The speculative imagination within, against and beyond Amazon: the Worker as Futurist project in an increasingly fascist context

Max Haiven

Abstract

Amazon, which might be said to emblematize the Silicon Valley ethos of mobilizing massive capital to ‘disrupt’ capitalist industries and everyday life, is today among the world’s largest employers, retailers and providers of cloud computing services. But the firm was in no small part built through science and speculative fiction, not only as a genre of entertainment it sells, but as a set of ideas, narratives, tropes and ideologies that have facilitated its internal and external relations. The firm promises to be a benevolent usher of a consumer utopia, but its success at the expense of its workers, many of whom toil in dystopian conditions. The Worker as Futurist project aimed to support rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, speculative fiction about ‘the world after Amazon’. This paper provides a brief account of that project, framed by the question of how workers can reclaim the power to imagine and shape the future from Silicon Valley and the form of capitalism it represents. It argues that collective creative and speculative writing practices can be an important part of building workers’ power in the twenty-first century. This is especially important as Amazon and other firms are rapidly aligning themselves with a form of twenty-first century fascistic politics.

Keywords

Amazon; capitalism; science and speculative fiction; creative writing; workers; struggles; Silicon Valley; writing; Amazon

Download: https://drive.proton.me/urls/QY0CV5JSVW#Woma8GS9DHSb

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I’ll be on tour in the UK and Europe in February and March 2026 to promote the game, visiting universities, community spaces, game shops and other venues to:

• Demonstrate and play the game with groups large and small
• Deliver public or academic talks on a range of related issues
• Offer accessible game-making workshops to activists and researchers

On this page you can find information on

• The Game
  • Who it’s for
  • How it’s played
• The tour
  • Where and when
  • Who and how
  • Costs and needs
• More information

Finally, it’s the billionaire simulator you and your friends have been waiting for! In the board game Billionaires & Guillotines, 2-5 players will take on the roles of rival plutocrats, competing to accumulate the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution and they all lose… a lot more than their assets.

Will you play the media baron or the property speculator? The aristocrat or the tech overlord? Whoever you play, the aim is to acquire five extravagant assets prized by the super-rich (a mega yacht, a celebrity spouse, art masterpieces and more!) and prevent your opponents from achieving their dreams.

But watch out! As you compete to gobble up ever more resources, crises cascade out of control: wildfires and floods, pandemics and doomsday cults… At the final moment, will you collaborate to put down the rebellions, or escape into your luxury bunker?

If you or your organization might be interested in hosting me, please get in touch: mhaiven AT lakeheadu DOT ca

This tour is supported as part of my work as a professor and the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, and also by Pluto Press.

The game

Who is it for?

Billionaires & Guillotines is designed for all sorts of players above the age of 14 (and precocious people under that age as well). While people who “hate board games” may never see the light, the game has got rave reviews from both serious gamers and casual players around the world.

The game is designed in four levels of complexity and I can teach the most basic level and get people playing in about 15 minutes. You can finish a game at that level, or, when everyone is ready, add another level to enhance the fun.

Billionaires & Guillotines is competitive, but there are opportunities for collaboration. It’s a board game, rather than a role-playing game, but players are encouraged to get into character! Although the game doesn’t rely on words, a good grasp of English is important to be able to understand the rules.

How is it played?

Billionaires & Guillotines is designed in four levels, so you can start with a simple game and add more complexity and fun when you are ready.

1. Grab the assets, crush your rivals

In the first level, select your billionaire (aristocrat, media baron, property speculatory, tech overlord, or war profiteer). Each billionaire needs to collect five assets to win, so head to the market using cards you draw to your hand to try and buy the treasures you cherish (eg. a private zoo, a mega yacht, a tabloid empire and more!). Sprint for victory, but if the odds aren’t in your favour why not get your more successful opponents audited by the tax authorities, run a scam or game the markets? 

2. But there’s a revolution brewing

The second level is where things really get challenging. As the billionaire’s competition heats up, their greed begins to have its consequences: political and ecological crises start to randomly cascade out of control, including floods, collapsing infrastructure and doomsday cults. With each crisis rebellions break out and if they grow too large a revolution will end the game for everyone. On the brink of disaster, you’ll have one chance only to put aside your differences and cooperate as a class to undermine the revolution, and then may the best (or worst) billionaire win!

3. Employ the advanced plutocrat tactics

Can’t I just run away to my disaster bunker? Yes, of course! In the third level of Billionaires & Guillotines! Additionally, each billionaire will get a special secret role that offers special powers. Maybe you’ll be the banker who gets to cheat, the gangster who gets to steal, or the celebrity who is so popular they win when all their competitors succumb to the revolution.

4. Bribe the government

Why not simply pay the government to put down the rebellions, favour your investments, or sabotage your opponents? We’ve heard you! In level four you’ll be stuffing envelopes full of cash to ensure the democratic process goes your way.

There is also a 2-player version of the game, where your billionaire will control another billionaire from the shadows!

Is Billionaires & Guillotines fun?

Yes! Or so our players tell us.

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out:

• this promotional video
• this interview about the game
• this short overview
• or this (slightly out of date) long tutorial.

The tour

Where and when

I will be touring in the UK and in Western Europe (and potentially other places) in February and March 2026.

What and how

Gaming sessions

I am happy to facilitate playtest sessions of Billionaires & Guillotines at game stores, academic venues, community spaces and… anywhere else!

I’ve become very good at teaching the basics of the game and getting people playing in about 15-minutes, and players can complete a first basic game in about 35-45 minutes.

I have tended to find it useful to mix-and-match the following elements

• Max gives a short introduction to the game (+15mins, suggested)
• A play session of the game (60-90mins)
• A facilitated debrief discussion about the game’s themes (+30mins, suggested)
• Opportunity to play the advanced game (+1h)

Games can be played in groups of 2-5 people. It rarely works well to team-up players (i.e. 2 people playing one player) as it makes the game long and boring. Better to split into more “tables.” I’m experienced at teaching up to 10-12 tables to play at the same time (up to 50+ players). Each game requires a table around which the players can sit with a space of about 75x75cm at a minimum.

Public and academic talks

I am prepared to deliver the following talks for the general public

• Games: The dangerous medium of 21st century politics
• We’re being played: Fascist billionaires and the gamification of capitalism (and resistance!)
• Agency, conviviality, and fun: What community organizers must learn from games

I am also prepared to offer academic talks from my forthcoming MIT Press book The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism (Fall 2026)

• The rise of the playgrom: Gamified fascistic swarm violence after financialization
• Silicon Valley’s malign worldbuilding and worldrazing: From colonialism
• The rules of the cheat: On fake fairness and fascist fun
• What is the antifascist game today?

Game-making workshops

I have led game-making workshops for many audiences, including at Princeton University, the Historical Materialism conference, Berliner Gazette’s Pluriverse of Peace conference and more.

• My workshops require absolutely no prior experience and make use of simple materials which I can bring (pens and paper, etc.)
• Workshops can be scheduled for as little as 3h and as much as 2-3 days, depending on the group’s objectives. Let’s talk.
• These workshops can be made open to a wide public, or I can do them for a small defined group
• I generally offer two kinds of workshops
  • One for activist and community groups aimed at demonstrating how game elements can be integrated into organizing to improve engagement
  • One for academics (generally in social sciences and humanities) focused on how game-making can be an illuminating way to open up research questions by focusing on finding agency in complex systems

Costs and needs

This project is a labour of love and of activism, so money is not the most important factor, but it does help.

Thanks to funding from the RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab and Pluto Press, we are able to offer these activities at a reduced cost (or potentially at no cost to our hosts).

The following would be appreciated, but may not be required as we have subsidies (please get in touch):

• Economy travel costs for me (usually based in London, but travelling frequently)
• A place to stay (I’m open to staying in a host’s spare room, although I’m not as young as I used to be)
• If your institution has the capacity to offer payment, it helps cover the costs of the tour and also visits to places that cannot. I usually recommend a rate of €/£150 per hour. So a 90 minute talk is €/£225. A 3h workshop is €/£450, etc. however this is negotiable.

More information

The designer

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.

His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).

He is currently working on a book for the MIT Press tentatively titled The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines.

He has hosted several interview-driven podcasts, including recently Against the Fascist Game (2025) and The Exploits of Play (2024).

He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024).

Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press.

He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.

Information for hosts

How to order copies of the game

We are currently waiting for the game to ship to Europe, but it should be at the warehouses in mid-January 2026.

Pluto (the publisher) is also amidst a website revamp, so preorder is not yet possible, however:

• Sign up to be notified when pre-order is possible by clicking here.
• Pre-ordering copies now: Please email Veruschka at Pluto and let her know how many games you’d like to buy: veruschka AT plutobooks DOT com
• Getting a demo copy to try: Please email Veruschka at Pluto: veruschka AT plutobooks DOT com
• Bulk ordering for retail: If you are a store, you can order the game from the supplier, Gardners.
• Playing a digital version: We have created a version of the game for Tabletop Simulator. It’s a bit clunky, but it does the job. Get in touch if you’d like access.

Promotional copy and images you can use

Coming soon!

The post Billionaires & Guillotines 2026 tour appeared first on Max Haiven.

Capitalism cheats: Three moments of normalized swindling

Max Haiven
Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and Associate professor, Lakehead University
ORCID: 0000-0002-2143-9472

 Abstract

In a financialized world where we are all conscripted to be competitive players, the category of cheating takes on new political and cultural potency and has become key to reactionary ideology. This speculative essay moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, as well as beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery. By examining (1) imperialism’s ‘Great Game’, (2) the links between game theory and neoliberalism, and (3) the role of recursive rule-breaking in the history of finance, we can triangulate the normalization of cheating within the dominant economic paradigm. This essay approaches cheating as a discursive formation entangled with financial power. Such an approach can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.

Introduction

We are, by now, so familiar with the economy being described as a game that that the metaphor often passes without notice (Cudd, 2007; Mooney, 2020). Scholars from a wide diversity of disciplines and across the political spectrum have explored the importance of metaphors to the functioning of the economy, both for economists and policymakers and for more humble market actors, including consumers, workers, and small investors (McCloskey, 1995; Gramm, 1996; Young, 2001). The metaphor of the game not only affirms that capitalism is competitive and rule-bound, it also frequently implies that it is at least ideally fair. Metaphors of a ‘level playing field’, for example, were crucial to the neoliberal project that promised that trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation would lead to a system where hard work and talent were rewarded and where innovation would thrive (Krarup, 2021). That ideology never promised equality, and indeed inequality was crucial to the driving motivations of its actors, but it did promise fairness. And yet, forty years into the neoliberal revolution and it would be hard to find anyone who believes the game is fair.

This exploratory essay presents three scenes where cheating can be seen to be at the ideological core of the free market project. Its purpose is to contribute to the argument that cheating is not simply, as defenders of neoliberal capitalism and financialization tend to claim, the exceptional and regrettable outcome of individual amorality or regulatory failure (see Jaeggi, 2016). Nor is it simply, as many critics of the system contend, a matter of the rich and powerful breaking or bending the rules, as for example in the use of tax havens and other tax avoidance schemes, or lobbying efforts, insider trading, or the gaming of regulations to avoid the inconvenience of human or environmental responsibility (Shaxson, 2019). It also goes beyond the Marxist supposition (with which I agree) that capitalism is fundamentally built on the inherent swindle of the wage relation, where workers, deprived of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in return for a fraction of its actual value, the rest being pocketed by their boss and reinvested in the expansion of capitalist accumulation (Harvey, 2006). Rather, across three cases, I seek to sketch a pattern where cheating is integrated into the very ideological and operational core of capitalism.

My purpose is not to make a moral critique of free-market capitalism or a structural analysis of financial accumulation, although both might be well-served by my argument. Rather, it is to lay the groundwork for an explanation for our present-day conjunctural political salience of the cheat and cheating. Why is it that today’s far-right, fascistic, and reactionary politicians, influencers, and personalities so successfully mobilize vitriol against supposed cheaters? Donald Trump is only the most famous example in his claims that he must be given profoundly antidemocratic powers to save democracy from cheats: political miscreants alleged to have cheated him and his supporters of the 2020 elections; migrants accused of cheating the ostensibly fair border regime; racialized grifters supposedly cheating the capitalist meritocracy with their cynical claims to oppression and demands for bureaucratic remedies (preferential hiring or university admissions, etc.); and, more generally, ‘elites’ said to have cheated the hardworking and entrepreneurial (white) American everyman of his due.

The success of Trump’s antics are all the more surprising given that he is himself a convicted cheat, and proud of it (Haberman and Feuer, 2020). His policies have hamstrung or completely eliminated many government bodies tasked with controlling corporate crime and he has used Presidential fiat to pardon multiple notorious wealthy cheats (Claypool, 2025; Goldstein and Silver-Greenberg, 2025). It appears almost certain the he cynically deployed his bellicose threats of tariffs to undertake one of the world’s most staggering acts of insider trading (Faturechi, Rebala, and Roberts, 2025) and that he has deployed a cryptocurrency as a means to essentially sell political influence in plain sight (Chayka, 2025).

But Trump is only the most egregious, telegenic, and bombastic of many such characters. Many similar accusations could be levelled at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (Nunes, 2024), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (Yang, 2025), Argentina’s Javier Milei (Callison and Gago, 2025), Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (Stille, 2007), or India’s Narendra Modi (Auvray, 2024). All of them are illiberal democratic autocrats who have wielded accusations of widespread cheating to fuel pro-market reactionary politics, while at the same time overseeing parties or regimes that are significantly built on cheating. These and other far-right political revanchists mobilize a public rhetoric that revolves around fostering the anger of manufactured majorities against what I will call the ‘cheating other’, minorities who are rumored to be defrauding society and refusing to play by the rules. The claim is often that this cheating has either been intentionally allowed by venal political elites or permitted because of the stupidity and gullibility of liberal or left-wing policies, and that matters have become so dire and corrupt that it requires radical actions that contravene the law, human rights, and other such inconveniences.

Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, actual well-documented cheating continues in plain sight. For example, none of these regimes have done anything meaningful to reign in the use of tax havens and other forms of tax evasion whereby the wealthiest members of society essentially use legal loopholes to cheat the common purse. Indeed, many of these reactionary political actors and their supporters are named in leaked documents such as the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers (Tax Justice Network, 2024).

However, the purpose of this essay is not to point to the rank hypocrisy of these actors, which is rarely hidden and whose revelation seems to do little good. Nor is it to provide a complete account of how we came to live under what I will, elsewhere, call ‘the rule of the cheat’ (Haiven, 2026, forthcoming). Rather, it is to try and understand a tendency deep at work within financialized neoliberal capitalism, one that has helped feed the revanchist political sentiments that gave rise to the popularity of these figures (Haiven, 2020).

Those sentiments brood within financialized subjects. Forty years into the global neoliberal revolution and its accompanying processes of financialization, we have witnessed profound pressures on the formation of subjectivities, as individuals are compelled to conform to an increasingly competitive, austere, and precarious socio-economic environment (Cooper, 2017). Yet, as many theorists have demonstrated, this is rarely encountered or interpreted as the grim imposition of market domination, but rather as a set of agentic opportunities to speculate, perform, and compete (Haiven, 2020; Lazzarato, 2015; Martin, 2015). For example, while housing precariousness has increased in many jurisdictions thanks to the financialization of urban real estate, many non-elite subjects have embraced property speculation as an opportunity to profit and improve their life chances (Stein, 2019). Likewise, although work has generally become more precarious, many subjects see increased opportunities to start their own businesses or invest in financial assets, from publicly traded shares to cryptocurrencies (Lorusso, 2019). The affordances of social media and other platform corporations offer opportunities to leverage one’s personality and talents in the name of becoming an influencer or streamer, which are among the top career aspirations for young people today (Bollmer and Guinness, 2024). While these opportunities are themselves the result of the economic forces that generally tend to increase precariousness, inequality, and the domination of society by the market, they nevertheless are experienced by many individuals as forms of freedom. This is more than ideological false consciousness in any simplistic sense. Financialized neoliberal capitalism’s unique success has been to not merely subdue but to seduce our agency.

As Wark (2007) and Jagoda (2020) note, such conscription of agency often feels like – and is frequently expressed in terms of – a game. Even though success in capitalism is extremely rare, each of us is tasked with reimagining ourselves as a ‘player’, convincing ourselves that the game is or at least ideally should be meritocratic and fair, even if far from equal. And yet most of us will fail while we watch others, whom we imagine to be less talented or hardworking, succeed. We increasingly feel cheated. This feeling is compounded by fines, fees, and costs, including inflation. These have, ironically, increased under neoliberal financialization largely thanks to the deregulation of capital and the privatization of public services, despite claims that the system would eliminate the red tape of overprotective government bureaucracy (Cooper, 2018). It is this figure of the ‘cheated player’, the financialized subject whose sense of agency and possibility has been betrayed, that is especially susceptible to the siren song of the reactionary political commentators, influencers, and candidates who promise to apprehend and take revenge on people and populations they depict as cheaters.

This essay takes this set of problem as a point of departure, but ultimately seeks to excavate three moments in the genealogy of contemporary financialized neoliberal capitalism where we can observe cheating being at the very center of its operations, not simply because certain cheating individuals or institutions hold pivotal roles, but because forms of activity that can very well be understood to be cheating are incorporated into the core operations of the system. Such an analysis would not only undermine neoliberal claims that capitalism fulfils the liberal dream of a society built on the Rawlsian principle of procedural justice – that is, one in which markets may generate inequality but nonetheless remain fair (see Hunt, 2013) – it would also contribute to a complication of Marxist approaches which, in their zeal to understand the abstract laws of capitalist accumulation and the ways these are enabled by a legal superstructure, have tended to downplay the crucial role of cheating, fraud, and criminal activity.

In the first case, I take up the imperialist ‘great game’ on which modern capitalism was founded: the operations of imperialist states and their corporations and companies. Here, the ‘great game’ was one that promised to bring freedom, ‘fair play’, and free trade to colonized people, but in fact established a rigged game. European powers imposed punitive and exploitative trade relations on their protectorates while also insisting that they submit to their sanctimonious tutelage.

In the second case, I take up the paradigm of game theory, which has become a pivotal element in neoliberal financialized capitalism, both as a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal as well as a crucial mechanism in financial decision-making, geopolitical strategy, public policy, and the development of digital technology. Within that paradigm, cheating has a specific meaning, namely defection from a previous agreement. But it is also anticipated and incorporated into game theory’s fundamental assumptions, whereby it is rational and expected that optimal players will almost inevitably ‘cheat’.

In the final case, I look much more broadly at what I would frame as the normalization of cheating in recent financial history, which we can trace in the work of acclaimed and highly influential financial reporter Michael Lewis, whose books have tended to focus on the rule-bending or rule-breaking mavericks whose defiance of the conventional norms (and sometimes laws) that govern finance quickly comes to be common practice and around which a new set of rules and norms quickly form.

