Release, Rehearsal, and Radical Happiness: Offline Public Play As A Practice of Situated Hope

Entrenched powers must be fought on all fronts, and our invitation is to use play as one of the weapons. In August 2025, the Indonesian House of Representatives announced an extravagant salary increase amidst a stagnant job market and growing resentment towards police-escorted officials clearing the roads for their convoys of luxury cars while ordinary citizens struggled through traffic daily. Protests erupted in Jakarta at first, but after an armored vehicle killed a taxi bike driver, it immediately spread to other cities, including Denpasar, Bali. It quickly escalated into violent clashes with police. In the hours that followed, state-aligned influencers and paid “buzzers” amplified uncertainty and urged withdrawal into private spaces while the threat of Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE) that has been repeatedly used to criminalize online dissent loomed. The combination of narrative control and legal threat make fear an efficient governing tool, pushing resistance away from public space and into isolated, surveilled interiors. In this atmosphere, Bukan Main Games organized an offline public play session in a city park blocks away from the crackdown that happened a few hours earlier. Around sixteen players and several observers attended, collectively releasing suppressed emotions while reclaiming the civil space. When confrontation was unsafe and online discourse was saturated with misinformation, play offered a sideways tactic, echoing James C. Scott’s account of everyday resistance: practices that endure through illegibility and social cohesion. The board game we designed and played that day, The Battle for Our Roads (Rebutan Jalanan), required eight players to cooperate in reaching their destinations while blocking officials and their escorts. The mechanic mirrored lived frustrations of facing unequal mobility and contested infrastructure. Drawing on Huizinga and Caillois, the game’s absorptive, rule-bound space demanded trust and conflict resolution through deliberation. In this sense, the session functioned as rehearsal for a better future, aligning with Flanagan and Nissenbaum’s argument that games are spaces where values are practiced, and following Freire’s insistence that futures without domination must be practiced, not narrated. What emerged was what Lynne Segal calls “radical happiness”: joy that did not erase grief but sustained collective hope and endurance, and offline public play became both release and rehearsal while sustaining the conditions under which resistance remains embodied and alive. With this context in mind, we offer our reflections and the methods that made it possible.