Gaming communities function as true laboratories of innovation: far from passive consumers, they master modding, repair hardware, customise software, and weave alternative infrastructures wherever resources are scarce. This technical practice becomes cultural resistance, integrating repair and technological transformation into their collective identity.

A paradigmatic example is SNET (Street Network), which emerged in Havana around 2010 when dozens of gamer groups linked their neighbourhood LANs and eventually interconnected tens of thousands of users. With kilometres of Ethernet cable draped over balconies, homemade Wi-Fi antennas on rooftops, and repurposed servers, they built the world’s largest community network completely disconnected from the global Internet. Forums, messaging services, website hosting and—above all—multiplayer arenas that structure social life flourish inside it. SNET exists thanks to an “army” of volunteers who maintain its hardware and software, proving how scarcity sparks collective ingenuity.

By fusing modding with material reuse and community management, SNET challenges centralised connectivity models and proves that innovation can be sustainable, accessible, and playful all at once. Beyond entertainment, it reconfigures our relationship with technology and turns shared creativity into a motor for digital democratisation. Thus, peripheral gamer cultures not only solve local challenges; they also offer global clues for imagining more inclusive, horizontal, and resilient technological futures.