In each of these three cases, I am not seeking to make a categorical historical argument. Rather, my effort is to paint, in broad strokes an overarching pattern.

By way of conclusion, I take up Johann Huizinga’s distinction between the cheat and the spoilsport: the former may be unethical, but is often accepted and sometimes admired because they bend but do not break the rules, allowing the game to continue; the latter is loathsome because, in their (often justified) refusal to play a game they think is stupid, rigged, or fruitless, they call into question the wisdom, morality, or agency of their fellow players. This has significant consequences for our consideration of strategies against fascistic politics and for collective liberation.

What is cheating?

In legal philosopher and expert on corporate criminality Stuart P. Green’s (2004: 137) rigorous definition, cheating:

entails two elements: the cheater must violate a prescriptive (rather than descriptive), mandatory (rather than optional), regulative (rather than practice-defining), and conduct-governing (as opposed to decision-governing) rule. Second, the rule must be fair and enforced even-handedly, and must be violated with an intent to obtain an advantage over some party with whom the rule-breaker is in a cooperative, rule-governed relationship.

The first part of this definition helps us understand the nuanced nature of cheating: it is located in the murky and potent territory between unfair and legitimate strategy, between law and norm, between discipline and governance. Most of what we call cheating occurs in the realm of unwritten rules, in the violation of law-like norms.

The second part of this definition adds further nuance. Cheating must be intentional (even if done semi-consciously) and have the objective of gaining some advantage. But importantly, for Green and other liberal theorists of cheating, it is a violation of a ‘rule [that] must be fair and enforced even-handedly’ where all the proverbial players are in a ‘cooperative, rule-governed relationship.’

This abstract view of cheating is complicated by empirical research in the study of games.

Mia Consalvo (2007) frames her pathbreaking ethnographic and participatory-observational work on cheating in videogames as concerned with the negotiation of what she, following Pierre Bourdieu, calls ‘gaming capital’: the way that players produce, share, and contend the co-production of esteem, respect, and status. These social values are negotiated in tension and dialogue with the industries that produce the game commodities or that provide the platforms but are not, in the final instance, completely prescribed by those powerful actors. Indeed, the value that gamers produce within those frameworks, which in turn help these companies generate economic value, is a complex negotiation. Cheating, for Consalvo, has no strict definition in gaming worlds. Rather, it is a term that reveals frictions between different orders of value and evaluation. For example, some player communities contend that status, esteem, and praise should be reserved for players who only rely on skill to win, while others admire the daring ‘exploit’ of the rules.

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux (2017) go further in identifying cheating as one among many methods of metagaming, which is to say playing games with games. Proposing that videogames are instruments or pieces with which many games are played, they reframe cheating as a means by which players take back the ludic, playful, and transgressive impulses that have been enclosed by the gaming industry in coded games. Breaking, bending, and exploiting the rules becomes a game that exceeds the confines of the game itself, one that paradoxically makes the game worth playing. Like the social contexts of play, online debates about games, modification of games, and so many other practices, it is the semi-autonomous co-creation of metagame spaces (physical, virtual, and discursive) that has always given games their value.

 We ought to also take inspiration from Aaron Trammel’s (2023) important corrective to games studies. The history of the oppressed (specifically, in Trammel’s study, the legacies of transatlantic and chattel slavery) demonstrates that games are often unfair, exploitative, non-consensual, and torturous from the outset. Indeed, what if their power is such that they can determine what does and does not count as a game (see Pearce, 2024), and what does and does not count as fair?

Critics might charge that I risk stretching the definition of cheating too far. I would respond that cheating is always already a somewhat arbitrary concept, one whose definition depends much more on the prevailing relations of power in a society than it does on strict categories. As we will see, the grey area that separates acceptable cunning from dubious cheating from possibly illegal activity is never quite clear. And it is precisely this lack of clarity that makes cheating so lucrative for so many people, and such a vexing and seductive political category. 

The Great Game

The history of colonialism is inseparable from the history of capitalism, and it is often in the excesses of empire that we witness the rule, rather than the exception, of accumulation (Byrd, Cacho, Jefferson, and Koshy, 2022). In the final quarter of her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (2004) traces the murderous dehumanization of fascism back to its birthplace in European colonialism and imperialism. In particular, she takes up the metaphor of the Great Game, widely used in Britain and elsewhere in the nineteenth century to refer to the way empires played out their rivalries on a world imagined as a giant chessboard, drawing on that term’s most famous (and cynical) exponent, Rudyard Kipling. In Kim, Kipling (1901) means many things by the ‘Great Game’. On the most transparent level, it refers to the jockeying for position between the British, French, Turkish, and other empires in Central Asia, executed occasionally through open warfare but more commonly through manipulative diplomacy, the bribing and counter-bribing of local officials, and the use of secret agents to sew distrust, whip up rebellions, and stir ethnic and religious antagonisms (Hopkirk, 1994). As Arendt confirms, these were done not simply in the interests of imperial rule, but also to secure profitable opportunities for the extraction of resources and the exploitation of labor by corporate and business interests.

The Great Game is one ‘whose rules permitted and even dictated the consideration of whole nations as stepping-stones, or as pawns… for the riches and the rule over a third country, which in turn became a mere stepping-stone in the unending process of power expansion and accumulation’ (Arendt, 2004: xviii). Arendt takes up the writing and projects of several quite different British imperialists to make the point about the spectrum of players of the Great Game: the earnest ‘dragon slayers’, the obtuse bureaucrats, and the megalomaniacal worldbuilders. In the first case, the ‘dragon-slayers’ often genuinely believed they were bringing and maintaining a fair set of rules to territories and people whom they imagined were previously ruled by despotic potentates. As Edward Said (1979) makes clear in Orientalism, European imperial rule largely hallucinated the cruel and tyrannical regimes that preceded them. Many British and other imperialists sanctimoniously pronounced that they came as saviors, to bring the values of ‘fair play’ (including ‘free’ market competition) and to impose the ‘rule of law’ wherein all subjects have formal equality.

Of course, this was a lie, even if many imperialists were delusional enough to believe it. The game was rigged. It was a sine qua non of early European imperialism to impose preferential or exclusive trading treaties or relations on the territories they dominated, and also to insist that Europeans be immune to the laws that governed local non-European populations. Lisa Lowe (2015) has explored how the liberal rhetoric and ideals of ‘free trade’ and economic ‘fair play’ were mobilized by British philosophers, politicians, and imperialists during the conquest of China through the two Opium Wars (this, while Britain was forcing the world’s most populous country to import massive quantities of a ruinous narcotic that they, themselves, banned from import). This was among the most egregious examples of the use of gunboat diplomacy to force patently unfair and often ruinous trade relations on vassalized sovereigns, a technique which had the added benefit of being relatively cheap: the empire was able to extract huge amounts of wealth from the colony while an installed or propped-up local despot took care of the enforcement. No doubt, some imperialists recognized the rhetoric of freedom and fair play to be transparently manipulative, but Lowe’s work demonstrates that the imperial project was able to cohere itself around the prominent ideas of luminary scholarly, legal, and clerical figures who presented it as Britain’s vocation to bring white fairness to a world of racialized corruption.

As Arendt notes, when unfair treaties and gunboat diplomacy gave way in the nineteenth century to direct colonial administration of territories, governing bureaucracies ruled without the consent or input of those whose lives they dominated. Under the promise of delivering a modern, rule-bound form of enlightened government – that is, a fair game for all – Europeans typically imposed a form of capricious, bureaucratic, self-serving, and increasingly violent tyranny. This was conventionally justified in one of two ways: either as stern but necessary tutelage for a backwards people, who were deemed ‘not ready’ to play the real game of civilization, or simply by insisting that colonized people’s inherent racial inferiority required European powers to protect them from predation. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 8–9) has depicted the imperial injunction ‘not yet’ as one that places colonized people in the perpetual ‘waiting room of history’.

Arendt is centrally concerned with the bureaucratization of violence, which she sees as reaching its climax in the Shoah and which would be the subject of her most famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006), where she introduced the concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This section of Origins thereforetries to unpack how a bureaucratic structure of empire, which at least nominally exists to ensure the fair and impartial administration of life in a colony, produces an even more nefarious mode of dehumanization and instrumentalization.

Arendt (1998: 215) goes on to insightfully point out that the license with which imperialists granted themselves the power to play with the fates of those in their colonies  quickly gave way to a kind of proto-fascist, hallucinogenic megalomania which she personifies in the figure of with Cecil Rhodes:

as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed ‘do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god-nothing less.’… It is obvious that these secret and anonymous agents of the force of expansion felt no obligation to man-made laws. The only ‘law’ they obeyed was the ‘law’ of expansion, and the only proof of their ‘lawfulness’ was success.

Here, the cheat lionizes himself as animated by an ancient and timeless, if ultimately nihilistic, wisdom: power rules, and power is all that that has ever been or ever will be. Cheating is merely the natural expression of power, the prerogative to flaunt or ignore the laws and rules set in place based on the delusion that the world could be fair. Here, Rhodes gives us in naked form what Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt would later dress in Hugo Boss philosophical livery: power ultimately is getting to make rules (and punish transgressors), but never having to obey them (see Agamben, 2005; Bratich, 2022).

Arendt (like Kipling) spends countless pages mulling over the fate of the courageous and conflicted European individual caught up in the Great Game, rather than the millions upon millions of colonized people who paid a much higher price: whole civilizations eradicated, millions murdered or starved to death, racial and religious divisions sewn to divide and conquer, which continue their lethal work to the present day (Davis, 2000). As with so many European critics of her generation, the concern with colonialism and empire is how it exposed Europe to a ‘heart of darkness’ and led to a kind of ‘regression’ into Nazi barbarism.

The idea that racialized and colonized people are cheating, or cannot be trusted not to cheat, or are too benighted to be able to truly understand or respect the rules of ‘the game’ (and therefore need to be excluded, protected, or eliminated) remains with us to this day. It is part of the racist ideological reservoir on which contemporary reactionary, ethnonationalist, and fascistic politicians and commentators draw when they point to migrants ‘cheating’ the system. They stoke fears that too many immigrants will jeopardize not only the economies but also the values of Western democracies – values often framed through notions of fair play and the level playing ground of the market (see HoSang and Lowndes, 2019). In many countries, the figure of the state benefits cheat is racialized, notably in the US where Ronald Regan popularized the term ‘welfare queen’ with conspicuous reference to a Black woman, or where the term ‘anchor baby’ is indelibly associated with racialized women who allegedly plan to deliver children in the US to game the birthright citizenship statutes of that country’s immigration system (Foster, 2017). In the UK, the figure of the ‘benefits scrounger’ cannot be separated from racialized implications, even if many of the journalists, politicians, and blowhards who mobilize it insist they are color-blind (Shilliam, 2023). In Italy, the figure of the state welfare cheat is frequently racialized, and typically held to be guilty of a worse form of cheating than those many normalized malfeasances undertaken by politicians, businesspeople, and mafiosi in a culture where, since the early modern period (if not since ancient times), the clever cheat has otherwise been celebrated (Guano, 2010).

In the post-war period, this association of non-European others as incompetent players or cheats has also been a justification for new forms of neoimperialism. Many of the brutal policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which railroaded governments in the Global South into adopting neoliberal policies, was imposed in the name of fighting or preventing corruption – that is, the alleged cheating of the free-market system (Reinsberg, Kentikelenis, and Stubbs, 2021). For a century, the ‘West’ has supported dictatorial, authoritarian, and fascistic regimes in the Global South based on the presumption that the nation in question was ‘not ready’ to play the game of democracy fairly. In fact, the goal has either been to ensure coutnries in the Global North (or their corporations) maintained access to resources or to prevent socialist governments from being elected to power (Chomsky, 2024).

My purpose here is neither to litigate the past nor to highlight the hypocrisy of the imperialist worldview. Rather, I am seeking to excavate a moment when the global capitalist system has integrated a form of cheating into the very core of its operations, not simply in terms of the secret malfeasance of rogue opportunists, but in terms of its dominant logic of accumulation and its prevalent ideological justifications.

Game theory

It is difficult to overstate the importance of game theory to the operations of present-day capitalism. Game theory refers to a set of mathematical tools that purport to model rational decision-making. The nuances and complexities of game theory today are impressive, largely because it is no niche academic curiosity: its influence has profoundly shaped some of the most important sectors of capitalist society, technocracy and economics, from its original deployment as a tool for Cold War and nuclear military strategy to its centrality in neoliberal economic thought and governance to its pivotal role in the development of the financial models that rule our world and of so-called artificial intelligence (Amadae 2016). It is this influence, and the underlying ideological assumption that game theory depends on and normalizes, that are the subject of this section, rather than the fascinating particularities of its various iterations, theories, debates, and concerns. Much like Edward Said’s (1979) analysis of orientalism, I am less interested in the (often quite impressive, earnest, and functional) innovations and developments within the field but, rather, the world that made the field and how that field has remade the world in its own image.

Here, I am following the excellent work of S. M. Amadae (2016), whose Prisoners of Reason demonstrates that we must locate game theory at the heart of the neoliberal revolution, both historically and ideologically. Game theory is remembered as central to the West’s victory in the Cold War, insofar as it informed a US and NATO strategy that would eventually articulate itself as MAD: the principle that the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction through the proliferation of ever more powerful nuclear weapons and brinkmanship would be the best way to prevent a nuclear war. As the West emerged triumphant, game theory migrated, thanks to its massive military influence, into spheres of corporate governance, public policy, and macroeconomics such that it came to shape the key institutions of post-Cold War American global hegemony, including the co-evolution of finance and networked computing (Jagoda, 2020).

Briefly, game theory’s modern origins are credited to the early interwar work of Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann who, during his exile at Princeton during the Second World War, would collaborate with economist Oscar Morgenstern to publish the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), which laid out a series of mathematical models for rational and strategic decision-making. The field was inspired by von Neumann’s forays into gambling in his attempts to understand the mathematics of probability and uncertainty. The most famous articulation of the theory, first developed at the RAND corporation, a military think tank, is the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ which presents a hypothetical ‘game’ in which two accomplices to a crime are arrested and interrogated in separate cells and offered a choice: if they rat the other out (‘defect’, in the model’s terminology), their compatriot will be imprisoned for a long time and they will walk free. If both stay quiet, they will each serve a short sentence, but if both defect, they will each serve a long sentence. The notorious Princeton mathematician John Nash, perhaps the most influential proponent of game theory as a paradigm for micro- and macroeconomic decision-making, demonstrated that defection is always the most strategic choice. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in part for demonstrating logically that a system made up of ruthlessly competitive agents could produce stabile equilibrium. This would become key to neoliberalism’s ideological justifications and technocratic operationalization.

Ultimately, at the core of game theory, is a model of the ideal human ‘player’ as a completely selfish, ruthlessly rational, self-maximizing, and competitive agent. To ‘play’ as anything ‘less’ is irrational and counter-productive. Game theory as a method basically brackets out other motivations, which cannot be modelled except in the negative (the amount one would be willing to sacrifice, subtracted from the potential gains of one’s optimal position). Ultimately, as Amadae notes, the player of game theory is the personification of the perfect neoliberal subject, the idealized homo oeconomicus. This is a figure Sylvia Wynter (2015) called ‘Man 2’, the abstract ideal telos of the colonizing, white supremacist, masculine figure against whom all the other people of the earth are judged and found wanting.

Game theory is not a reliable model for how people actually behave, and not even a particularly good model for how most people play games (see Jagoda, 2020). Extensive research shows that not only humans but many other animals play both unstructured and structured games based on a much more complex set of behaviors and motivations (Huizinga, 1971; Sicart, 2017; Toomey, 2025). Like the players of a competitive game of Monopoly or dogs wrestling, players frequently sacrifice their own rational self-interests for reasons that include personal honor, care for their opponents’ wellbeing, long-term relationships, or simply fun. The entire field of behavioral economics has emerged and thrived to demonstrate the limits of the model of homo oeconomicus. And economic sociologists and anthropologists have decades of research within and across cultures that demonstrate economic behavior is deeply socially embedded, governed not simply by cold rational self-interest but also norms, institutions, and values (McMahon, 2015). Nonetheless, as Amadae argues, the paradigm that game theory presupposes is expedient for proponents of a neoliberal worldview, in part because it reiterates the basic assumptions of that worldview about human nature and in part because it makes these accessible in a mathematical language that can be integrated into other systems.

Game theory came to be taught in university economics classrooms in the 1950s and 60s, during a time when the discipline was moving away from its concern with the more sociological study of political economy and towards a more mathematical focus on microeconomics and econometrics. This was the case at the University of Chicago, where a cluster of thinkers affiliated to or inspired by the Mont Pelerin Society free market think tank were becoming increasingly influential. As is now well-known, these thinkers not only pioneered the models that would become central to the policy revolution of neoliberalism (though they never used the term, which they consider pejorative), they also became key consultants to regimes around the world that were using natural or unnatural disasters to impose market-oriented regimes, notably Pinochet’s fascistic regime in Chile (Klein, 2007; Slobodian, 2020). They would later play starring roles in the administrations of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, and their approach would fundamentally reshape the policies and orientations of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that essentially leveraged their stranglehold over international credit to set the economic policy for the ‘developing world’ since the 1970s. Game theory was merely one weapon in the neoliberal arsenal, but one that lent mathematical precision and prestige to a set of policy orientations that were based, fundamentally, on the belief that economies and the societies of which they were a part were reducible to the aggregate behavior of economic actors who were, in the last and ideal instance, homo oeconomicus.

Amadae goes on to show that this set of presumptions, and game theory itself, quickly migrated into the realm of public policy and administration. Under the previous Keynesian regime the state took on a paternalistic role, providing regulation, care, and stability for (some, typically white) citizens such that they could more securely participate in the capitalist economy as workers and businesspeople, based on the presumption that universal public services (health, education, transit, old-age security, etc.) were both fairest and most efficient. Here, the normative subject was the dutiful, well-intentioned citizen. The neoliberal revolution not only demanded drastic cuts to public services (in the name of offering tax cuts) or their privatization, it also led to a set of changes to how public services and institutions were managed. These included the importation of market measurements of productivity and efficiency, in which the presumed normative subject was modelled on game theory’s ruthless, self-maximizing player. The recipient of state assistance and public services came to be distrusted as a ruthless homo oeconomicus whose urge to cheat the state’s generosity was only rational, but nonetheless costly and potentially ruinous to the economy. Amadae notes the shift in neoliberal policy away from the provision of the common necessities of life and towards tax cuts, subsidies and incentives for competitive market behaviors (see also Cooper, 2017). Here, game theory was often explicitly used to model and justify a shift towards a more minimalist and market-oriented form of government intervention. Game theory’s implicit agent or subject, homo oeconomicus, is motivated by the same fundamental drives regardless of whether they are a Fortune 500 corporation with an army of lobbyists in Washington or a destitute migrant in rural Nebraska. But, of course, the consequences and capacities could not be more different.

