LUME Does Not End with Results, but with a Transformation in Thinking
Projects are often evaluated through their outputs and outcomes: what results were pursued, what kinds of outcomes were achieved, what was published and communicated about the topic, and how different outputs are implemented after the project ends. But perhaps we should also pause to consider what does not appear in publications, reports, blogs, or handbooks, yet still remains as a lasting part of the thinking of those involved, such as us teachers and experts working in universities of applied sciences. Perhaps the most significant contribution of a project is not its individual outputs, but rather the hidden expertise it generates: the kind of knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking that are difficult to name, measure, or productize. This article argues that the LUME project has also played a major role in transforming ways of thinking and developing tacit knowledge. From Tacit Knowledge to Visible Expertise Hidden expertise can be understood through the concept of tacit knowledge. Polanyi (1966, p. 4), one of the first scholars to study the concept, described tacit knowledge with the statement: “we can know more than we can tell.” According to him, a significant part of human expertise is of a nature that cannot be fully verbalized or documented. Polanyi (pp. 9–13; 25–32) also emphasized that tacit knowledge is built through experience and action. Tacit knowledge has become an important concept especially in organizational studies. As Hadjimichael et al. (2024, p. 546) note, whether a task is practical or expert-oriented, simple or complex, routine or creative, its successful execution always depends partly on tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is particularly evident in context-sensitive, experience-based judgment, where individuals recognize essential situational factors, respond intuitively, and learn within uncertain and changing environments. From this perspective, the learning process within the LUME project, along with all the materials produced and experiments conducted, created a strong foundation for tacit expertise. This expertise enables us to approach new technological phenomena critically and identify new, essential needs, problems, and solutions—especially in situations where no ready-made answers yet exist. Hidden expertise can also be examined through the lens of situated learning. This perspective emphasizes that expertise does not emerge as isolated individual activity, but through participation in shared practices and communities. According to Lave and Wenger (1991, pp. 29–33; 67–69; see also Ackermann et al., 2024, pp. 596–597), situated learning develops gradually within communities as part of everyday practices. In this sense, expertise is not only visible in outputs and results, but also accumulates as collectively shared ways of thinking. Tacit knowledge becomes social, context-bound expertise. Many of my own views, assumptions, and attitudes related to Web3 technologies changed through regular project meetings. By discussing, exchanging ideas, and experimenting together, I learned far more collectively than I ever could have alone. My own, at times perhaps even childlike, enthusiasm and curiosity toward the new topic certainly supported this learning process. Learning manifested itself, for example, in the courage to admit to others that I did not understand something. The expertise produced together was not tied to any specific role or organization. Rather, it was based on shared ownership that continues to live on and spread as tacit knowledge among us participants even after the project has ended. Web3: An Object of Learning or a Catalyst? When reading a project report focused on Web3 themes, attention is easily drawn to technologies, tools, or applications. Naturally, one tends to ask what was learned about technological concepts such as blockchains, NFTs, DAOs, or smart contracts. However, as the LUME project progressed, it became increasingly clear to me that the most important learning was not related to any specific technical solution. Many of the learning transformations that emerged during the project were subtle in nature. The project fostered new enthusiasm for asking questions and experimenting, new ways of relating to technological change and constantly evolving operational environments, and new ways of understanding commercialization opportunities in the creative industries. At the beginning of the project, Web3 appeared to me primarily as a new phenomenon that I, as a teacher, should explain, clarify, and make understandable. Gradually, however, this perspective shifted. Web3 was no longer primarily something to be taught. Instead, it became a catalyst that forced us to rethink our perspectives in new ways. Web3 highlights many questions related to ownership, value creation, and revenue models (Perboli et al., 2026). These are not entirely new issues unique to the Web3 world, but the technology gives concrete form to otherwise rather abstract concepts. Instead of technology itself, the core of learning becomes user-centeredness, values, and choices. At the same time, Web3 loses some of the technical mystique surrounding it, which in turn makes it more approachable. One of the most important lessons concerns teaching itself. When dealing with emerging and rapidly evolving technologies, complete mastery of the subject is simply unrealistic—at least if you are not teaching in a technology field. Nevertheless, as a teacher, you inevitably found yourself outside your comfort zone: how can you teach something that is entirely new even to you? Yet this discomfort did not prove to be a problem. On the contrary, it may actually have created space for shared learning, critical discussion, and acceptance of incompleteness. This mindset certainly does not apply only to Web3 themes, but can also be transferred to future technological disruptions—ones that teachers and educators in the creative industries will inevitably continue to encounter. When the Hype Fades, the Expertise Remains – How Can It Be Sustained? The hype surrounding Web3 has been intense, but according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle