Contact with other players is a key social motive for gaming. True friendships can grow between gamers who regularly play together online—even if they will never see each other’s faces, or know each other’s true location or name.

This social experience is very different from our everyday and often rushed exchanges online. Yugo: the non-game is an online production that attempts to replicate that social experience for non-gamers. The gaming element is therefore kept to a minimum: as a player you simply drive a car through a hilly landscape where there is no other traffic. While you’re on the road, someone else may log in from another device, join you in your car and start a voice chat. You can carry on chatting with your invisible co-traveler as you glide through the calming, abstract landscape, listening to the car radio.

One potential conversation starter is the radio program, and another is the visual design: the car looks like an old Yugoslavian Yugo, and the landscape is inspired by the region of Kosovo at twilight, when the sky fills with crows and the monoliths on the hills stand out like the utopian socialist monuments of the past.