But perhaps most consequentially, game theory became a crucial component in the building of mathematical computerized financial models (Allen and Morris, 2002; Ganti and Singhania, 2025). The complex algorithms that, today, execute a huge percentage of global trades, or that advise market analysts at the world’s top investment banks and private equity firms, are built, fundamentally, on an adversarial paradigm that is calibrated to outmaneuver other market actors who are assumed to be playing the same game (Grindsted, 2016). With a huge proportion of global financial trades made autonomously or semi-autonomously by rival supercomputers, and with these actions in many cases determining the flow of global goods and services, it is not such an exaggeration to propose that we are, indeed, living in a kind of gamified simulation, much of it built on game theory.

Within game theory, cheating is defined narrowly as the strategic choice of one player to deviate from a previous cooperative agreement for their own benefit. It is, ultimately, synonymous with defection. For example, if the two accomplices in the prisoner’s dilemma promised before their arrest to not confess, but one then confesses based on their assumption the other will remain loyal to the promise, the first player can be said to be cheating. And yet in this case and seemingly all cases in game theory, cheating does not actually involve a breaking or bending of the rules, but rather a kind of amoral but not illegal deception of another player. This is not actually cheating at all within the shrunken moral world of game theory: it is perfectly rational if it maximizes a player’s advantage. In fact, one might say that within the paradigm of game theory, cheating per se is impossible: the mathematical model cannot comprehend a deviation from its rules that is not already anticipated within the model.

Another way of looking at this is that, within game theory, cheating is always already normative: advantage-seeking players will naturally (indeed inevitably) defect and deceive when it is in their interests, otherwise they are playing with a suboptimal strategy or (and this is often more practically the case), they are actually playing the wrong game.

The upshot of this is that, while game theory has in many ways taken over the world, it is a paradigm within which cheating is both impossible and normalized. On a systemic level, one cannot cheat free market capitalism because, outside of laws that prevent fraud and theft, the game (recalling Green’s definition of cheating above) has no mandatory prescriptive, regulative, and conduct-governing rules that cannot be broken in the name of personal advantage. Indeed, the breaking of these rules is key to success and innovation within the system.

My argument here is not that game theory is somehow the secret code or grand conspiracy that has guided the neoliberal revolution. Game theory has, above all else, been useful to various actors who have, collectively, both driven forward and benefited from that revolution without always being aware of it. Game theory is an elegant and sophisticated set of mathematical tools that present themselves as pure logic and claim to derive from natural laws (see Sun 2023). And yet it in fact functions as part of an ideological substrate. It came to prominence because it mirrored a market-oriented thought-world of competitive individualism and it offered various actors (military, corporate, financial, and technological) a set of tools that helped them navigate and reproduce the reality that this thought world created in its image. But most significantly for our purposes, game theory helps us delineate some of the ideological and material consequences of the neoliberal revolution that articulate themselves in terms of games. They help us see the underlying tendencies and modes of justification for a system that, while allegedly based on liberal values of fairness based on individual opportunity, normalizes and makes a virtue out of cheating from the very outset.

Finance’s normalization of cheating

This is in large part the gospel of billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and far-right éminence grise Peter Thiel, an avid chess enthusiast who has often compared his manipulation of markets and politics as a kind of game (Chafkin, 2021). As one of the founders of PayPal, he presided over and enriched himself through a business plan that took advantage of the loose and outdated regulatory framework around emerging digital network technology to conspicuously cheat the system by essentially creating an unregulated bank. The plan, which he would repeat subsequently (notably with his AI-driven surveillance and security firm Palantir) was to scale up the enterprise and userbase rapidly by any means necessary so that, when finally regulators responded, it would be too late: millions of people would rely on the infrastructure and the firm would be rich and powerful enough to undermine any attempt to regulate it or interrupt its enjoyment of a monopoly. Later, this strategy (which would be sloganized by early Thiel acolyte Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, as ‘move fast and break things’) would also include scouting out potential competitors in their larval phase and buying them outright, poaching their staff, or destroying them before they could become a threat.

For Thiel and his many devotees and proteges (including current US Vice President JD Vance), this behavior can only be said to be cheating if one fails to understand the true game that is being played. Like the mind-bending, seemingly chaotic moves made by chess- and go-playing AI (some of Thiel’s favorite pet investments), his business model does not explicitly break any rules or laws, just conventions and norms (Thiel and Masters, 2014). In fact, they are, according to this philosophy, a more perfect strategy for playing the game of capitalism by its natural and eternal rules. Those who fail to do likewise are cheating themselves by clutching on to an outdated, outmoded set of pieties and expectations. Indeed, within Thiel’s influential worldview, these pieties and expectations are far from innocent: they functioned to protect and enshrine an older, equally manipulative (but far less honest) elite, who were served well by a mutual agreement to uphold those norms and keep challenging any innovative newcomers out of the game, like snobbish imperial universities of old who claimed they were open to anyone, so long as they could speak basic Latin and Greek, knowing full well only elites would have been educated to do so. Indeed, within this worldview, it is the old residual elites who are cheating: they are bending the game around an unspoken set of non-transparent norms that, effectively, become rules. He, and those like him, are merely playing the game as it was always intended to be played, ruthlessly.

In this as so much else, Thiel is not original. In fact, one might make the argument that the whole history of major turning points in so-called ‘financial innovation’ can be narrated as a series of normalized cheats (see Klaus, 2014). When the joint stock corporation emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, allowing many investors to pool resources under a new legal meta-entity, it was decried by contemporaries as a legal but dubious effort to cheat not only the conventional rules of trade (which at the time were very deeply tied to notions of honor, character, Christian ethics, and fraternal relationships) but also God’s exclusive right to create new life (see Perelman, 2000). Similarly, established and conservative bankers and traders were horrified when, in the moment of European powers’ ambitious imperial expansion in the early eighteenth century, class-transgressive ‘stock-jobbers’ cheated the norms of finance (though not the law) and pioneered what would come to be known as retail trading, where securities (in this case investments in dubious colonial ventures) were sold directly to consumers (Dale, 2004). In the industrial age, market insiders likewise condemned ‘innovative’ traders’ manipulation of new telegraph technologies to game the markets with complex forms of arbitrage, or to use increasingly integrated and connected global markets to speculate on land or buy and sell derivative contracts tied to the fruits of imperial pillage (de Goede, 2005). In all these cases and many more the cheat became the rule: within months or years (although often only following scandal and, occasionally, regulation) these techniques would become standard conventions. The same holds for the twentieth century’s increasingly complex mathematical models, such as those that priced derivatives or portfolios, which enabled powerful trading strategies that upended financial markets and forever changed the way finance operated, contributing to a transition from a conservative, staid, and prudent world of haut-bourgeois civility to a crude game now famous from films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (on this cultural shift, see Zaloom 2006).

The trading computers that today execute the vast majority of global financial exchanges, or that guide the decisions of the world’s investment banks and asset management companies are all built implicitly on the logic of game theory, where the presumption of an equivalent adversary or adversaries is part of the code (Khan and Bao, 2021). Within such a system, all else being equal (as it so rarely is), the only way to beat the market is to find a cheat: a legal (or at least ostensibly legal) method to gain a slight advantage (Angel and McCabe, 2013). This, for example, happened in the case of the development of high frequency trading algorithms, as famously retold by luminary financial journalist Michael Lewis (2015) in Flash Boys. Here, high-tech investment firms competed with one another to ‘game the plumbing’ of the American digital financial infrastructure by placing their servers mere meters closer to major data centers, gaining millisecond advantages on their rivals that, over the span of millions of trades, resulted in tremendous windfalls (Toscano, 2013).

Indeed, Lewis’s whole profoundly influential oeuvre since the success of his breakout semi-autobiographical hit Liar’s Poker (1989), has been dedicated to what, in a later book (this one about American football) he calls The Blind Side (2006): the unseen gap, liability or exploitable opportunity hidden within a competitive system that some clever innovator recognizes and seizes upon, and thereby changes the game (for good and for ill). In both The Blind Side and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004) (both made into hit Hollywood films), the ‘game’ is a sport and the cheat involves coaches, investors, and players looking at the game from a completely new angle. In Moneyball, for example, this meant eschewing the typical strategy of recruiting expensive star baseball players and, instead, using statistical data and models to create a portfolio of mediocre and inexpensive players whose skills counterbalance to produce a winning team.

These activities, at the seam between cheating and strategic innovation are perhaps best explored through the idea of the exploit. As Alexander Gallow and Eugene Thacker (2007) note, the term was coined by hackers to describe a program that takes advantage of a flaw, mistake, or oversight in a network or system, but it can now be used to identify a much broader trend: computer, financial, legal, and other systems in a complex and competitive capitalist society are the result of past exploits (or attempts to prevent them), and produce new opportunities for future exploits.

Finance capital, historically and in the present, is built on the normalization and incorporation of what might well be considered cheating: actions that do not necessarily explicitly break laws (although sometimes they do) but take advantage of grey areas, loopholes, unrecognized vulnerabilities, and back doors, and that, more generally, defy the norms rather than the explicit rules of the proverbial game (Calathes and Yeager, 2023; Klaus, 2014). But this tendency has only intensified in the past 40-year period of financialization. The subprime mortgage scandal was paradigmatic: on multiple levels, a wide array of financial actors sought to ‘game the system’ to return profit to their investors (Lapavitsas, 2013). The fact that almost none of them were ever brought to justice indicates not simply corruption, but the deeper truth: it is, from one perspective, a system ruled by and for cheats. The cheats in this case may be intentional and unethical, passive, and benevolent (such as those who genuinely if misguidedly thought they were doing good work by providing poor people access to housing), or simply following explicit or implicit orders; cheating here is not a description of intentions, but rather, a quality of the system itself.

Before and since, examples abound. The LIBOR scandal, for example, saw financial insiders at some of the world’s leading investment banks conspire to fix the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate of interest at which banks lend to one another in the very short term, a rate that serves as an important reference-point for many other processes in the global financial economy, including an estimated $350 trillion worth of financial derivatives (yes, that is indeed four times the global GDP) (Calathes and Yeager, 2023). Such manipulation allowed huge banks who were essentially part of a rate-setting cartel, to subtly but consequentially influence other deals, contracts and instruments that might include a reference to LIBOR. Even though the orders to game the rates were authorized by the field marshals of the world’s leading investment banks, a seven-year British investigation (costing some £60 million) was only able to convict five foot soldiers. Their cases largely hinged on whether their actions were exceptionally dishonest or simply represented normal practice in the industry at the time (their eventual convictions were later overturned). Several banks were fined or settled their cases for what amounted to tiny fractions of the profits they had earned through the manipulation. The power to set the LIBOR rates was handed over to a UK regulatory body.

The case is noteworthy because it was such an egregious conspiracy to cheat, hidden in plain sight, with massive consequences, and because, shockingly, it actually led to (paltry) fines, convictions, and new regulation. The vast majority of cases do not (see Culpepper and Lee, 2026). State financial regulators are typically overwhelmed, not only by the scale of cheating but also by its complexity, and by the recognition that much of it has become so normalized that to take action against it would jeopardize the financial system and risk plunging already volatile financial markets into chaos, something most capitalist governments are loathe to risk. Further, many regulators have been (or will in the future are likely to be) employees of the same financial firms they scrutinize (Brezis and Cariolle, 2019). This is perfectly legal, but it represents a kind of cheating in plain sight. Beyond the direct incentives for regulators to look the other way, it also means that many have already been party to this kind of malfeasance and might fear that pursuing punishing it (even if it were feasible) might adversely affect them or their friends and associates. But more generally, having worked in the financial sector, they are part of a culture where such cheating is not only accepted but often celebrated. As former star financier Gary Stevenson’s (2024) recent autobiography The Trading Game demonstrates, traders, analysts, and managers who discover new cheats and exploits are often handsomely rewarded.

To witness the consequences, we might follow Hudson’s (2012) proposal that we see financial markets as, essentially, the decentralized but massively consequential engine of capitalist economic planning, one so powerful it would be the envy of the most megalomaniacal dictator. The financial sector ultimately determines the global flow of goods and services, the price of food, the accessibility of housing, the kinds of technologies that will be developed, the way cities and countries will grow, what governments will be allowed to rule and which will be starved of access to the credit that is the lifeblood of any administration. The LIBOR scandal was indeed, explicitly, an illegal conspiracy. But the thousands of other similar cheats, revealed or still undertaken in the shadows, are the normal operations of this global governance structure.

There is of course, nothing new about corruption, and many regimes throughout history have run on it. But my argument here is that neoliberal financialized capitalism makes the cheat central to its operations as never before. Partly this has to do with the sheer complexity of a system built on a rapidly evolving network of on extremely sophisticated and multilayered private financial institutions, byzantine and contradictory sub-national, national and supra-national governance institutions, and rapidly advancing technology, all of which offer innumerable opportunities to find niches, grey areas, hacks, exploits and cheats that play off one part of the apparatus against another. It also has something to do with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an ever smaller number of individuals and corporations (and the diminishing power and capacity of the regulatory state, at their behest). This means the cheat or exploit is no longer simply the tactic of the marginal gangster or opportunist, but the strategy of many of the firms that control the commanding heights of the economy. But, as we have seen, it is also something at work within the core logic of the system itself. Cheating is the rule, and cheating rules as never before.

Conclusion: of cheats and spoilsports

To conclude, I want to turn to some of the fascistic consequences and resonances of such a system. In The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, I argue that financialization has compelled most people to adopt the agency of the player: the savvy, risk-taking, exploit-seeking homo oeconomicus, competing to survive and thrive in an austere world (Haiven, 2026, forthcoming). It is in this context that a reactionary politics takes root around a set of feelings related to feeling cheated – not cheated of one’s entitlement to a share of social wealth, but of one’s right to compete.

Writing in the late 1930s, shortly before the brutal occupation his native Netherlands and his own brief incarceration by the Nazis, Johann Huizinga (1971: 11–12) made the important distinction between two key figures that might occupy a magic circle, the term he gives to the consensual orbit of play:

The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion – a pregnant word which means literally ‘in-play’… Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community… It sometimes happens, however, that the spoil-sports in their turn make a new community with rules of its own.

Ultimately, part of the charm of the cheat is that they do not unduly disturb the game, whereas the spoilsport makes it impossible or unsavory to continue playing. The cheat, after all, is just another player, just like the rest of us, until their malfeasance is revealed. When their cheating is discovered, the other players are faced with a choice. Do we refuse to play any furthers, or kick the cheat out and thereby jeopardize the game? Or do we all now begin to cheat, reasoning that it is the only way to win? Part of us even admires the cheat for their cunning. Ultimately, what makes a cheat acceptable is that they have walked the tightrope between a normative and a legal breach, and in so doing they have simply elevated the logic of the game to its next level. In their attempt to win, they have transgressed the norms of fair play, but not catastrophically. They did as any player would, had they the courage or intelligence to do so. Ultimately, we accept the cheat because they do not call into question the motivations, legitimacy, and sense of agency of us as players; they in fact vivify it in magnified form.

Meanwhile, the spoilsport must be excluded and castigated not only because they make the game unfun, but because they call into question the game itself and, more vexingly, the subjectivity and sense of agency of the other players. If we are all playing (and enjoying, and betting on) a broken or rigged game, what does the spoil-sport’s refusal imply about the rest of us? We are dupes, or complicit, or both.

And what if the game were compulsory, and its outcomes determined our lives? What if we had come to imagine that the game was natural, normal, and eternal? In that case, the cheat’s actions and motivations would certainly be understandable, given the stakes. And the spoilsport? What good would their complaints about the game’s inherent injustice or unfairness do any of us? The spoilsport may indeed tell us we ought to play a different game. They might argue that the game relies on us, the players, more than we, the players, depend on the game. And yet for those of us who play and imagine we have a chance to win, or even those of us who acknowledge the game is rigged but still are not the greatest of all of its losers – for us, the spoilsport is at best a hopeless romantic and at worst that most reprehensible of cheats: one whose criticism of the game is just a ploy to distract us from our competitive pursuits with sanctimonious pieties, or to hoodwink us into come kind of doomed collaboration from which they will no doubt come out ahead. If we are all cheats at heart, then the spoilsport is either the worst cheat (in denial of the fact) or the very best, for which they can never be forgiven.

To return to the key point with which I began, this might help us understand the success of far-right, reactionary, and neofascist political actors who promise to take revenge on those whom they present as cheats: welfare claimants allegedly gaming the system; migrants who cross borders outside the legal frameworks; nebulously defined ‘elites’ (a term that conveniently often conflates or substitutes cultural for economic capital) who manipulate the otherwise fair and meritocratic system; and minorities that manipulate the guilt of majorities to gain special advantage. Numerous prominent left-wing and progressive parties and commentators have, rightly, observed that these targets of reactionary rage are almost insignificant in their effects on the economy and working peoples’ lives. This is especially so compared to the massive forms of corporate and financial cheating happening in plain sight. The world’s real economic elites today squirrel hundreds of billions away in tax havens; golden visa programs allow them to avoid the law; corporations hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to sabotage any efforts to hold them to account for labor, environmental, and other infractions.

And yet, these facts appear to have little influence. Instead, conspiracism is mushrooming: a general paranoid search for nefarious actors who are cheating the system, rather than a reckoning with a system that is built on cheats and makes cheats of us all (see Haiven, Kingsmith, and Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022; Haiven, 2023).

Perhaps this is because subjects habituated to a form of gamified capitalism distrust and resent the spoilsports who call into question the legitimacy of the game. To play the game of neoliberal, financialized capitalism is to be afforded a sabotaged agency. One clings to it not because it promises redemption and success, but because without it one cannot imagine what agency would be: one would be a loser, not a player. Everybody has a sneaking suspicion the game is rigged, but few are afforded the systematic opportunities to imagine a dignified life beyond the game. We are, then, inclined towards the emotive claim that some people are cheating and also resentful toward those who would (rightly) point out that the game is rigged, which we all know but cannot truly admit. The bombastic cheat, who promises that, by cheating, they will make the game fair, holds a special and dangerous place in our political imagination.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for feedback from and conversations with many people including Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Sarah Stein Lubrano, Bue Hanson, Faye Harvey, Luce DeLire, audiences at the Marxist Literary Group’s Institute for Culture and Society, and the three anonymous reviewers at Finance and Society. Special thanks to my research assistants Sam Cousin and Stella Lawson. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program and with the support of UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Centre for Capitalism Studies.

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The post Capitalism Cheats (Finance & Society) appeared first on Max Haiven.