model, the decline of hype is a typical and expected phase for emerging technologies (Stephan, 2025). From the project’s perspective, however, this is not necessarily a problem. The rise and fall of hype can actually function as a gateway to deeper learning. The hidden expertise developed within LUME represents precisely this more enduring form of capital. It appears as a readiness to approach new technologies critically yet openly, an ability to distinguish the essential from the irrelevant, and the courage to leave some solutions unused. Not everything must be adopted, and not everything requires participation—this too is part of expertise. Not all expertise can be productized or documented within systems, because a significant part of professional expertise is based on tacit knowledge that cannot be fully verbalized or formalized (Hadjimichael et al., 2024, pp. 546–547). This does not mean that such expertise lacks value. Hidden expertise can be nurtured by recognizing it, allowing time for it, and enabling it to develop as part of everyday practice. This transformation cannot easily be demonstrated or quickly measured; its effects are long-term. LUME does not end with the outputs produced during the project, but continues to live on as a transformation in ways of thinking. References Ackermann, F., Pyrko, I., & Hill, G. (2024). Mobilizing landscapes of practice to address grand challenges. Human Relations, 77(5), 593-621. Hadjimichael, D., Ribeiro, R., & Tsoukas, H. (2024). How Does Embodiment Enable the Acquisition of Tacit Knowledge in Organizations? From Polanyi to Merleau-Ponty. Organization Studies, 45(4), 545–570. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406241228374 Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Perboli, G., Merlo, F., & Vandoni, C. (2026). Decentralizing the future: Value creation in Web 3.0 and the Metaverse. Horizon Europe. https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-226 Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday & Company. Stephan, C. (8.9.2025). Get Grounded With the 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies Author:Satu Lautamäki is a Principal Lecturer in Cultural Management at Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SEAMK). She works as an expert in the LUME – Creative in the Web3 Era project, co-funded by the European Social Fund of the European Union.
Digital Presence, Identity and Avatars in Creative Production
How does digital presence reshape creative work and art? This text is a summary based on an interview with internet historian and artist John Reis. In the discussion, he explains how game worlds and avatars are evolving from mere entertainment elements into building blocks of professional identity. Digital identity and the use of avatars are no longer limited to entertainment. They have become part of creative work, art, and cultural production. At the same time, they are transforming how people present themselves and build their presence online. This is not only about technology, but also about new ways of understanding existence in digital environments. Avatars are no longer just profile pictures or game characters. They are tools for constructing social, temporal, and spatial experiences. Digital presence no longer adapts to the limitations of the physical world in the same way it once did. It can stretch, layer itself, and transform across different contexts. However, understanding digital identity in creative production requires a broad perspective. Internet historian, designer, and digital artist John Reis (known online as Chaize) offers his own viewpoint on the subject. His expertise lies at the intersection of product design, sociology, and internet art. For six years, Reis has explored what digital existence means for contemporary creators, and in recent years these theoretical reflections have merged into practical experimentation within his own artistic work. From Virtual Theme Parties to Art Concepts Reis’s journey into using sandbox games as tools for cultural production began from a social need during pandemic lockdowns. At first, it involved virtual themed parties organized with friends, where the walls of game spaces were decorated with inside jokes. These experiments quickly expanded into graphic design and immersive concepts, such as a virtual cat exhibition where guests presented imaginary pets that defied the laws of physics. Later, the platform became a meeting place for a long-distance relationship, where Reis recreated, together with his partner, a fake terrace inspired by a photograph taken in Italy. These intimate experiments led to an important realization: game environments attract audiences who are genuinely curious and eager to explore content presented within digital spaces. Years later, Reis’s early sandbox experiments evolved into prototypes for presenting art, eventually leading to the inclusion of his work as part of the Helsinki Festival. Virtual Space as Part of Identity IMAGE: Screenshot by John Reis, Tower Unite (PixelTail Games, 2016) In Reis’s work, the virtual gallery space is not merely a backdrop, but a direct extension of the avatar and digital identity. As a tool for cultural production, the game environment enables the multiplication of the creator’s presence. Visitors entering the exhibition are greeted by a digital guide character (NPC, Non-Player Character) modeled after the artist’s own avatar. Identity and self-portraits are therefore not simply hung on walls; they come alive through the interactive elements of the environment. Space also becomes a tool for shaping identity when physical and digital histories merge together. Reis has, for example, reconstructed his former apartment in Tampere within a game environment. This creates a disorienting illusion between two- and three-dimensionality, blurring the line between real-world history and the digital present. Game mechanics, such as teleporting through walls into hidden rooms, can become methods for choreographing how audiences experience the artist’s digital world. Professionalism and Freedom in a Surreal Environment One of the most fascinating questions surrounding digital presence