The Carpoolers Arcade Game, 2026, grows out of my long-term documentary project Carpoolers, which followed Mexican workers riding in the open beds of pickup trucks as they moved between home and work across suburbs and cities. Translating these photographs into a video game lets the images stop being only something you look at and become something you move through. The player does not control a hero. You are in an digital arcade "landscape." You navigate routes, timing, balance, and risk. Simple actions like staying in the truck or making it to the job site become charged with tension. Play becomes a way of feeling how labor is organized, how bodies are transported, and how entire systems depend on people who are meant to remain unseen.

As a game, the project leans into the strange mix of fun and discomfort that play allows. Bright colors, simple mechanics, and repetition echo classic arcade logic, but the stakes are social and political. In a moment when Mexican workers in the United States are increasingly targeted, erased, or reduced to talking points, the game insists on presence. It does not explain or moralize. It asks the player to spend time inside a structure that already exists, to notice how power hides in everyday movement, and to recognize how meaning can shift when documentary images stop being fixed and start responding to human action. A documentary arcade game?

I am exploring a different kind of rarity, one that is earned rather than assigned. Most NFTs so far have treated value like a label, something baked in through traits, supply, or a story that people agree to repeat until it feels true. Sometimes that agreement becomes real culture, and that can be powerful, but it is still mostly belief sitting on top of a fixed object. I want to test a harsher idea: what if the thing that makes an on-chain artwork valuable is the work someone does inside it, the choices they make, the mistakes they survive, the time they sacrifice, the systems they learn to navigate. Not as a feel-good badge, but as a documentary arcade game where play is a way of inhabiting labour, not watching it from a safe distance. If the token is a record, then it should record effort and constraint, not just ownership, and it should make the player feel the friction that real systems produce. That also means facing the uncomfortable parts of NFTs head-on: speculation flattening meaning, status games replacing art, and the chain turning human activity into a scoreboard. I am not trying to pretend those problems do not exist; I am trying to make them visible by designing a world where progress costs something and where the trace left on-chain is not just proof you bought in, but proof you endured the structure. Maybe it turns out this kind of rarity does not work, or maybe it creates a new kind of cultural consensus, one grounded in what people actually did rather than what they were told to want.