This rising fascistic tide is deeply entangled with games and play (Lankford et al. 2024; Schlegel and Kowert 2024; Wells et al. 2024). Over the last decade or more, scholars have witnessed the intertwining of fandoms with reactionary politics (Massanari 2024; Wilson 2018). Others have observed the darkly playful behaviour of the digital far-right (Davies 2022; Grobe 2022; Haiven et al. 2022; N’Guessan 2024). These tendencies build on the long-standing presence of authoritarian and exclusionary narratives and structures in commercial games (Did 2024; Hammar 2020) that frequently draw on cryptofascist notions of play (Eidelpes 2014), already, at least implicitly, invested in cultures of white-supremacy (Trammell 2023).  

And it coincides with the gamification of many violent and exclusionary aspects of our worlds (Flanagan and Jakkobsen 2024; Haiven 2026; Hon 2022). But games and play(fulness) also offer possibilities for rupture and resistance, which can be turned to antifascist aims and towards the horizon of collective liberation (Flanagan 2009; Ruberg 2020; Woodcock 2019).

When we speak of games, we are not only thinking of the massive digital games industry. We also want to expand our attention to include board games, role-playing games (tabletop, live action/LARP and more), sports, the gamification of… everything, sexual and romantic play, educational games, serious games and the broader concept of play. When we speak of fascism as a global phenomenon, we are thinking historically and in the present, about not just an ideology and political organization but also a reactionary set of attitudes, dispositions and orientations that entrench and celebrate power and domination, both in “the West” and in the majority world.

To explore these contradictions and conundrums, we propose a special issue of Edulamos that poses questions, including: 

• How are today’s forms of fascism (dangerously) playful and with what consequences? How are they mobilizing games? How do they make use of gamified platforms (Twitch, YouTube, Discord) and gamified digital practices? Does this gamification make them different from their 20th century ancestors?
• How are fascist games and play entwined with the hyper-capitalist and games industry and its exploitation of workers throughout its supply chains, from the extractive mining operations to the self-exploitative hustle of “independent” developers? How are they entangled with the broader tendency towards capitalist gamification, and with the even broader climate of capitalism that feels, to so many people, like an unwinnable game?
• How is ludic fascism connected to resurgent patriarchy, racism, nationalism, colonialism and genocide (in Palestine and beyond), revanchist politics, and rampant and violent transphobia?
• How do mainstream and alternative games (digital and analogue) promote or encourage fascist attitudes in either content or form (or both)? And how can such games (or other playful pursuits) be part of an antifascist project?

We will also ask questions of resistance, rebellion and renewal, including:

• What role (if any) do play and games play in defending our communities from and ultimately abolishing fascism?
• How can anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, decolonial crip or “gaming from below” coordinate with anti-fascist efforts? And how can we support or encourage resisting or rebelling against fascist games?
• How shall we, who care about the power of games, draw the line and hold the line against fascist imaginaries? How shall we recognize enemies and encourage our allies?
• What games will help us win a new postfascist, postcapitalist world? How will games and play feel after we win? What games will we play on the way?

These intentionally provocative questions are intended to excite, rather than limit the imagination about submission proposals to the special issue. They are based on discussions held at the “What is the Antifascist Game” symposium held in London in July of 2025 as part of the Games Transformed festival, whose participants include Max Haiven, Sebastian Quack, Carina Erdmann, Sarah Thorne, Nick Koppenhagen, Paolo Ruffino, Konstanze N’Guessan, Venessa Theonia, Thomas Spies.

We welcome a plurality of responses to our call from people including game designers, interactive theatre practitioners and artists, scholars and intellectuals (with or without institutional affiliations and credentials), community organizers who share an opposition to fascism and a recognition of its entanglements with racism and white-supremacy, with patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, with capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism, with ableism, and with other systems of domination. We can only publish work in English.

By July 19, we welcome 250-300 word proposals for

• 9000-word research articles (for peer review stream)
• 3000-word essays, artist statements, review essays or other material

Please send your proposal, along with a 50–125 word biographical note, using this form: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/ZylyI85ROlgWBvbO5z7b8OT5XlzwXO9iP1G+jBi+xmg/

This special issue is edited by Briar Dickey, Max Haiven, Konstanze N’Guessan, Thomas Spies, Sarah Thorne.

For inquiries, please contact Max Haiven or Thomas Spies at edulamos-special-issue at reimaginingvalue dot ca

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical academic study of games and play. Eludamos is fully open access. Copyright for all manuscripts published at Eludamos remains with authors. All submissions need to be fully formatted in accordance with Eludamos guidelines. Please consider Eludamos’ information for authors when preparing your submission.. 

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Flanagan, Mary, and Mikael Jakobsson. Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. The MIT Press, 2023.

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Lankford, Adam, Clare S. Allely, and Sonya A. McLaren. “The Gamification of Mass Violence: Social Factors, Video Game Influence, and Attack Presentation in the Christchurch Mass Shooting and Its Copycats.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2024: 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2024.2413184.

Massanari, Adrienne Lynne. Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled up the Far Right. The MIT Press, 2024.

N’Guessan, Konstanze. “Only Playing? Ethnographic Perspectives on Ludic Fascism in Germany,” Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 209. https://cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de/fb07-ifeas/wp-content/uploads/sites/396/2025/04/AP-209_NGuessan_Only-Playing_AP_209.pdf

Ruberg, Bo, ed. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LBGTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke University Press, 2020.

Schlegel, Linda, and Rachel Kowert, eds. Gaming and Extremism: The Radicalization of Digital Playgrounds. Taylor & Francis, 2024.

Trammell, Aaron. Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. Playful Thinking. The MIT Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14656.001.0001

Wells, Garrison, Agnes Romhanyi, Jason G. Reitman, Reginald Gardner, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler. “Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature.” Games and Culture 19, no. 4 (2024): 469–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231167214.

Wilson, Katie. “Red Pillers, Sad Puppies, and Gamergaters.” In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119237211.ch27.

Woodcock, Jamie. Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle. Haymarket Books, 2019.

The post What are antifascist games? (CFP) appeared first on Max Haiven.

The following is an unedited preprint of a paper that appears in volume 9(1) of the journal Media Theory.

Abstract

This highly speculative paper proposes the term playgrom to identify an idiom of playfully cruel fascistic violence that emerges from, is shaped by, and also exceeds gamified financialized capitalism. Like the anti-Semitic pogroms of late-Tsarist Russia and subsequent acts of racist terrorism there and elsewhere, the pogroms appears to be a forms of spontaneous, unsanctioned majoritarian mob violence against minorities. But we must look to the deeper roots of such phenomena in both dominant ideologies and collapsing socioeconomic systems. I draw on the examples of the 2014-15 Gamergate online decentralized anti-feminist swarming campaign and the 2019 Christchurch white supremacist massacre as examples of the playgrom. As other have illustrated, these acts of mass violence, which I will characterize as fascistic, were gamified, and drew on gaming themes, tropes and communities for their vitality. But I also propose that, to fully understand these phenomena, we must also contextualize them in the current moment of gamified capitalism, and so I propose approaching the playgrom as a form of deep, dark playbor.

Keywords

Fascism; play; games; reactionary and far-right politics; capitalism; playbour; gamification

Introduction

This highly speculative essay attempts to paint, in the broadest strokes, a theory of what I will call the playgrom: a portmanteau of play and pogrom. By this term I am gesturing towards an idiom of fascistic mob violence that emerges within but that also exceeds a digitalized, financialized and gamified mode of capitalism. This term can help us bring into view some of the alignments of ideology, affect, technology and political economy which can enrich our understanding of fascism and fascistic politics in the contemporary moment, when, I argue, the subjectivities and modes of sociality forged under financialized and gamified capitalism (roughly 1973-present) have incubated new forms of reactionary culture and politics. 

I will take up the 2015 Gamergate mass anti-feminist swarming and the 2019 Christchurch massacre as examples of the playgrom: both are incidents where dominant groups undertook fascistic mass violence as if it were a kind of game, and with direct reference to digital and commercial game culture. Both events emerged from online gamer cultures and were pursued by their protagonists using gamified methods. While other authors have insightfully dwelled with the gamified elements of these events, I will supplement this with some observations about how this behaviour must also be contextualized within a political economic frame of financialized, gamified capitalism. Here, most people’s lives have come to feel like an unwinnable game, giving rise to both (toxic) forms of countergaming and vindictive political affects.

After introducing, contextualizing and justifying the term playgrom, I will argue that much is to be gained by considering it a form of deep and dark playbor. Anthropologists understand deep play to be forms of play that reflect a society’s (often unstated and misapprehended) values and their contradictions. Game scholars name as “dark” those forms of play that have broader “real life” consequences (often dire), or that dwell with or incorporate non-normative social themes, usually ones which mainstream opinion finds taboo, objectionable or offensive. Several scholars have theorized far-right and fascist online cultures as playing deep and dark games (Grobe, 2022), but my analysis will suggest that we also see these in a broader political economic context where various forms of play and games have been incorporated as never before into the operations of capitalism in its financialized, gamified mode. In presenting the playgrom as deep dark playbor, I am drawing on a literature that seeks to bring play and labour into critical proximity, in an effort to recognize the changing nature of exploitation, especially in technology and cultural industries where user-generated and playfully collaborative work produces assets of significant social and economic value. Yet in identifying the playgrom as deep dark playbor I am also seeking to open a space for considering how it contributes to the reproduction of capitalism much more broadly: as a nursery for reactionary subjectivity, as a form of wage- and demand-suppressing vigilantism, as a means to enforce racial and gendered divisions within the working class that entrench the conditions of exploitation, and in ways that offer psychic compensation (akin to the “the wages of whiteness”) to some of that class’s more privileged actors.

The pogrom as fascistic violence

The word pogrom is derived from the Russian verb that roughly translates as “to destroy.” It seems to have appeared in the 1880s in the first instance to describe unsanctioned, spontaneous anti-Semitic violence. While that phenomenon was certainly not new, it took on both a renewed vigour and terror in the late 19th century as the Tsarist empire succumbed to paroxysms of chaos that would, eventually, culminate in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Civil War until 1922. The grim fate of Jews in that period was widely reported around the world, and the term pogrom was widely applied to other forms of anti-Semitic violence as well as to refer to the more centrally organized and coordinated persecution of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their various fascist clients (Avrutin and Bemporad, 2021).

Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the term has been broadened to identify a much wider range of extra-legal mob violence of majorities against minorities, notably anti-Muslim campaigns in India perpetuated by individuals and groups closely associated with the now-reigning far-right BJP party (Jasani, 2014) or the anti-Palestinian mob violence of Zionist settlers in the West Bank (Iraqi, 2023). There remains a debate as to if the term ought to be applied to the mob violence, race riots, and lynchings that characterized the Jim Crow era in the United States. Whether or not the term is fitting or anachronistic, the events are not dissimilar (Gordon, 2022).

The salient characteristics of a pogrom include that it is an incident or series of incidents of anti-minority collective violence that appears spontaneous and is not officially organized by the state, but that nonetheless emerges from deeply rooted prejudices and forms of oppression, and it takes place in the context of social upheaval and uncertainty.

Historians and theorists of the pogrom warn that we should not see it simply as an ahistorical recurrence of some atavistic human tendency (see Dekel-Chen et al., 2010). Certainly, unsanctioned and seemingly spontaneous xenophobic and anti-minority violence has characterized many horrific episodes across many civilizations. But the pogroms of the Tsarist Empire must be historicized as emerging from a particularly modern confluence of forces that had the effect of unleashing violent racist terror. These, argue the editors of a recent collection of documents contemporary to the events, included not only long-standing anti-Semitic sentiments but also growing fear and frustration and desperation at rapid economic and social change brought about by the increasing integration of capitalist markets; new technological affordances (notably the ability to print and distribute newspapers and tracts and the public’s growing ability to afford and read them), as well as uniquely modern political ideologies that introduced racial nationalism and also the closely connected supposedly scientific rationales for racial, ethnic or religious purity or more generally promoted the management of populations (Avrutin and Bemporad, 2021).

In this sense, we might say that, although pogroms are rarely (and perhaps by definition) not planned or coordinated by leading economic actors (the state or firms), and indeed in spite of the fact that sometimes these actors officially (and perhaps even earnestly) decry the pogrom, they nonetheless do the work of the dominant order. By this I mean that they typically enforce, entrench and extend the forms of oppression, inequality and exploitation on which that dominant order, or significant powerful factions within it, depend. The Tsarist regime officially decried the original pogroms and claimed it was helpless to prevent them, and indeed the pogroms in some ways undermined some of its plans and embarrassed it on the world stage. And yet the pogroms were initially and frequently undertaken in the name of the Tsar and his regime, and in many ways contributed to the perpetuation of his regime. Pogroms can be observed to serve various factions within the broader political economy. For example, small capitalists and farmers who were indebted to Jewish lenders could rid themselves of their obligations. Employers could exploit racialized divisions within the working class. The class tensions at work could release themselves without any meaningful consequences to the political and economic elite.

Obviously, not all pogroms are fascist in the limited political sense that they are conducted by or under fascist regimes or by members of fascist organizations. Indeed, pogroms predate the emergence of fascism by at least half a century. However, I will hazard here that all pogroms articulate a fascistic politics in a much broader sense.^[1] Pogroms are a form of terrorism that aims to achieve political outcomes through mass violence, even if not all participants share or can articulate those objectives. Pogroms emerge from and contribute to a culture suffused with fascistic ideas about the imperiled purity of a majority (see Griffin, 1991). Pogroms, like fascism, articulate collective violence in a uniquely modern form, and are reactions to the rapid changes of capitalist modernity (Bauman, 2000). Like fascism, pogroms emerge from, resemble but also exceed the regimes within which they incubate: they often appear as a vicious parody or excessive microcosm of the kinds of violence that already persists all around them (see Toscano, 2023). And while the proponents of fascism or the protagonists of pogroms might espouse all manner of (often contradictory) philosophical or political positions, the ideology behind them ultimately always boils down to what I see as the sine qua non: the worship of power through spectacular and transgressive cruelty.

For this reason, I will associate the pogrom with fascistic politics, a term that strives to identify something broader than fascism: a set of cultural, affective, political, economic and social tendencies that take inspiration from, resonate with or contribute to fascism, but that often lack the centralization, ideological unity or political ambition of fascism. The reason I insist on framing these in terms of fascism (rather than “authoritarianism” or “reactionary politics” or the “far right”) is that it brings my analysis into proximity to a tradition that (a) seeks to demonstrate that these political forces are uniquely incubated within capitalism; that for that reason (b) both inherits traits from and rebels against that system or its contradictions and crises; (c) cannot simply be defeated or ameliorated by liberal capitalist social institutions, nor understood within their dominant frameworks (see Horkheimer, 1973). My analysis here echoes the project of Jack Bratich (2022) to understand the affects, relationalities, subjectivities and broader cultural substrate within which fascism takes root. There is a risk, of course, that the notion of “fascistic politics” is analytically imprecise and easily swallows the nuances between fascism and other expressions of conservatism, nationalism, reactionary politics and so on. The risk, in this context, is worth it, as my ambition here is to bring to light a broad cultural-political trend and its relation to the continental drift of capitalist political economy.

Playful fascism

My concern here is with the form that fascistic politics take when they emerge from what I am referring to as gamified financialized capitalism. In conjoining these adjectives to capitalism I am drawing attention to two entwined dimensions of the transformations in the socioeconomic world system since roughly the 1970s that have seen, on the one hand, the rise to prominence and the widespread influence of the speculative FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector of capitalism and, on the other, the way that this system is increasingly invested in the competitive participation of social subjects which has been achieved in no small part through processes widely known as gamification, as I shall describe later in this paper.

My argument is that the forms of fascistic mob violence we see today must be read in the context of the capitalist contradictions from which they arise and to which they offer a (false) remedy. To that end, I now want to turn to some elements of what I will call playful fascism.

Of course, fascism has always, in its way, been playful. We are ill-served by stereotypical Hollywood images of pathologically severe, unsmiling Nazis. We have ample evidence that humor was (and remains) essential to the cultural politics of fascism and numerous critics have explored and illustrated how cruel and racist jokes can conscript fascist subjects through a politics where innuendo, insinuation and stereotypes work as proxies for arguments, ideological statements and policies (Herzog, 2012; Gundle, 2015; Askanius and Keller, 2021). Indeed, Arendt was among those observers and theorists who noted that it’s rarely fruitful to take fascist ideas, rhetoric and arguments too seriously: not only are they often a joke, but debating or analyzing them seriously makes a joke out of the broader democratic frame of debate or analysis (Arendt, 2004). We might say that it is a conspicuous fascist “flex” to trick or compel “serious” intellectuals or politicians to stoop and contort themselves to deal seriously with fascist ideas.

To this we might add the consistent fascist obsession with sport. Much has been written on the way this dovetails with racist and supremacist notions of the martial and muscular body, as well as the way modern sport often wraps itself around notions of nation (Bolz, 2016; Gilroy, 2000, pp. 137-176). Less has been written about the way that a fascist obsession with sport is itself a kind of game, where a form of organized play is transmuted into a matter of life of death, for example when football hooligans undertake righteous violence in the name of their chosen team.

There is also a widely-held association of fascism with sadistic play as well, made famous in literature and film and having given rise to a substantial kink subculture that fetishizes Nazi aesthetics (Moore, 2011). More historically, Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies offers a window into the kinds of nihilistic violent misogynistic sexual fantasies of wanton playful cruelty that subtend the fascist imaginary (Theweleit, 1987).

And yet today’s fascist cultural politics are playful in historically unique ways. Numerous critics point out that the rise of fascistic politics in the last decade have emerged in no small part from and been deeply inspired by a “gamer culture” that has grown up in a complex dialectical relation with the emergence of digital games as, by some estimates, the largest entertainment industry to have ever existed (Did 2024; Salter, 2018; Hammar, 2020). As we shall explore in more detail momentarily, the avowedly fascist Steven Bannon, architect of Donald Trump’s first successful presidential bid and, more recently, doyen of the global far right and celebrity broadcaster, has profoundly inspired by gamer culture and the events associated with the #gamergate harassment campaign, where (almost exclusively male) gamers organized a vicious online campaign of revenge against a hallucinated conspiracy of feminist game critics and designers (Bezio, 2018). Not only was he to recruit many protagonists to his movement, he also credits them with teaching him to leverage the affordances of online culture to gamify reactionary politics to make them much more widely appealing (see Donovan, Dreyfuss and Friedberg, 2022, pp. 78–107).

The affinity of gamer culture with a new form of fascistic politics is hardly surprising, given the themes, tropes and formats that have been promoted by the hugely profitable video game industry over the past three decades (Hammar, 2020; Did, 2024). While few if any video games openly promote fascism (quite the opposite: there are plenty that revolve around killing fascists), many (indeed, most) are organized around perspectives that are broadly in line with explicit fascist principles and more generally revolve around the worship of power. The “first person shooter” genre of games, perhaps the most popular, places the player behind the eyeballs of a lone, paranoid, violent, superhuman actor who typically uses catastrophic violence to achieve his apocalyptic goals (Voorhees, Call and Whitlock, 2012). The “4X” strategy genre affords the player a gods-eye view of a terrain which he may “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate” to achieve dominance (Rezny, 2016; Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023). While obviously playing these games does not make someone a fascist, and while one cannot say that the medium of digital games or these particular genres are inherently fascism, and while there are interesting (but rare) exceptions within these genres that challenge the dominant paradigm, it’s hard to avoid the fact that, had they been available in the 1930s, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have celebrated them as fitting educational tools for the German master race.