is how to maintain professional integrity within surreal environments. How does an audience react to an artist who communicates with strong professionalism while operating through an avatar? According to Reis, the absurdity of the environment can actually become an advantage. In game worlds where everyone is already performing some kind of role, the traditional “gallery curator character” can appear surprisingly restrained. In virtual spaces, people often ask more direct and professional questions than they would face-to-face, even when conversing with a flying game character. The digital body also enables faster fine-tuning of one’s personality and communication style. Online, there is freedom to experiment and perform in ways that are much harder in the physical world, where social codes and physical cues are considerably more rigid. In this environment, trolls and disruptive individuals can simply be muted or excluded — the digital gallerist always retains control over their own space. John Reis’s Three Pieces of Advice for Building a Digital Identity Drawing from years of experience designing digital spaces and identities, Reis offers three practical building blocks for creative professionals who want to develop their online presence as a professional tool: The power of rebranding.When thinking about your online persona, remember that you can always rebrand yourself and change direction at any time. Do not worry about whether others notice the changes. It does not matter. Think outside the “human box.”Online, you can be anyone or anything. How would your understanding of yourself change if you began to think of yourself as something other than human? Does that feel good? Play!I believe you can present yourself as anything online and still remain professional. Personally, I draw inspiration from the furry community, which I see as one of the best examples of serious professionals fully expressing themselves through internet personas. Sources Reis, J. (2026). Haastattelu 13.05.2026. Haastattelija: Anna Puhakka. [Julkaisematon aineisto]. Steam. (i.a.). Tower Unite -pelin kauppasivu. Haettu 18.05.2026 osoitteesta https://store.steampowered.com/app/394690/Tower_Unite/
From Basements to Blockchains: How Roleplay Gamers Pioneered the Creator Economy
The cultural history of the internet is often told through silicon chips and fibre-optic cables. A more human story, however, began in the basements and wood-panelled dens where tabletop roleplaying games (RPG) first took shape in the 1970s. This article traces the evolution of the web through the experiences of tabletop roleplaying communities, with a particular focus on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) players during periods of platform change. The key takeaway from RPG communities for cultural producers lies in understanding how creative work is increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures. The Analogue Roots of Participatory Culture When D&D was published in 1974, it was structurally unusual: a rule system designed not as a finished product but as a framework to be expanded, modified and shared by its players. Innovation scholar Eric von Hippel used the term "lead users" to describe groups encountering emerging social and technological needs, often years prior to wider marketplace recognition. RPG communities fit Hippel’s description well. These communities immediately began producing their own adventures, distributed through photocopied newsletters, hand-stapled zines and convention networks. In the language of contemporary media theory, this represented participatory culture in its earliest analogue form (Jenkins, 2006). As tabletop RPG communities moved online during the Web1 era, they carried with them a culture built around open standards, collaborative worldbuilding, and shared creative ownership. Early internet forums, fan sites, and digital archives became spaces where players openly modified rulesets, expanded fictional universes, and circulated community-created content. The idea that a creative framework could be shared for others to build upon, without giving up control of the core intellectual property, was already embedded in RPG culture long before Creative Commons licensing was formalised in 2001. These communities were, in effect, conducting an extended live experiment in what Yochai Benkler terms commons-based peer production: the collaborative creation of shared cultural resources outside both the market and the state (Benkler, 2006). Players were no longer passive consumers. They were active stewards of a shared creative space. From Forums to Platforms The transition into Web2 dramatically expanded the reach of tabletop gaming culture. Virtual tabletops (eg. Roll20 and Foundry VTT) made remote play accessible, while streaming platforms transformed collaborative storytelling into spectator entertainment. Critical Role, a live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series featuring professional voice actors, demonstrated that tabletop roleplaying could attract a global audience. In 2019, Critical Role's crowdfunding campaign for its animated series The Legend of Vox Machina raised more than eleven million US dollars. This signalled the commercial maturity of the RPG creator economy. This commercial growth came with a structural cost that took years to become visible. As creators moved their work onto centralised platforms, their roles became that of tenants than owners. Characters, campaign worlds, fan wikis and streaming archives lived on servers controlled by corporations whose priorities were shaped by shareholders, not communities. Algorithm changes could bury years of content and platform closures could erase entire archives of lore. Writer Cory Doctorow has described this dynamic, originally developed in the context of social media, as 'enshittification', a process by which digital platforms initially attract and serve users before gradually prioritising extraction and monetisation over community wellbeing (Doctorow, 2023)." The Open Game Licence Moment The risks of platform dependency became clearly visible in 2023. That year, the corporate owners of the D&D game, Wizards of the Coast, proposed revisions to the