Grinding Choices, a gamebook of crypto labor, launches

Grinding Choices is a solo adventure gamebook built like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1990s: numbered sections, branching decisions, a character sheet, dice rolls and multiple endings. It comes from latency.club, the Havana and Berlin platform run by Cuban artist Nestor Siré and filmmaker and anthropologist Steffen Köhn, and its subject is the rise and collapse of the Axie Infinity play-to-earn economy in Cuba. The Rijksakademie, which published the book, hosts the launch as part of its Open Studios.

The academy's listing calls the book "an interactive ethnography disguised as a 1990s solo adventure role-playing game." It draws on several years of fieldwork: participant observation, collaborative play and interviews with players, sponsors, hackers, brokers and their families. In its world, infrastructure is unreliable and trust is currency, so who you know decides as much as strategy does.

The half-hour presentation pairs Siré and Köhn with Chuli Herrera, the Cuban artist behind the book's art direction, graphic design and illustrations. Ricardo Miguel Hernández shot the photography, and Yainet Rodríguez Rodríguez copy-edited the Spanish. Siré is one of the 48 resident artists opening their studios this year, alongside five tech fellows.

We first wrote about Grinding Choices when the pair showed it at the Rijksakademie's experimental games night in September, in our piece on the gamebook. The collective's interest in speculative economies also runs through Oracle Index, its crypto-mined cinema installation in Madrid.