Besides this, we can note, along with Massanari (2024) and Paul (2018), that gamer culture, like the tech sector ideology with which it is intertwined, organizes itself around the (delusional) notion that games are politically neutral and (when not gamed by biased do-gooders) present meritocratic arenas where the naturally talented, hard-working or perseverant rise to the top. This perspective implicitly and often vituperatively denies the existence of preexisting social inequalities and the gendered, ableist and other biases inherent in game design, which has largely been guided by the fabricated desires of its largest client base: able-bodied boys and young men (Salter, 2018). The result has been the emergence within gamer culture of a vicious backlash subculture that has carried through into some of the most influential sectors of capitalist society, notably the tech sector, whose workforce and leadership are disproportionately young male “geeks” raised in video game cultures (Massanari, 2024).

Gamification

And yet something even more insidious and profound is at work here in the emergence of a gamified fascism. Already almost 20 years ago, McKenzie Wark (2007) noted that a winner-take-all, competitive mode of neoliberalism had produced a world eerily haunted by what she called the “gamespace,” a kind of parallel reality where everything felt like an inescapable game, and noted the reactionary sentiments it awakened. Over the past 40 years, the forces we associate with the financialization of the economy and the neoliberal restructuring of governmentality and social institutions have, as has been widely observed, a transfer of social risk from society at large to the individual and the family unit (see Mader, Mertens and van der Zwan, 2019). This transfer, which has been experienced by most people in rising inequality and precariousness, has not, by and large, been experienced as a punitive imposition but, rather, as an expansion of agency, responsibility and possibility, albeit in a highly delimited financialized idiom (Haiven, 2014; Feher, 2018). As state “investment” in social care and security has been eroded, individuals have been exhorted to embrace risk and view themselves as not only an entrepreneur but an investor. Education, once a public good, is increasingly (structurally and culturally) reframed as an opportunity for personal or familial investment in human capital; housing has been financialized not only at the level of banks and other large financial actors, but at the level of the retail consumer, who is increasingly told to secure their and their family’s economic future through judicious investment in property markets; collective defined benefit pensions are quickly being replaced by private investment plans; health, diet and physical and mental fitness have been recast as “investments” in wellbeing; the increasingly fragmented and precarious labour market recasts each worker as a (individually cultivated) portfolio of skills, connections and capacities to be rented on a competitive market, increasingly via digital “platforms” that, on the model of Uber, allow unprecedented “flexibility”; romantic, parenting and psychological  advice books, television and online content routinely mobilizes a rhetoric of “investment” to insist that individuals take on the responsibility for future success (and failure). One could go on, and hundreds of scholars have, in the last decades, traced financialization as not only a phenomenon that affects the economy at large and politics, but also social institutions, popular culture and subjectivity (see for example Mader, Mertens and van der Zwan, 2019).

For our purposes, I would summarize this research as follows: Financialization has exhorted, expected and to a certain extent rewarded most people for adopting the disposition of the player, the savvy, self-maximizing risk-taker.  

The financial sector, since its pre-capitalist origins, has always had an uncomfortable proximity to games, often taking pains to distinguish itself as a science or a productive enterprise, rather than (mere) gambling (de Goede, 2005; Bjerg, 2011). More recently, the whole oeuvre of famed financial journalist Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker; MoneyBall; Going Infinite), or cautionary tales like the Martin Scorcese’s Wolf of Wall Street or Oliver Stone’s Wall Street reveal the centrality of games to financiers, not only as recreation but as a powerful and versatile metaphor for their vocation. In his tell-all memoir The Trading Game, former champion foreign exchange trader Gary Stevenson (2024) explains how new financiers (almost all of them young men) are recruited, trained and retained through games. Their appropriation of the hiphop-culture moniker of “the player” (originally a reference to gangsterism and especially pimping) is of a piece with a hypermasculine culture that in so many instances excuses and normalized personally abusive and systemically destructive behaviour. Echoing Ice-T: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” – financiers, like the war criminals who use drones to commit mass murder, supposedly cannot be held responsible for their actions because they were “just playing a game.”

Perhaps young men in many civilizations and throughout history justify their heinous behaviour by saying they were “just playing a game.” There is no shortage of examples of lethal games that the powerful impose on those they dominate, notably the Roman gladiatorial games. Nonetheless, the financial maneuvers are particularly good at both articulating itself in game-like ways (Aitken, 2014). The violence it unleashes in terms of economic volatility and rising inequality, only appears to its authors in abstracted form, on game-like interfaces like Bloomberg terminals or in the high-testosterone arenas like the trading floor. It is not unlikely that this kind of dehumanizing “abstract violence” of finance (LiPuma and Lee 2004) is akin to the sort invited of drone pilots: the affected and afflicted “other” disappears into the digital screen and the code, an disposable externality (Steyrl 2017). 

Like the gamers who have been recruited to 21st century fascism’s ranks, financiers also believe that their game-like sphere is a meritocracy and typically resent what they see as heavy-handed or even corrupt efforts to correct for systematic inequalities (which they deny exist or are relevant) or reign in their boorish behaviour (Littler, 2017). They, too, have supported post-fascist political parties (Aronoff, 2017; Bourgeron, 2024; Copeland, 2024) not only because they promise forms of deregulation and tax cuts that will benefit their industry and their class, but also because a revanchist reactionary ideology is consonant with the subjectivity they have been encouraged to and rewarded for adopting in their industry: the ruthless player.

It is this subjectivity that, through financialization, has become the template we are almost all instructed to adopt now. In part, this has been encouraged and normalized by gamified apps and platforms which make the financialization of the lifeworld more easy, enticing and addictive (Hon, 2022). There are, of course, stock trading and investing apps that have us checking our pocket every 20 seconds for market news, either on conventional stock exchange-traded shares or all manner of para-financial assets or tokens including cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens or collectables (see O’Dwyer, 2023). This is only a small subset of the “fintech” (financial technology) industry, which also includes apps (including those from our banks and even governments) that use state-of-the-art game design techniques and neuroscience research to “nudge” our behaviour towards more beneficial outcomes (beneficial for whom?) (Bernards, 2019). But the gamified financialization of life also advances through fitness, diet and health and self-improvement apps that allow us to chart the progress of our personal embodied investments on charts and through metrics eerily reminiscent of a Bloomberg terminal; they include dating apps that encourage us to use algorithms to leverage our assets in the search for love or companionship; they include a vast array of education apps, including many that have become part of public school curricula, that promise to maximize learners’ return on investment (of time and effort) and provide legible and reliable quantitative metrics on progress and potential which can themselves be leveraged in the hunt for employment; and of course the include the gamified app platforms that platform corporations like Uber, Amazon or AirBNB use to entice their worker/users to higher levels of profitable (for them) productivity(Woodcock and Johnson, 2018); and this is to say nothing of the gamified interfaces of apps like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, Twitch, Amazon and more where cultural producers and would-be influencers are given data and “nudged” to compete to invest their time and talent and hope in producing ever more appealing content in the hopes of fame and revenue (Gupta, 2025).

Gamification in a limited sense refers to the use of game or game-like elements to contexts (especially digital interfaces) for purposes other than fun. But in a broader sense, gamification might be seen as idiomatic of financialization: the transmutation of more and more aspects of life into competitive games of investment and return, and the transmutation of each of us into players.

And yet if we are all players now, most of us play to lose. The rising inequality and shrinking middle class characteristic of financialized neoliberalism means that while, numerically, there are more millionaires and billionaires than ever, the vast majority of humanity makes do with a smaller share of social wealth (Blakeley, 2019). We players are, evidently, being played. If the popularity of spectacles like Squid Game or Hunger Games are any indication, we resonate with stories of protagonists caught in an unwinnable game. In Arlie Hochschild’s (2016) influential ethnography of reactionary sentiment in Louisiana, her interlocutors regularly refer to the idea of a “rigged game” to refer to their feelings about life in 21st century American capitalism. And yet the same forces that encourage the financialization of our subjectivities also deprive us of the frames of analysis we would need to understand the systemic and structural reasons why the game is rigged and so few of us seem to win, in spite of the fact that we play by the rules. The culture of competitive individualism, the culture of “the player” denies us the resources we would need to see the bigger game: financialized capitalism. Instead, we feel individually cheated, and we search for the cheats.

It is in this context that a form of genuinely 21st century fascistic politics brood. Whereas 20th century fascism took hold of workers of an industrial economy, an economy of dehumanizing mass exploitation, 21st century fascistic politics appeal to a society of lonely, competitive investors whose sense of agency, creativity and sociality has become a lever of their exploitation. 20th century fascism used the then-new technologies of mass broadcast media to seduce people habituated to the myths and ideologies of nationalism; 21st century fascistic politics leverages emergent game and social digital media to appeal to isolated individuals unified only to the extent they are all playing the same compulsory game. Walter Benjamin’s (1969) warning of the “aestheticization of politics” in the 1930s sought to help us comprehend how the fascists of his day appealed to citizens whose sensoria was both shaped and wounded by unforgiving capitalist industrialism and urbanization, offering the vengeful expression of suffering without any real transformation. Then, the signature media were the broadcast and the mass rally where, like workers in a factory, the addressee of fascism was massified and took pleasure in their massification. Today’s aestheticization of politics likewise gives vengeful expression to (but will not transform the circumstances for) that aspect of each of us that has been encouraged to play the financialized game and just keeps losing, who feels cheated. Now, the signature medium is games, where the addressee of fascism is hailed as an individuated player.

The playgrom

My effort here is not to justify or explain what motivates forms of fascistic violence I am understanding as the playgrom; rather, the foregoing has been an attempt to map the contours of the political-economic and cultural-political context within which new forms of fascistic violence gestates. My effort is to map only one usually overlooked part of that context, but there are other significant parts, notably the persistence of racist ideologies and structures, the ethos of religious fundamentalism, as well as the intentional, decades-long campaign of far-right or fascist think-tanks and their billionaire backers. But tracing the context of a gamified financialized capitalism does help us better understand what is distinct and historical about what I am calling the playgrom.

The playgrom does not describe a specific set of actions but, rather, an idiom of playfully cruel fascistic violence that emerges from, is shaped by, and also exceeds gamified financialized capitalism.

Let me break this working definition down, before turning to two grim examples that I see as representing two poles of the playgrom: the #GamerGate swarming and the Christchurch massacre.

I have spent some time above sketching the lineaments of gamified financialized capitalism and the revanchist subjectivity of the “cheated player” it incubates. When I insist that the playgrom “emerges from, is shaped by but also exceeds” this valence of the system, I intend to echo the work of critical theorists of fascism in the 20th and 21st century who encourage us to recognize it not (as liberals would often insist) as the ahistorical resurgence of some sort of atavistic barbarism, but rather as a kind of devil child of capitalism (Renton, 2020; see Toscano, 2023). This is why we must insist on using the term fascism (rather than authoritarianism, totalitarianism, the far right and so on): it brings us into alignment with an intellectual and militant tradition that sees reactionary thought and organization as something that incubates and offers a false resolution to the agonies of capitalist contradictions and crises. This also means that fascism appears in its incipient or nascent form even within other moments of capitalism, and as a result that individuals, organization, parties, ideologies and cultural producers who don’t see themselves as fascists or fascistic (and may even bray about “freedom” and accuse their opponents of being fascists) can in fact be doing what I will call the work of fascism, a work that has its place and rewards within capitalism, a work that, like all work under capitalism reproduces that system but that is excessive (even destructive) of that system, a work that may be undertaken by actors who are unaware of their participation or protagonism, or who may call fascism by many other names. Certainly, this can make a definition of fascism and fascistic politics analytically imprecise and easily politically weaponized (theoretically and in practice, almost anyone and anything can be accused of incipient or micro fascism). Yet such an ambiguous definition is necessary to grasp a particular strange confluence: first of all, the fact that capitalism produces and reproduces itself a social totality, and hence its pathological or cancerous fascist growth is likewise to be found throughout that totality; second, as noted that what fascists say or think about themselves is untrustworthy, misdirective and largely irrelevant: speech and ideas, in the fascist mode, are merely disposable pieces in a game whose name is simply power. Together, these produce the weird condition where fascism can appear both everywhere and nowhere at once, a fascism without fascists (no one identifies as a fascist, yet fascism is manifest) and fascists without fascism (fascistic actors without any overarching organization, ideologic unity or agenda) (Traverso, 2019; Toscano, 2023).

Gamergate is difficult to narrate, in part because it is not a distinct event but rather an archipelago of related events, and in part because the events are shrouded in disinformation, myth and the sabotaging of reporting. In brief, it refers to a campaign that crescendoed in 2015 of online harassment of (alleged) feminist video game designers and critics and their (alleged) supporters, that can be traced around the use of the #gamergate hashtag (Bezio, 2018; Salter, 2018; see Massanari, 2024 especially chapter 2). Its protagonists were an amorphous mob of online game fans who appear to have almost all been men, most of them young, who claimed they were forced to act by the decay of journalistic standards in game journalism. This was primarily based on a conspiracy theory that certain feminist game journalists and designers were benefiting from their sexual relationships with men in the industry, and that this represented only the toxic fruiting of a much deeper network of rotten actors who were conspiring (either intentionally or due to being duped by woke ideology) to destroy game culture and Western civilization. The flames of outrage were stoked by notable far right media personalities on social media and cited as evidence of the corrosive influence of “politically correct” discourse and of “social justice warriors.” Protagonists coordinated their campaign of harassment on social media as well as on online forums like Reddit, 4chan and more. While there were more influential and active voices, the campaign was largely leaderless and took the form of a self-perpetuating online swarm which gleefully dug up sensitive personal information about their targets (addresses, employers, etc.) and used this to harass them with death and rape threats, as well as anyone imagined to be associated or sympathetic with them. Using online forums, the protagonists developed a justification for their actions, encouraged one another to crowdsource information, and celebrated individuals for proposing and enacting all manner of activities, including targeting advertisers and institutions said to support those held responsible for the decay of “ethics in game journalism.”

My summary here has been dismissive and prejudicial on purpose. Like the Nazis, plenty of the supporters of Gamergate had “legitimate concerns,” were “just asking questions everyone was too afraid to ask” or “agreed with the concern, but not the methods.” There was indeed a wide diversity of approaches, perspectives and tendencies. It’s hard to see how or why any of that matters substantively, except to furnish the vanity or excuse the cowardice and complicity of those who imagine they were peripheral.

Eventually, the Gamergate campaign “died down,” but its influence lived on. It inspired and many of its protagonists participated in subsequent similar campaigns, for example against “wokeness” in science fiction publishing (Wilson, 2018). It brought several highly influential right-wing media personalities into the spotlight. It enriched several online chat forums that would, later, become breeding grounds for a new generation of reactionary thought and action. It defined a generation of gamers. It had a massive chilling and intimidating effect on the games industry, particularly on women and non-binary people. And perhaps most significantly it was highly inspirational to an emerging group of far-right political and media strategists, notably Stephen Bannon, said to be the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and, since that time, a luminary figure of a new fascistic politics and advisor and confident to many or the world’s fascistic politicians and actors. 

On 15 March 2019, a 28-year old white Australian man used Facebook to livestream himself massacring 51 people at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (Lakhani and Wiedlitzka, 2023; Lankford, Allely and McLaren, no date). The protagonist was deeply inspired by fascistic and white supremacist conspiracy theories that argue that the “white race” is being intentionally “replaced” and subjected to genocide by permissive immigration and equity-related policies, theories he found and discussed primarily on video game forums.  His actions, which were inspired by previous livestreamed attacks and would go on to inspire several others, were undertaken in an idiom that directly referenced and reflected game culture, notably the “first person shooter” perspective of the livestreamed footage, as well as the obsessive preparations he made, including scrawling white supremacist names, symbols and messages on his weapons.  His actions were followed and celebrated by a network of sympathetic game fans, who framed his actions in terms of in-game goals and achievements familiar from violent video game genres: the modding and skinning of weapons; a scoring table to celebrate “kills” and other violence; references to favourite games; sadistic jokes.

The murderer acted alone, and so his actions may at first appear to contradict the notion of a “pogrom.” However, his actions emerged from an online subculture that celebrated, encouraged and broadcast his actions, which would go on to inspire other seemingly isolated acts of violence. These acts have been framed as “stochastic terrorism,” where a broader ideological and technological context creates the conditions where it is increasingly likely that such events will take place, but where they cannot be predicted (Angove, 2024).

What connects these two horrific events? A number of elements that demonstrate the many of the contours of today’s fascism can be revealed by looking through the lens of games. I am not arguing that games cause fascism, but rather that games and game culture are particularly revealing of a much broader fascist idiom, in part because games and gamification have been such an element of restructuring capitalism and capitalist subjectivity, from which fascism emerges but which it also opposes (sort of) and exceeds.

First and foremost, both are offshoots of a much broader gamer subculture, and both events organized themselves as if they were a game.

Second, in both cases, reality is transgressively bent: Is it a game, is it real? This contortion of reality is part of a fascist “flex”: serious business (mass murder, for example, or mass harassment) is “just a game”; conversely, a game or “game culture” is made into a matter of life and death. It’s not that fascism always insists that everything is game, or that all games must be taken seriously. Rather, it delights in transgressing the line between the serious and the frivolous, the game and the real because this transgression is, ultimately, the expression of a nihilistic form of coercive power whose worship is at the core of the (otherwise utterly contradictory) fascist worldview (see Bratich, 2022).

Third, in both cases, the protagonists of the pogrom are motivated by or at least marshal around a narrative in which they have been cheated. The protagonists of #gamergate espoused a vast array of asinine and puerile opinions, but they ultimately all boil down to a (hallucinatory) idea that the games industry and games culture are open, meritocratic and fair but have been sabotaged or corrupted by nefarious and dishonest feminists and the cowardly and/or venal supporters. They believe themselves to have been cheated of their opportunity to compete. This metanarrative is also common to other far-right reactionary movements and ideologies, notably the very proximate Incel (involuntary celibate) subculture, who believes feminists have ruined the otherwise fair and natural game of heterosexual hierarchy.