Open Game License. The licence had governed third-party D&D content for more than two decades. The proposed changes would have significantly increased corporate control over community-created work. The backlash was swift. Publishers, developers and players began migrating toward alternative open systems almost immediately. Although the revisions were ultimately withdrawn, this incident exposed a structural vulnerability that had for a long time been concealed behind convenience. Creative work built on corporate permission remains subject to corporate decisions. For many creators, this was the moment that made the theoretical risks of platform dependency feel real. Web3 and the Question of Ownership This tension helps explain why some of the most influential Web3 experiments have emerged from RPG and creator communities. One example is the Loot project, released in 2021, which echoes the original design philosophy of D&D in a significant way. Like the 1974 D&D rulebooks, Loot began as a minimal framework rather than a finished system. It consisted of 8,000 text-based “bags of adventuring gear” (NFTs), released without artwork, formal mechanics, or a central development team (Loot Project, 2021). The project functioned as an open-ended prompt for community-driven worldbuilding and experimentation (Adventure Gold DAO, 2021). The ecosystem that formed around Loot also experimented with NFT-based forms of character representation. The ownership of a “bag” could act as a portable on-chain identifier through a crypto-wallet signature across community-built applications. While not a formal decentralised identity system, it anticipated later discussions around interoperable digital identity and composable user-owned assets. This experimentation emerged alongside growing interest in standards such as W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and self-sovereign identity (SSI), which seek to formalise user-controlled digital identity. In parallel, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) have explored governance models that distribute decision-making through token-based voting and smart contracts which could be compared to the distributed narrative authority found in tabletop role-playing games. However, empirical studies have shown that governance activity within DAOs is often disproportionately driven by a small subset of highly active members (World Economic Forum, 2022). This concentration of influence challenges the ideal of full decentralisation, even while these systems echo the shared authority of RPG cultures. Ultimately, these developments highlight a central tension in creative digital systems. Whilst ownership and governance are described as decentralised, they remain tethered to uneven participation and the realities of infrastructural control. Cultural Production as Infrastructure Management For cultural producers, this history suggests that the decisive question is not which technology they use, but how it structures power: Who retains the ownership of the work and does the technology support continuity within creative communities? The aim is not to reject platforms, but to understand their role more precisely from visibility, and collaboration to how they define what can be preserved, shared, or monetised over time. Web3 offers one avenue to make this logic explicit. It embeds ownership, identity, and governance into infrastructure itself. But its lesson is broader than any single technology. Cultural production in a digital era is always also about infrastructure management. The question I propose cultural producers ask themselves is not whether new systems are “better”. Rather ask whether these systems strengthen the capacity of creative communities to sustain themselves and ownership of their work across technological change. Sources Adventure Gold DAO (2021). Adventure Gold and the Loot Ecosystem. AGLD Whitepaper. Available at: https://adventuregold.org Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press. https://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf Doctorow, C. (2023). "Social Quitting." Locus Magazine, January 2023. Available at: https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/ Goel, A.; Rahulamathavan, Y. (2025). "A Comparative Survey of Centralised and Decentralised Identity Management Systems: Analysing Scalability, Security, and Feasibility." Future Internet. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17010001 Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press. https://nyupress.org/9780814742952/convergence-culture/ Loot Project (2021). "Loot (for Adventurers) FAQ." lootproject.com. Available at: https://www.lootproject.com/faq von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press. Available at: https://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books/DI/DemocInn.pdf Wizards of the Coast (2023). "An Update on the Open Game License (OGL)." D&D Beyond, 13 January 2023. Available at: https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl World Economic Forum (2022). Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Beyond the Hype. White Paper, 23 June 2022. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/publications/decentralized-autonomous-organizations-beyond-the-hype
Tämän blogin kirjoituksia ja toimitustyötä on tuettu vuoden 2023 loppuun asti Euroopan unionin sosiaalirahaston Luovat metaversumissa esiselvityksen osarahoituksen avulla ja vuoden 2024 alusta Euroopan unionin sosiaalirahaston osarahoittaman LUME – luovat web3-ajassa -hankkeen avulla.
Tässä blogissa käydään ammattilaiskeskustelua web3 kehittymisen myötä avautuvista uusista toiminta- ja ansaintamahdollisuuksista sekä ajankohtaisista ilmiöistä. Blogissa julkaistaan asiantuntijatekstejä, haastatteluja ja kantaa ottavia tekstejä, videoita, podcasteja tai niiden yhdistelmiä. Kirjoittajat ovat Metropolian ja sen yhteistyöorganisaatioiden asiantuntijoita. Haluatko julkaista Luovat web3 ajassa -blogissa? Ota yhteys päätoimittajaan sähköpostitse.
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– Mayreth Wolff, lehtori Humanistinen ammattikorkeakoulu
Sähköpostiosoitteet: etunimi.sukunimi@metropolia.fi
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