caregiving networks, spiritual communities, martial arts schools, property sharing groups, and anyone trying to coordinate repair, land, food, childcare, eldercare, retreat space or community infrastructure.

Vzna is not about becoming a more disciplined little economic unit inside a sick, broken game. It is about testing whether small groups can play by rules that recognize shared value more clearly, whether better rules can be discovered collectively by the people who are already carrying the consequences of the current ruleset, and whether small groups can begin correcting distorted value at the scale whether they still know one another intimately.

I want to change a much larger game than home finance. Home finance was not a game I thought I had any stake in. But I do not trust theories that refuse to be tested until they are too big to fail. Vzna is a small test for humans that may one day lead to a giant step for humankind.

If you have ever felt that the current system prices the wrong things, ignores the right things, and then leaves ordinary people to absorb the consequences, I’d like to play test some new rules with you.