Likewise, the Christchurch murderer and those who inspired him and whom he, in turn, inspired, subscribed to a narrative that, in broad strokes, held that non-white people had exploited the generosity of his colonial settler state’s border regime as part of an intentional scheme to outnumber, outvote and culturally and genetically “replace” white people and their supposed unique culture. This narrative has its variations: in some cases, it’s simply the fault of bad immigration policy that is the result of unquestioned and unquestionable woke ideology; in some cases, it is part of a Judeo-Bolshevik or “cultural Marxist” conspiracy. The details hardly matter, the story is the same: the most privileged group in society (white men) have, somehow, been, as a group, cheated.

In the fourth case, both the Christchurch massacre and the Gamestop events were accompanied by the production of voluminous texts and arguments. #Gamergate protagonists posted and traded and debated extensive essays. The Christchurch mass murderer wrote a manifesto and inspired many others. These texts espoused a wide variety of positions and take themselves very seriously, in spite of typically being poorly argued, ill-informed and ridiculously bombastic. But their content is, ultimately, not the point, even if their authors insist that they be taken seriously. Regardless of what positions they espouse, they ultimately function as justifications for (or bad faith misdirection away from) the “public pedagogy” of the events themselves (Giroux 2004), which is essentially propaganda for conspicuous fascistic cruelty.

Finally, in both cases, this cruel and transgressive violence is enabled through what I will call NPCization. In gaming lingo, the acronym NPC signifies a non-player character: an actor within a video or other game who is not controlled by a unique person but, rather, by some kind of program, artificial intelligence or human game master (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023; Halpin, 2024). In other words, NPCs fundamentally lack any real agency or reflexivity, even if they act like they do. NPCs can be enemies but are more often helpers or “extras” who contribute to the atmosphere of a game, or provide some artificial challenge or assets. There are rarely any meaningful consequences to killing, abusing or otherwise mistreating NPCs, and players often do, with joyful abandon.

By NPCization I mean a process of dehumanization where real people are reimagined as NPCs and thereby devalued and offered up for sport. Hannah Arendt is only one of many scholars of fascism to chart the importance of dehumanization and in her study of its European varieties she correctly sees it as derivative of the kinds of dehumanization practiced by Europeans in their colonies, insightfully pointing to the rhetoric of the Great Game that European colonists used to cynically reflect on their manipulation of non-European population on the imperial chessboard, with catastrophic consequences (Arendt, 2004; Lang, 2017).

Under 21st century fascism, emerging as it does out of the context of gamified financialization, the NPC has become a dehumanizing insult that first emerged in reactionary gamer culture to refer to so-called “normies” who are deemed to have an unthinking, uncritical or obsequious devotion to allegedly unquestioned liberal values and social justice attitudes, the implication being that, like the robotic extras of a video game, these individuals are not fully agents. Within this rhetorical world, this makes them disposable without consequences. In this world, there are real players and the NPCs, who represent at best distractions, at worst stupid threats to the players.

It would be too easy to blame video game culture alone for NPCization, but the roots go deeper. In the War on Terror, for example, American drone pilots and marines licensed themselves to murder non-combatants based on the principle that, because they were subjects of what was framed as an authoritarian regime and from a “backwards” culture, they did not possess full agency: they were like those slaughterable NPC automatons (Brady, 2015). Of course, this echoed hundreds of years of racist imperialist ideology that dehumanized non-Europeans and non-Christians as already unthinkingly enslaved to their dark fetish gods, their crude ancient customs, their tyrannical shamans, or their self-important absolute monarchs. This made them, in the eyes of colonists and imperial operatives, functionally indifferent, not truly individual agents deserving of dignity and value (see Silva, 2007). If they could already be deemed pawns in someone or something else’s crude and bestial game, they could be likewise manipulated and sacrificed in a greater and more elevated game, the “Great Game” of empires, as Kipling so famously captured it.

Deep, dark playbor and the work of fascism

To understand the playful aspects of fascism today and in the past it is instructive to turn to the work that critical theorists of play and games have done on the concept of deep and dark play.

Since it was introduced by Clifford Geertz in 1972, deep play has become a common theoretical term in anthropology to describe the way that games provide a venue for the expression, negotiation, testing and transgression of a society’s most profound norms, values, power relations and ideals, even (perhaps especially) where the players and observers of a game are unaware of the fact or deny the game’s significance (Geertz, 2005). In our context, to call the playgrom a form of deep play signifies that, although it may appear to be a (cruel) transgressive game that would horrify or offend the vast majority of people living in financialized gamified capitalism, it nonetheless is an expression, extension and extreme articulation of many of that society’s core structural and ideological tendencies. Notably, the playgrom instantiates, weaponizes and works to entrench endemic forms of misogyny, racism, cruelty and dehumanization that subtend that system.

At its most expansive, dark play refers to any form of play where there are meaningful real-world consequences, although more useful definitions stress forms of play that transgress social norms, that are not or not fully consensual for all players, or that dwell with themes that are generally considered to be distasteful, offensive or provocative (Mortensen, Linderoth and Brown, 2015; Grobe, 2022).

In his provocation Repairing Play, Aaron Trammel (2023) draws on the long history of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of American chattel slavery, as well as their aftermaths of Jim Crow institutional racism and today’s more cryptic forms of anti-Blackness, to argue for the centrality of what he calls torture in our analysis of games. Against a dominant Eurocentric approach that is uncomfortable with non-consensual games, or games the dwell with dark themes, or games where one players’ suffering is another player’s pleasure, Trammel encourages to look again at what others have termed “dark play.”

What if we were to see deep dark play as work?

In the wake of the protestant reformation, Eurocentric and supposedly modern societies draw a stark distinction between work and play (Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971; Huizinga, 1971). Work is thought of as mature, purposeful, goal-oriented, productive and typically not (or not primarily) fun, whereas play is rendered immature, intrinsically motivated, frivolous or inconsequential and, fundamentally, fun. Still, we can and should ask: what work does a game do? Here I mean work in a few different valences.

I am interested in so-called playbor, a portmanteau of play and labor that was introduced in 2005 and has since come to signify at least three things. First, the kind of work being done by players in digital ecosystems, such as the kind of investment of time and energy some players put into online multiplayer games to collect in-game resources in the hopes of being able to later exchange these for real-world resources (Kücklich, 2005; Goggin, 2011). Second and more broadly, the way that a new generation of platforms including YouTube and Instagram not only monetize content creation but introduce gamified elements that aim to entice creators to participate (Yazdanipoor, Faramarzi and Bicharanlou, 2022). Third, playbor can refer to the more nefarious inclusion of games in the processes of capitalist value extraction and exploitation, as for instance the gamified elements of the interfaces that Amazon workers or Uber drivers are compelled to use, which aim primarily to increase worker motivation and productivity (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018).

More generally, however, I am interested in the broader question of how an activity, in this case a structured playful activity, might serve a broader productive system, in this case financialized, gamified capitalism. As feminist theorists of social reproduction have argued, we are left with an incomplete understanding of capital’s process of valorization if we ignore how it subsumes forms of work that fall outside the wage relation (Federici, 2012; Bhattacharya, 2017)?  So too are we remiss if we neglect to ask: how do certain forms of labour (paid or unpaid) reproduce a system whether their protagonists intend to or not? And how is this labour disciplined and ensured? This is a question that has also captivated those studying the role of policing under capitalism, but also the role of deputized and vigilante actors, who take it upon themselves to do the work of class repression and racial terror on which that system relies.

In the speculative mode of this paper, I want to suggest that there is much to be gained by approaching the playgrom as a kind of deep, dark playbor. I mean this not simply insofar as its protagonists apply intention, planning, effort and skill to their games. Nor do I mean that, in either case, some capitalist actor generates profit. Rather, I see these events as doing what we might call the “work of fascism” even within capitalism.

As Toscano (2023) makes clear via his reading of Angela Davis and other mid-century Black critics of American fascism, fascism is not anathema to but, in its “incipient” form, is an important part of a liberal capitalist order. The persistence of fascist institutions (prisons, police, militaries, one might add corporations) functions almost like mitochondria in eukaryotic cells: a foreign lifeform that has evolved to find a vital, symbiotic place within a larger system. The “work” of fascism, in this sense, is to help reproduce that larger system, even if that work is quite unlike other forms of work, insofar as it is rewarded/extracted differently and may be subject to dissimilar forms of discipline. (We might think, for example, of the “work” of gambling, or of organized crime within capitalism: both have been there since the system’s beginning, and are arguably, each in their way, very important to its operations and reproduction. But neither are subject to the same structural pressures as other industries, and both are organized very differently than typical licit firms. We might equally think of the heteronormative nuclear family: it is essential to capitalism, but is disciplined by the wage relation only indirectly, and appears autonomous).

In the case of the playgrom, the work of fascism in this case serves several overlapping and at times contradictory purposes. In the first place, it supplies a version of what DuBois theorized as the “wages of whiteness”: the material and immaterial benefits offered to a privileged but disempowered minority as a means to secure their fidelity to the dominant class system (Roediger, 1999). In this case, the “fun” of the pogrom, as well as the meaningful sense of righteousness, is a perk afforded to preferred subjects that offers dignity, purpose and sadistic pleasure as part of an overall systemic compensation package that, nonetheless, feels to the protagonists righteously anti-systemic. Here, the playgrom appeals to that aspect of the authoritarian personality that Fromm (1942) labels as the conformist rebel: the oppositional-defiant child of the system whose anti-systemic antics merely emerge from a kind of intimate envy and resentment, rather than any substantive wish for transformation.

Second, the playgrom functions as part of a larger disciplinary apparatus that cheapens the labour and the lives of their groups whom it targets. In line with DuBois and those who continue his tradition we must look at the political economy of racial terrorism as having the effect of depressing the wages and options of racialized workers, as well as their capacity to organize effectively and make solidarity with other workers (Roediger, 2005). The Christchurch massacre may have been motivated by the conspiracy theory that “Western” governments were “flooding” their nations with cheap migrant labour as part of an effort to “replace” white people, but it was part of and contributed to a racist cultural atmosphere that sought to intimidate migrants and non-white people such that they did not fight for their legal rights and economic advantage (see Kundnani, 2023). So-called “Western” countries depend on and have always depended on the systematic cheapening of racialized migrant labour power, and one key method of this cheapening is freelance terrorism. The Gamergate swarming effectively set back equity relations in the game industry by a decade and contributed immensely to the atmosphere of intimidation, harassment and alienation experienced by women and other minoritized people in that industry (Did, 2024). It is an industry well-known for mobilizing the individualized dreams and meritocratic ideology of its workers in order to prevent unionization and other forms of worker organization. Much more broadly, both these “playgroms,” beyond the intentions of their protagonists or their intended ideological orientation, act much more broadly as a kind of “propaganda of the deed”: they tell people who would struggle that they can expect and should fear reactionary vigilante violence for the crime of inhabiting the wrong kind of body.

Third, the playgrom is also directly profitable to certain factions of capital, notably companies whose digital platforms facilitate it. Though the policing of violent content (such as the livestreamed Christchurch massacre) is expensive and complicated for streaming and social media companies, the media that surround such events is highly productive of the churn of content, attention, anxiety and discourse on which these businesses thrive (see Massanari, 2024). The argument here is not that these platforms encourage or directly benefit from such acts. However, it is certainly the case that they prioritize their profits over taking meaningful action to moderate or supervise their platforms to ensure the kinds of poisonous fascistic discourse that contribute to them (Fielitz and Marcks, 2019; Mirrlees, 2019). And, more generally, they have generated between them a forms of online culture that harvests attention and cultivates profit by fostering vitriolic and vituperative affect and the illusion of debate. It’s not that tech companies are explicitly encouraging playgroms (neither did the Tsar promote the pogroms). But they have cultivated and benefitted from an online ecosystem that contextualizes and encourages the kinds of political affect and ideology that enable the playgrom’s emergence.

Finally, we would be well-served by examining how the protagonism of the playgrom echoes with work in a gamified platform economy, and also echoes with the work of the financialized subject. This echo is more than happenstantial, and it reminds us that fascism always both emerges from and exceeds the forms of capitalism within which it incubates. The #Gamergate protagonists organized themselves to do their work in ways reminiscent of the emerging modes of decentralized, user-driven, “bottom-up” collaborative work that has become central to digital capitalism, not only insofar as workers organize themselves to pursue elective tasks (like co-developing open source software or editing and maintaining Wikipedia) but also in terms of how startups and even larger tech firms organize their workforces (Just, 2019; Hewa and Tran, 2024). The delightful work-game of #gamergate resembled the approach of Agile project management common to the tech sector, where many individuals take on component tasks of a greater effort, with regular check ins, which keeps hierarchical command and control to a minimum in the interests of encouraging each participant to take responsibility and test their limits.

As we have seen, the Christchurch massacre may have been planned and executed by an individual, but it was facilitated by a community of individuals who mutually encouraged and informed one another, not unlike the way that a great deal of software innovation these days builds on a common repository of collectively- authored and -edited open source code and only, in the final instance, provides the patentable coup-de-grace, generating a proprietary variation, usually at the point where code meets world. In this case, the culture, the ideology, the subjectivity and the idiom of the terrorist attack is generated collaboratively online, and the entrepreneurial murders simply instantiates it IRL.

In sum, we are well served by asking the question: what kind of work is the playgrom? It is a deep and dark form of playbor, a playbour that reflects and extends the historically specific forms of capitalist discipline, enticement, reward and valorization that incubated it.

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^[1] I am throughout this essay using the term fascistic as a means to gesture to a broad and ongoing debate about the presence of fascist thought, action and organization that falls short of but nonetheless often sets the stage for the full emergence of a fascist political party or the implementation of authoritarian rule. Some scholars (Paliewicz and McHendry, Jr., 2020) use the adjective fascistic, others terms like microfascism (Bratich, 2022), incipient fascism (Toscano, 2023) or the “fascist minimum” (Griffin, 1991).

The post Towards a theory of the playgrom: Deep and dark playbor and the work of fascism (Media Theory) appeared first on Max Haiven.

It’s all a Game, and the Game is Deadly Real

A psychogeography of unwinnable capitalism and the fascisms it incubates

Max Haiven – 2025-02-02

In the bestselling young-adult fiction trilogy The Hunger Games (2008-10) and the subsequent blockbuster film franchise (2012-present), children are forced to murder one another in the titular televised gladiatorial spectacle, all for the pleasure and glory of The Capitol, an exploitative dystopian regime. As the series proceeds, our heroes refuse to be human sacrifices in the sadistic games and, instead, lead a revolutionary insurgency. But they soon discover that, institutionally and geographically, the Capitol is a mind-bending labyrinth of games within games, and the series ends ambivalently.

In one of the most successful TV serials of all time, Game of Thrones (original series 2011-2019), warring elite families of a fantasy kingdom toy with the fate of several continents through eight blood-drenched seasons. Deftly combining palace intrigue with highbrow pornography and gratuitous violence, the series captivated its viewers for nearly a decade with the recursion of political games within games, from which no clear winner can emerge. The show’s core creative team would, in 2024, release Three Body Problem, a series based on the bestselling Chinese science fiction trilogy that begins with a novel of the same name (2006-10 in Chinese, 2014-16 in English). The plot includes malevolent aliens covertly recruiting humanity’s top scientists to their cause through a beguiling but unwinnable video game.

Game of Thrones would then be displaced from its own throne in 2021, when the South Korean Netflix drama Squid Game became the most streamed series ever, depicting a world where hundreds of  heavily indebted people are manipulated into travelling to a secret island to compete in a sadistic and lethal versions of children’s games for the pleasure of bored and perverted billionaires, the last survivor entitled to a huge cash windfall. As the first series ended with our good-hearted hero the reluctant and traumatized victor of the vicious tournament, we are led to believe that an even greater game is afoot. The sequel series (2024) was more of the same.

One of the top-grossing, most downloaded and most played video games of all time, Fortnite (released 2017) places players’ warrior avatars in a never-ending battle royale, wars of all against all, where the last one standing takes the title and where there is no greater objective than to gain and maintain prestige, power and ranking. This idiom is echoed in any one of dozens of blockbuster “reality TV” franchises, most recently The Traitors, where contestants must slowly betray and eliminate one another until (usually) only one remains.

What are we to make of the startling global success of these spectacles? Certainly, the theme of being trapped in a violent, unwinnable game has precedents, but it has never been so popular. Perhaps it is because the vast majority of people living under the direct rule of capital in the 21^st century also feel like they, too, are caught up in an unwinnable but compulsory game?

Already in her 2007 book Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark speculated on the sublation of what Guy Debord dubbed the “society of the spectacle” into what Wark calls the gamespace. Here, where the idiom of the game pervades society and all social subjects, not just gamers, are haunted by the uncanny sense that they are trapped in some sort of game. Today, this structure of feeling finds its hysterical expression in the millions of people who participate in gamified online conspiracy communities to share evidence that the world is, in fact, a vast simulation. But even where suspicions are never voiced, the disquiet remains: today, we almost all feel, to a significant extent (if in different ways), trapped in an unfair, inscrutable and unwinnable game. What political affects, structures of feelings and psychogeographies take hold in such a situation?

Gamification

On one level, this may be the result of at least twenty years of “gamification,” a term that generally describes the application of game mechanisms, processes and enticements into non-game atmospheres. While play is perhaps elemental to all human (and many animal) forms of learning and sociality, and while many civilizations have used games for millennia to train people for care, for war, and for much else besides, gamification names something newer, unique to the dangerous convergence of the finance and tech sectors so characteristic of capitalist power in the 21^st century.

Here, games and play are broken down into their most elemental components (the dopamine-inducing hit of constrained agency, the urge to safe competition, the proxy for collectivity offered by episodic cooperation) and then synthesised into other digitalised vectors of late capitalist life. Banking apps use game elements to reward us for good behaviour; dieting and health apps use leaderboards to nudge us towards hygienic behaviour; education and learning apps create a user-friendly panopticon; dating apps turn us all into avatars.

Critics of the trend often satisfy themselves with warning us about the grim uses of the data we players generate, that is now commodified and speculated upon. This data may soon be used (or is already being used) to target us for customised spam (if we’re relatively high up in the hierarchy of human disposability) or a drone or airstrike (if we’re not). Other critics note the way gamified interfaces, which have been birthed by an unholy alliance of software engineers, neuroscientists and venture capitalists, wreak havoc with our bodyminds, captivating and habituating us with apps calibrated to excite, reward and render dependent our ill-prepared mammalian neurotransmitters. To these we may add that the norms and values embedded in and encouraged by these gamified platforms (bourgeois financial responsibility, extrinsic enrichment of human capital, transactional romance) function as a kind of meta-ideological apparatus, hailing us silently, from within.

We might be said to live in a kind of decentralised totalitarian regime, where all aspects of life are dictated by the market. As compelling a fable as it may be, the dystopian world of The Hunger Games, where totalitarianism takes the form of a centralised state using naked violent repression, is ideological misdirection. In contrast to a regime that utterly represses all human agency, the regime of gamified capitalism relies on using gamified mechanisms to entice, seduce and channel our agency, holding our social reproduction at ransom.

