What would it be like to create your own society? One in which you could find imaginative ways to repair the problems of our day?

Students and scholars of utopianism at CETAPS in Porto set out to answer these questions by creating a board game, Horizon, in which players build their own utopia through collaborative discussion. I organized two trials of the beta version of Horizon with groups of friends at Dona Mira in Bonfim on 8 March and at the former Vintu in Cedofeita on 25 July to find out how people outside the world of utopian studies would respond.

The most fascinating thing I observed was how the two groups of players, the first mainly teachers, the second book lovers, created quite different kinds of utopia. The first made more use of the map, even creating additional spaces outside the city walls for agricultural and other social functions. The second group drew on their broad knowledge of fiction, especially sci-fi, to imagine social institutions with many futuristic and technical characteristics.

My experience showed how personal the utopian imagination can be, and how any kind of utopian speculation needs to take account of the great diversity of individual desire. Utopia is never perfect and cannot be a blueprint. It is best understood as a joint endeavour, one in which we enjoy the magic of observing our collaborative project come to life in ways we could never have expected, and then test and revise what we have built together. Horizon is a game that fosters that utopian possibility.

The Zeitgeist of our present world is dystopian, which, in my view, makes the need for utopian thinking ever more important today. As Tom Moylan argues in Becoming Utopian, dystopianism risks promoting a cynical apathy when confronted with social challenges. Utopian literary works such as News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris or A Modern Utopia (1905) by H.G. Wells reflect humans’ faculty for critical thinking about the state of society, as well as our capacity to imagine how things could be done better than they are. Likewise, Horizon offers players the opportunity to experience an engagement in utopian thinking with others. 

Horizon is being published in Portuguese and English and will shortly be available for sale in the shop at the University of Porto Rectory in Praça dos Leões.

You can learn more about Horizon here.