The development of gamified platforms is not some random or necessary development of human technology. Rather, driven forward by the entanglement of speculative finance and the tech sector. The former is eager to plough its ill-gotten wealth into the latter, which must in turn constantly prove an expansion of userbases, an ever-more successful harvesting of attention, more engagement and greater user dependency. Needless to say, the financial returns almost exclusively flow upwards. Meanwhile, at a systemic level, the spectrum of gamified interfaces with which we engage every day, in sum if not always individually, have the effect of installing in each of us a post-disciplinary system that, ultimately, makes our labour power cheaper, more accessible and more pliable for extraction.

Players

For this reason, to focus exclusively on the very real dangers of gamification in a limited frame would be to risk missing a larger, even more important picture. The 21^st century financialised capitalist economy in which we all participate is, indeed, a kind of vast game, unwinnable for the vast majority of us. Within it, almost everybody is exhorted to adopt this disposition of the player, the savvy risk-taking agent, operating both within but also bending or breaking the rules in a competition of all against all.

In his bestselling 2024 autobiography The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson offers detailed account of his rise from London working class origins to becoming one of the world’s most successful financiers around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. He reveals how investment banks and hedge funds identify and recruit new talent through poker-like betting games, and train and retain them through gamified protocols and platforms that make the movement of billions of dollars of wealth a form of play. Veteran financial reporter Michael Lewis has often revealed the importance of games among financial insiders, notably in his breakout tell-all Liar’s Poker (1989) and more recently in his insiders’ view of the empire of convicted crypto-Ponzi schemer Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite (2023). The latter book makes clear how important video, tabletop, and live action role-playing games were to the corporate culture of the firm that was, until its frauds were revealed, heralded as the future of finance. Numerous scholars have made clear that the line between gambling and allegedly economically productive financial speculation has never been clear. But if it is somehow a game, the consequences are deadly real: it directs the accelerating flows of global wealth that entrench wealth and poverty and fuels the extractive industries that are murdering the earth. Individual acts of strategic or tactical play, in sum, produce an almost universally catastrophic game, hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps in every regime, games are a mechanism to seduce young men into acts that perpetuate systems of unspeakable cruelty. The drone pilots that have been weaned to kill on violent, dehumanising video games are the postmodern echo of the war-gaming elite officers of the Napoleonic Wars, sons of privilege, who commanded working class soldiers on the front via perfumed letters, following the action on exquisite tabletop models, the pieces moved by servants. Like today’s financial engineers who program supercomputers to do algorithmic gladiatorial battles against one another for the profit of their masters are the modern-day equivalents of the heavily armoured knights of old, who waged wars that killed and maimed mostly unarmoured peasants. It’s not coincidental that today’s financial robots are built on the basis of so-called “game theory,” a school of thought developed primarily by American engineers to calculate how a nuclear war might be won and which soon became an important part of the neoliberal worldview and policy apparatus, with its presumption that all actors are either competitive and acquisitive… or simply stupid or incompetent, destined to drag the winners down.

As financialised neoliberalism came to supplant Keynesian political economy in the last half-century, the idiom of the player seeped into the social fabric. As principles of social welfare gave way to individualised risk-management and competition, those with the means to do so were encouraged to play the market. It was not only that, thanks to the affordances of ubiquitous networked computing, it became easier than ever for those with means to try their hand at investing, including on gamified phone apps that trigger in us psychochemical rewards indexed to the performance of our miniature portfolios. Though it presented itself as a popular insurgency of Davids against the Goliaths of Wall Street, the crypto craze was little more than a systemic side hustle, a grimy, scammy craps game out the back for those not dressed well enough to get in the casino. But the game was, essentially, the same.

Even beyond direct forms of investing, we have all been exhorted (and occasionally rewarded) to remake ourselves as players of a financialised game that now pervades almost all aspects of life. Houses became vehicles for investment; education became an investment in one’s human capital; exercise and diet became investments in health and wellbeing; personal connections and relationships became investments in social capital. Lest we believe this paradigm only extended to the borders of middle-class delusion, it ought to be noted that domestic and international “development” agendas have, over the last three decades, increasingly taken their cues from the paradigm of the player. The subprime mortgages that triggered the 2008 financial meltdown were intended to give poor Americans access to the financial game of home ownership and leveraging. The (largely abandoned) craze for microfinance lending, or today’s enthusiasm for “fintech” (financial technology) rests on the idea that new technologies and market mechanisms will unleash the competitive spirit of the world’s poorest people, making them players too. While in many ways this game-like competitive imperative is coded as masculine, we should not ignore the many ways that liberal/white/girlboss feminisms advertises itself with the promise that women can and should prepare themselves to play and win at the boys’ game, nor the reality that by far the most popular aspiration of girls and young women around the world is to leverage a dependency on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok to become an influencer, nor the way that patriarchal romantic and relationship norms are (once again) repackaged as a game that can be won through tactical moves and a strategic mindset.

 Meanwhile, everywhere, neoliberal cuts and austerity has been justified by recourse to the idea that those seeking economic support are probably cheaters, scammers and frauds who must be relentlessly suspected, surveilled, disciplined and punished.

Gamed

This is a world where everyone is instructed to take up the mantle of the player, and yet where everyone is also paranoid that they are being played. And we’re right: the game is indeed gamed. The rich get richer. Things fall apart. We are taught to blame the wrong people.

Capitalism has always been thus. Even Marx himself, who sought to show that the system is, in an ideal sense, ruled by certain laws that go beyond the agency or venality of any particular individual bad actor, readily admitted (and castigated) the competitive gaming of the system by various capitalist actors who used monopolies, cartels, bribery and all manner of financial chicanery to rig the capitalist game. Today, only the most delusional neoliberal economist could convince themselves that the capitalist game isn’t utterly corrupted. The manipulation of domestic and international law to create tax havens (no relation to the author) is only the tip of the iceberg. Scandal follows scandal follows scandal, and no one is surprised.

But something is also different now. In previous moments of capitalism, the class system appeared far less fluid. Capital was largely invested in exploiting workers’ bodies. While it may have provided a few opportunities for the entrepreneurial spirit of middle and working-class people (often in the form of a share in colonialism or the domination of a frontier), conformity and stability were both the norm and the (false) promise.

Today, massive profit (and perhaps even surplus value) is generated through consumer debt and credit. Whatever stability capitalism once promised to the middle class is gone, replaced with the imperative to innovate, compete and manage one’s own risks, to play the field. Moreover, capitalism as a set of social relations expands, in part, by making each of us its pioneer, tasked with “colonising” new spheres of life, now as entrepreneurs, now as influencers, now as gig workers turning our bedrooms into hotels, our cars into taxis, our hobbies into side hustles, our charisma or wit into “content,” all held to ransom by proprietary platforms that play us for fools.

In other words, structural changes in neoliberal, financialised capitalism over the past 50 years have meant that we have all had to, in various ways and to varying extents, adopt the habitus of the player. And yet the fable that this system had delivered us a level playing field is constantly belied. The game is rigged. We find ourselves in a world of cheated players.

Unfortunately, this reality only rarely manifests a systemic critique. More often it generates conspiracy theories, the urge to punch down or absurd fantasies of escape. As the late Fredric Jameson argued over three decades ago, today’s conspiracy theories can be seen as faulty but beguiling “cognitive maps” that attempt to offer a resource for generating a holistic and cohesive view of a world chaotically fragmented and fissured by the pressures of financialisation. They attempt to explain why the game is rigged: they hallucinate a kind of meta-human agency, a superplayer (an evil mastermind, a cabal, a secret society, an alien intelligence) that is stacking the deck or loading the dice.

Increasingly, and very dangerously, this kind of conspiracism dovetails with the idea that unscrupulous “minorities” are gaming the system, playing the long-suffering majority for rubes and chumps. The European template of such conspiracism is, of course, the modern antisemitic conspiracy complex. But today this model is applied to trans people accused of toying with gender and children for their own dark pleasures, to Muslims held to be playing a secret game to “replace” white Christian populations, to refugees and other irregular migrants who are rumoured to be exploiting the goodwill and sportsmanship of a nation of earnest entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, even dreams of liberation are caught up in the game. It would be misguided to imagine that the last decade of cryptomania was simply delusional. It represented (and became) for many young people a means of participating in the financialised game foreclosed to them. For those Keir Milburn hoped would emerge as “generation left,” who had no access to invested capital (like savings or houses) and who also felt acutely the hopelessly diminishing returns of investments in their “human capital” (infertile university degrees), crypto investment as well as memestock play, like the infamous Gamestop gamble, were imagined as methods to exit the rigged game of their parents’ capitalist economy and jumpstart a new one, where the real players could, finally, get what they deserved. 

Revenge

I have elsewhere theorised this tendency through the lens of revenge. Gamified, financialisation capitalism’s annihilation of any other potential futures and its relentless reduction of all of us into cheated players lends itself to a turn towards a revenge politics that is a grim reflection of the vengeful economy from which it emerges.

The nihilism, cynicism and spamminess of today’s far right and neofascist leaders, and the key to their success, lies in the way they appeal to a world of cheated players who feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Their apocalyptic rhetoric and viciously vindictive policies, which occasionally promise to punch up but always only punch down, appeals to subjects wrought of four decades of financialisation. That so many of today’s clownish fascist personalities are conspicuous cheats is fitting: like the stage magician who trumps his rivals by showing the audience how the trick is performed, the cheater-in-chief empowers his followers by promising to reveal how the game is fixed, and to take revenge on their behalf.

In the 20^th century, fascism first and most successfully festered not in the dispossessed working classes, but in the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie, who felt they’d played by the rules and been cheated of the pride, security and normative life they’d been promised. So too today, in 21^st century fascism, except for two things.

First, financialisation has seen the proletarianisation of the petit-bourgeoisie as more and more forms of “professional” work in the so-called “knowledge economy” have become precarious and subject to profound market discipline. This, as well as an increasingly international labour market and competition mean that those that considered themselves “middle class” feel, everywhere, under threat and cheated.

Second, financialisation and neoliberalism have been so successful in their decimation of working class identity, consciousness and communities that, today, we are witnessing the horrific ideological consequences of the petit-bourgeoisification of the proletariat. Today, everyone has learned to identify with the morality, expectations, dispositions and ambitions of the phantom middle class. Everyone is a player, tasked with leveraging their assets even if they don’t have any, investing in themselves even if there’s no real hope of payback.

Neoliberal financialised capitalism has bred within it a form of fascism that both mimics and exceeds it. This is a fascism where the cheated would-be players, rather than ending the rigged game, take sadistic revenge on those they blame for cheating.

It would be tempting to imagine that games are inherently anti-fascist because they reject it’s rigid ordering of human passions. But this would be to fatally misunderstand how 21^st century fascism differs from its 20^th century ancestor. They each emerge from very different forms of capitalism, the first an industrial and imperialist system that turned the working class into cogs in a machine; now a more decentralised, sublet and seductive system that exports each of us to hone our subjectivity and agency to chart our own (doomed) strategy of participation. In 20^th century capitalism, it was clear we were all sacrificial pawns, and something about what the Frankfrut school theorists (prudishly) identified as the sadomasochism of fascism preyed on this; 21^st century capitalism tells us we’re all potential queens, if only we can beat one another in the race to the back row. We must dwell with a new matrix of systemic contradictions, subjective reactons and political affects.

But moreover, today’s fascism is playful. It delights in making serious business a stupid game, and making stupid games serious business. They will hunt you in online packs for making fun of their avatars; they will livestream their massacres on gaming platforms and worship the one with the highest score. Today’s playful fascism flexes by making kings bow to clowns, by changing the rules in the middle of the game, by cheating in plain sight, by mimicking a dozen contradictory ideological positions (libertarian? Royalist? Nazi? Neo-Futurist? Hayekian? Randian?) and insisting, with force, they are all coherent and consistent. And through these actions it espouses, silently but unmistakably, it’s one and only rule: power is, and nothing else.

There are only two kinds of people: those real players who make and break the rules, and those NPCs (non-player characters) who obey them and are therefore disposable.

It’s all a game, and the game is deadly real.

The post It’s all a Game, and the Game is Deadly Real (Making & Breaking) appeared first on Max Haiven.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/04/radical-gaming

If the popularity of the Squid Game TV series and The Hunger Games film and book franchise are any indication, working people around the world tend to sympathise with characters trapped in a sadistic, unwinnable game. 

And why not? In this moment of capitalism, most of us feel that our chances of securing a good life are slim, no matter how dutifully we play by the rules. Forty years after the onset of a neoliberal revolution which promised to make the economy a ‘level playing field’, the rich get richer and working people continue to struggle. We feel cheated. This sentiment goes a long way to explaining the success of far-right and fascist politicians and influencers, who can redirect blame down the class ladder rather than upwards where it belongs.

It is in this context that games have the potential to reshape our imaginations. It’s also why I’m working with Pluto Books to launch the board game Billionaires & Guillotines. In it, players take on the role of plutocrats who compete to capture the wealth of the world via the acquisition of luxurious assets. But as the game unfolds, their greed leads to ecological, social and economic crises, and a rebellion brews. Players must try to win before their accumulation triggers a revolution and all the billionaires lose (their heads). 

This is all a satire, of course. In the game, the billionaires — a tech overlord, a property speculator, an aristocrat, a war profiteer and a media baron, all of whom might remind players of real-world people — gleefully sacrifice whole populations in their quest for luxury yachts, private islands and celebrity spouses. They can even bribe the government to pump up their investments or sabotage their rivals.

But who is surprised, and who actually feels threatened, by these representations? The critical potential of this game is hopefully a little more subtle than merely making fun of the super-rich, as rewarding as that may feel. It might just lie in the way that games in general speak in unique and powerful ways to working people who are struggling under a gamified form of capitalism.

Gamified Capitalism

Globally, some three billion people play a commercial game regularly — usually on their smartphones, and typically one of the top 25 games currently trending on the market. The games industry is said to be larger than the film, television, music and publishing industries combined, with major triple-A game studios pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of blockbuster games, from which they earn billions in returns. 

But the massive size of the games industry is only the most obvious aspect of what I will call ‘gamified capitalism’. This term can also help us to understand how struggles around work in the game industry also reflect and reveal class struggle more broadly. 

Exploitation is rife throughout the entire games supply chain, beginning with the horrific conditions of people compelled to extract the raw materials that go into the (quickly obsolescent) digital devices on which digital games are programmed and played. Even those relatively privileged workers who write, code, illustrate and playtest digital games are subject to emergent forms of exploitation.

Much of the less creative work is contracted out to the Global South, where workers are made to compete to work more cheaply to service corporations in the Global North. Even in the North, many who work for the top game companies accept precarious working conditions, gruelling schedules and abusive contracts for a chance to ‘do what they love’ and make games.

The indie game scene, where individuals and small groups make and market their own games, is similarly plagued by exploitation. And while many fascinating and innovative games are being made, a few companies own and have a stranglehold over the platforms where games are found and downloaded. Like Netflix or Amazon Prime, these platforms prioritise products that either pay for the privilege or stand what the platform-masters imagine to be a high chance of success. In such a way, the games industry reveals the horizons of class struggle today.

But the gamification of capitalism is deeper still. It also refers to the way that games and game-like elements have become a key part of everyone’s lives. Apps like Duolingo are the charismatic face of a vast industry that has used play to seduce us into accepting the harvesting of our data, the commodification of our attention and the reshaping of our social world.

As public education budgets have been slashed, schools increasingly turn to corporate e-learning apps that promise to revolutionise pedagogy, but often deliver a banal, standardised experience that has dubious outcomes when measured holistically. Gamified dating apps have revolutionised romance, but rarely for the better; most users struggle with new and old forms of objectification, alienation and disconnection.

Gamified banking and investment ‘fintech’ apps claim to help us better manage our finances and ‘nudge’ us towards a more hygienic economic life — and some working people indeed benefit from them. But they do little to remedy the austere conditions of life and work under a system where workers are getting poorer. Rather, they provide the alibi that these structural inequalities are due to individual failings.

Health and fitness apps likewise encourage individuals to imagine that their wellbeing is simply a matter of reinforcing better habits, erasing the fact that the most consequential factors in health are access to decent food, rest, good housing, a clean environment — all things that are best delivered as public goods, not private responsibilities.

The Unwinnable Game

Here we come to the broadest meaning of gamified capitalism: the way that the system as a whole makes most of us feel like we’re trapped in an unwinnable game. Consider the person trying to navigate the high-stakes maze of an immigration system — especially the UK’s ‘hostile environment’, in which every teacher, doctor, landlord and service provider becomes a border sentinel.

Consider the family trying to work out the riddle of how to get care for a loved-one in the shattered public healthcare system, or through extortionate private insurance schemes. Consider the punitive bureaucratic game of applying for benefits in a system designed to be practically impossible. Consider the worker on the phone to the human resources call centre, or trying to sort out a phone or utilities contract, or complaining about being charged too much by their bank. It’s one unwinnable, absurd game after another — and the house always wins.

The problem in a nutshell is this. For 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has told us that in order to survive and thrive, we need to become ‘players’: savvy, risk-taking, self-managing competitors. Rather than relying on employers and the state to offer us security in return for our productivity, so the logic goes, we should instead embrace the hustle and throw ourselves into the market game. And yet most of us now feel fundamentally cheated, and look for someone to blame as a result.

This is one of the main factors leading people to the far right, whose representatives promise to make the game fair again and punish those they accuse of cheating: the migrant who is allegedly cheating the border regime and free-riding on society’s wealth; the benefits claimant who is opting out of playing the game and cheating the system to sustain their own laziness; the minority subject who is cheating the capitalist meritocracy by ‘playing the race card’ and benefiting from diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

While reactionary demagogues also often complain — vaguely — about ‘elites’ cheating the system, they do nothing about, for example, the billions of dollars of public wealth being stolen in off-shore tax havens, or the innumerable loopholes by which the rich and corporations avoid paying their fair share. 

The Potential of Games

Our assumption in making Billionaires & Guillotines is that, under gamified capitalism, games have a special place and are a vital field for intervention. If we have all been told to become players, then we might learn a lot by appealing to people’s playfulness. Gamified capitalism depends at every stage on us remaking ourselves into active agents, trained and primed to play its competitive game. I believe games can speak to a world of ‘players’ in more fruitful ways. 

But this begs many questions. How to make games that don’t just reaffirm the idea of ‘the player’, but meaningful challenges it? How to make games that reveal the possibility of solidarity? How to make games that direct workers’ anger towards the real causes of it? How to make games which show that there are other ways of being in the world, and that other worlds are possible? And how to get these games past the capitalist gatekeepers?

With Billionaires & Guillotines, we are experimenting with the relatively cheap medium of board games. While these can reach far fewer people than digital games on handheld devices, they have the benefit of bringing people together in real space and time, where critical conversations and radical conviviality can transpire. While Billionaires & Guillotines is a satire, it also experiments with how asking players to take on the role of billionaires can teach us some important lessons about how capitalism works. 

Partly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s elaboration of Marxian crisis theory in her magisterial The Accumulation of Capital, Billionaires & Guillotines demonstrates how the seemingly rational and strategic actions of individual competitive capitalism creates unforeseen crises. As players of the game gobble up the wealth of the world for luxury assets, their actions inadvertently unleash ecological crises, political upheaval and social calamity, ultimately leading to a revolution. In other words — spoiler alert! — the game ultimately destroys itself from the inside.

The post Radical Gaming (Tribune) appeared first on Max Haiven.

A symposium for committed makers, players and organizers of games 

London – July 11, 2025

Fascism, yesterday and today, is a sick and deadly game. What role, if any, do play and games take in defeating it?

In cooperation with Games Transformed (“a London festival for discussing, making and playing radical games”) and Weird Economies (a platform for tracing the “economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time”), RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab presents What is the Antifascist Game?, a one-day symposium of game-makers, game-thinkers, game-players, game-artists and game-interventionists to consider this vital question.

This symposium is organized in conjunction with the 2025 Games Transformed Festival, which will take place the following day, July 12, at the same location.

In solidarity with internationalist material struggles to defeat fascism in the streets and with broader struggles to build radical democracy, we will gather to pose common questions about the growing threat, including but not limited to:

• How are today’s forms of fascism (dangerously) playful and with what consequences? How are they mobilizing games? How do they make use of gamified platforms, from (Twitch, YouTube, Discord)? Does this gamification make them different from their 20th century ancestors? 
• How are fascist games and play entwined with the hyper-capitalist and games industry and its exploitation of workers throughout its supply chains, from the extractive mining operations to the self-exploitative hustle of “independent” developers? How are they entangled with the broader tendency towards capitalist gamification, and with the even broader climate of capitalism that feels, to so many people, like an unwinnable game?
• How are these phenomena connected to resurgent patriarchy, racist nationalism, colonialism and genocide (in Palestine and beyond), revanchist politics, and rampant and murderous transphobia? 
• How do mainstream and alternative games (digital and analogue) promote or encourage fascist attitudes in either content or form (or both)?

We will also ask questions of resistance, rebellion and renewal, including:

• What role (if any) do play and games play in defending our communities from and ultimately abolishing fascism?
• How can anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, crip and other forms of “gaming from below” coordinate with anti-fascist efforts?
• How shall we, who care about the power of games, draw the line and hold the line against fascist imaginaries? How shall we recognize enemies and encourage our allies? 
• What games will help us win a new postfascist, postcapitalist world? How will games and play feel after we win? What games will we play on the way?

These intentionally provocative questions are intended to excite, rather than limit the imagination about what kind of work and thinking might be welcome at our gathering. 

When we speak of games, we are not only thinking of the massive digital games industry. We also want to expand our attention to include board games, role-playing games (tabletop, live action/LARP and more), sports, the gamification of… everything, sexual and romantic play, educational games, and the broader concept of play. When we speak of fascism, we are thinking historically and in the present, both in the thing we call “The West” and also “The Rest,” about not just an ideology and political organization but also a reactionary set of attitudes, dispositions and orientations that entrench and celebrate power and domination.

We welcome a plurality of responses to our call from people including game designers, interactive theatre practitioners and artists, scholars and intellectuals (with or without institutional affiliations and credentials), community organizers who share an opposition to fascism and a recognition of its entanglements with racism and nationalism, with patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, with capitalism, with ableism, and with other systems of domination.

Format

The exact format of this symposium will depend on the participants, however it will not be a conventional presentation of academic papers. Rather, we will devise a well-facilitated format that prioritizes sharing ideas, meeting like minds, posing important questions, and generating new connections and collaborations. We welcome participants who are genuinely curious and interested in collaborative thinking, not grandstanders and know-it-alls.

Most of the day’s events will be private, for registrants. There will be one public-facing panel, which will also be recorded and appear as the final episode of the Weird Economies podcast The Exploits of Play, Season 2: Against the Fascist Game.

Logistics 

• 10am-5pm on July 11
• At a central London venue
• The event is free
• Lunch will be provided
• Limited small travel and care subsidies are available
• Stick around for the Games Transformed 2025 festival, beginning on the evening of the 11th and continuing all day on the 12th.

Organizer

RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is  a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization based in Thunder Bay (Canada) with activities around the world. It is directed (and this symposium is hosted) by Dr. Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination, creator of the board game Billionaires and Guillotines, the producer of the podcast The Exploits of Play and author of many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: How the Game of Financialization led to Fascism.

Apply

Please apply by 2 May 2025.

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All Games are Political

Max Haiven – 2025-03-16

Why was the winner of the world’s most prestigious prize for board game makers banned immediately after the ceremony by the very organization that awarded him?

Palestine.

When Daybreak won the Spiel des Jahres (SdJ, or “Game of the Year”) for the best “expert” board game, it affirmed what many reviewers and players knew: the game, which models geopolitical blocs cooperating to solve the climate crisis, broke new ground and showed that board games can be important tools for reimagining urgent social issues.

But when one of the designers dared to quietly demonstrate solidarity with Palestine at the SdJ awards ceremony in Berlin in July, a scandal erupted.

This story could be counted as simply another example of a German institution’s fanatical anti-Palestinian bias — the kind that, in other contexts, has seen Palestinians and their supporters surveilled, arrested, deported, blacklisted, and defamed.

But it also raises a wider question of board games’ politics today, in a moment of burgeoning fascism and deepening crisis. And these politics matter. Games are not only fun ways to come together. They play a unique role in helping us envision new worlds and new ways of working together.

A Game for Our Moment

During the pandemic, London-based game designer Matteo Menapace began working with Matt Leacock, creator of the legendary Pandemic series of board games. The first of these highly innovative games was released in 2008 to widespread acclaim, busting the myth that cooperative games are boring and sanctimonious. When the global COVID-19 outbreak forced billions of people to stay home or limit social interactions, makers of independent board games found millions of new fans. Given its themes, Pandemic — where players take on the roles of scientists and public health workers collaborating to cure and eliminate global diseases — emerged as a clear winner.

Early in the pandemic, Menapace wrote a blog about what the game Pandemic could teach us about the real-world event. This then led him and Leacock to develop the idea for a game about another crisis: the climate emergency. The two researched extensively and interviewed and play-tested early versions of their game with dozens of scientists, activists, and policymakers.

The final result, Daybreak, was published by CMYK Games in 2023. Up to four players take on the role of geopolitical blocs (the United States, Europe, China, and the Majority World). In a game that takes about ninety minutes to play, they try to share resources and technologies so that they can each transition their economies away from fossil fuels and help communities deal with the ecological and social disasters brought by climate change.

The game has been celebrated by reviewers for the satisfying way it allows players to focus on the challenges of their own region but also collaborate on global problems, and for creating a game that foregrounds the difficult questions of what paths to take toward climate justice. That the players often lose the game by triggering climate tipping points doesn’t seem to be discouraging. Each card has a QR code linking to the data and debates that animate the game about, for example, the risks and benefits of nuclear power, the feasibility of solar at scale, and the possibility of degrowth.

Like socialist speculative fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s blockbuster Ministry for the Future (which was a big inspiration for the game), Menapace and Leacock’s game Daybreak brings us into the near future of capitalism’s climate chaos and invites us to imagine what kind of power and institutions we would need to build globally to deliver us from calamity.

The Game of the Year Debacle

Packing that much complexity into a game that remains genuinely fun and challenging is no small feat, and so it was unsurprising when Daybreak was nominated for a SdJ award. The SdJ might be compared to the film industry’s Oscars: an award unparalleled in its prestige since its launch in 1978. Hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Germany, follow the awards, which celebrate games that are both critical and commercial successes. The SdJ brand represents the gold standard of board games.

But in Germany and elsewhere, the board game industry is biased toward “apolitical” games. Games as commodities are often framed as family-friendly activities, a safe platform for good-natured competition, an uplifting alternative to television or other forms of entertainment. The preference has been for games that are themed around historical or fantasy settings that will not offend or perturb players.

That said, the board game industry has been rightly criticized for regularly promoting racist and exoticist tropes, including in the famous Settlers of Catan, where players invade an island and proceed to build trading empires, all the while beset by a mysterious “robber,” implicitly recalling European fantasies of colonialism.

So Daybreak’s more explicit political orientation already ruffled feathers in board game communities. But when it won the prize, it was Menapace’s expression of solidarity with Palestine that really set things off. In addition to making a short speech encouraging game designers to engage with real-world challenges, Menapace affixed a sticker to his T-shirt that depicted the silhouette of historic Palestine in a watermelon motif.

Shortly afterwards, without notifying Menapace, the SdJ issued a public statement, declaring that “we find it intolerable that a game author we invited wore a symbol on his clothing on stage that must be perceived as antisemitic by Jews.” (It was unclear if any Jews were consulted, and if so which ones, or how they felt about being told what they “must” find offensive.) The organization was keen to point out that their concern revolved around the shape of the map of Palestine, which extended to the 1948 borders, allegedly implicitly delegitimizing the State of Israel — which is illegal under Germany’s singularly draconian laws.

The SdJ also accused Menapace of behaving “in an extremely uncollegial manner toward the others involved in his game (author, editorial team, publisher),” in spite of the fact they had spoken to none of the supposedly disrespected parties. They announced that “Menapace is no longer welcome at events organized by the Spiel des Jahres association” — quite a sanction, given the singular prestige of the organization.

Menapace responded with a thoughtful letter explaining his reasons and rightly denying the highly offensive accusation of antisemitism. Others have since written letters condemning the SdJ’s actions, notably its spurious accusation that solidarity with Palestine is inherently antisemitic, which is unfortunately commonplace in Germany.

Whatever the case, beyond the scandal of German exceptionalism around Israel and Palestine, this story reveals what’s at stake when a game “breaks the rules” and dares to take an explicitly political orientation.

Games Have Always Been “Political”

Perhaps all civilizations engage in what anthropologists call “deep play,” games that give expression to and help a society reflect on its fundamental beliefs and conflicts. In many societies, games and sports offer proxies for war and mechanisms to navigate political relations, for good or for ill.

The original Olympics, for example, were a vital diplomatic opportunity for the ancient Greeks. Given the ornate materials of many archeological relics, some scholars speculate that tabletop games like go, chess, senet, and the Royal Game of Ur were highly prized and may have been important tools for navigating domestic and international conflicts.

Modern board games stem from the tabletop war games used to train military officers, and from attempts to use the printing press to create toys for middle-class children to teach history and impress bourgeois values on them. This was hardly apolitical.

As early as the nineteenth century, social movements began using board games to convey their messages, including Suffragetto, a board game developed by militants fighting for women’s right to vote that simulated street fights with the police, or Monopoly, which was a critique of free-market capitalism before it was hijacked and turned into the game we all know today.

There have also been explicitly anti-capitalist games. In 1978, Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman gained international notoriety for bringing to market Class Struggle, a socialist response to Monopoly that eventually sold over 230,000 copies worldwide. That game inspired Jacobin to release two-player board game Class War in 2022.

The idea that games are “not political” is really a fiction cooked up by late twentieth-century corporations who were keen to sell first board games and then video games to kids, mostly boys. This industry developed in the postwar years when childhood was being increasingly commodified and conformity to white-supremacist, homophobic, and sexist norms was being strictly enforced.

These days, the anti-politics of games serves an industry that promises to deliver players an escape from unnecessarily busy and stressful lives under modern capitalism. But often games’ reactionary politics are hidden in plain sight. In Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson catalogue the past and present of racist and colonial tropes in board games, notably in popular genres like 4X (also prevalent in video games) where players “eXplore” curiously cleansed landscapes, “eXpand” their empire, “eXploit” resources and people, and “eXterminate” their opponents. Many games are built around market mechanics that, inspired by the myths of neoliberalism, imagine economics as a matter of pure calculation and risk, failing to recognize the role of power and exploitation, or the possibility of solidarity.

In the past decades, many game designers have struggled to tell different stories and create games that move us away from the common themes of accumulation, competition, violence, and scarcity. But it was only with the recent rise of crowdfunding platforms, as well as the emergences of diverse online gamer communities, that a space has opened to a multitude of experiments.

Menapace’s collaborator on Daybreak, Matt Leacock, is widely recognized as a hero of today’s “board game renaissance” when it comes to cooperative games, a genre of games that many children of lefties (like the present author) remember as boring, pedantic, and profoundly unfun. Leacock and others have developed ways to make cooperative games deeply engaging and enjoyable, and so accessible to many players who don’t enjoy games that trade in stress and competition.

Many others have followed by adapting these mechanisms to speak to radical themes. T. L. Simon’s Bloc By Bloc, for example, is a (mostly) cooperative game of urban insurgency where players work together as students, workers, incarcerated people, and local activists to defend their neighborhoods from the cops. The TESA Collective works closely with progressive and environmental organizations to produce cooperative games like STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion, Community Garden: The Board Game, and Space Cats Fight Fascism.

While not cooperative, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory is a phenomenal simulator of class struggle in social democracy (including the possibility that the workers take over the state and institute communism or that the ruling and middle classes team up to impose fascism). Board games like Red Flag Over Paris or Chicago ‘68 help us reflect on the victories and defeats of movements in the past.

My own game, Billionaires and Guillotines, is a satire that dramatizes the lessons of Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital: the capitalist class cannot be trusted to solve the crises its competition has created; they will cascade out of control unless we rise up and establish a system that serves people and the planet, not profit.

As Richard Barbrook argues in his fiery book Class War Games, games help every radical hone their skills at developing meaningful movement strategy, something the Left desperately needs as it contends with growing corporate power, rising fascism, and climate and social crisis.

Many board game designers use the format to do radical work that is less concerned with market success. Avery Alder’s mapmaking game A Quiet Year movingly depicts the joy and struggle of building community after the fall of “civilization.” Live action role-players (LARPers) explore queer and radical political themes from the past, present, and future by playing characters in immersive, interactive theatrical productions that can be profoundly transformative.

Organizations like Red Plenty organize “mega games” (large simulations, kind of like a Model United Nations) at radical and lefty events and festivals to help us explore potential futures. And many movement facilitators and educators around the world have been inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed to use social and board games to help train a new generation of activists and community organizers, and many compendia of these games are now available.

New Games for an Age of Crisis

The ruling class has always resented and feared workers’ playfulness, even as sports and other spectacles of play have long been used to defuse social tensions or sew divisions among oppressed people.

But play is our birthright. All animals play — David Graeber even argued that subatomic particles play. If capitalism forces us to work for the benefit of bosses, play and games contain within them a kernel of resistance.

Some of our first and most meaningful experiences are small games that caregivers play with us when we’re infants. This is because, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen makes clear, games allow us to explore how the world shapes us and how we shape the world. Games offer us a chance to try on other forms of agency: what is it like to be a property tycoon trying to bankrupt your opponents, or a geopolitical bloc trying to collaborate on fixing the climate crisis, or an orca taking revenge on the boats that killed your family? Many games allow us to simulate real-world radical struggles, from organizing a union to managing an anti-capitalist government. But even when they are more poetic or abstract, games invite us to, for a time, gain and share new powers.

Most people today feel like they’re caught in an unwinnable game, hence perhaps the popularity of TV shows like Squid Game or the Hunger Games film and book franchise. The far right has capitalized on this feeling, but offers racist and reactionary explanations: it’s the immigrants, the “special interest groups,” and some nebulous “elites” who cheated the system, which is presented as otherwise a fair meritocracy.

The reality is that the capitalist game was always rigged, from the very beginning: it works to cheat the working class of its time, power, and wealth and transfer it upward.

Games can and should help us understand this system for what it is and envision alternatives. Daybreak is a phenomenal example of just such a game, and for that it couldn’t be forgiven.

The post All Games are Political (Jacobin) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Sunday 25 to Thursday 29 of May in Palermo

It need hardly be said: fascism has seduced people around the world, and the world hangs in the balance. 

Why has fascism been so successful? What can be done?

Sense & Solidarity, a platform where radical thinkers and movements come together to study what changes hearts and minds, invites applications to join a 5-day study intensive in Palermo.

We will be focusing on reading and discussing theoretical and historical texts that illuminate our current conjecture.

Today, those of us who believe another world is necessary find our hopes destroyed and our fears realized in the rising spectre of fascism. It is capitalizing on a deepening global crisis and unleashing profound violence. Meanwhile, the centrists, whose obedience to corporate rule and neoimperialism caused the crisis that opened the doors to fascism, seem to have learned nothing. How can we retain and expand a radical vision while also meaningfully defending our communities from the fascist threat? How can we recognize fascism’s incubation within neoliberal capitalism? How can we envision radical alternatives and make them irresistible.

Uniquely, at this study workshop we will be asking questions about the mass psychology of fascism. How does it capitalizes on and reshapes people’s sense of self and other, disgust and desire, their craving for community and fear of freedom? How can this be opposed, destroyed and replaced?

Every day of the intensive Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano will lead discussions on readings that concern questions including:

• How can social movements for collective liberation and anti-fascist artists, intellectuals and other interventionists best respond to fascism, not only in terms of opposing and rebelling against specific policies, but also in terms of responding to fascism’s widespread appeal? 
• How is 21st century fascism similar to and different from its 20th century predecessors, especially in terms of how it seduces and poisons hearts and minds? What should movements and interventionists learn from those anti-fascists who have come before us, and are fighting in other contexts?
• How does fascism intersect with patriarchy and misogyny, with racism and imperialism, with transphobia, with ableism and with other systems of domination? How can anti-fascist struggles and interventions advance collective liberation? 
• What actually works to fight fascism, in its germinal state and in its fully-grown form (and how do we know the difference)? What can we learn from the victories and defeats  of the past and from other spaces?
• What role, if any, do those things we call art, culture, literature, writing and education play in an anti-fascist struggle?

The facilitators do not claim to be experts on this topic, but rather propose to convene a generative space to learn together.

Who is it for?

This intensive is open to all people intentionally engaged in anti-fascist struggle, with the understanding that this means a wide variety of things and that a diversity of tactics is essential in this moment.

We envision cultivating a space shared by front-line organizers, people working within/against/beyond organizations, radical thinkers (with or without credentials or jobs), and artists and writers and other interventionists who see culture as both a weapon and a cure.

We will be reading and discussing theoretical texts, and while the facilitators (Max and Sarah) are very experienced teachers of this material, it will require a significant commitment to read complex and at times abstract texts and discuss them in English.

By applying, all potential participants agree to help proactively co-create and foster an atmosphere of collective joy, intensive inquiry, mutual support, community care, and intellectual rigour which is as free as possible from sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of domination and that, for a moment, prefigures the world we want to create after we destroy fascism.

We anticipate about 10-14 carefully selected participants.

What will happen?

We will gather each day for five days, from Sunday May 25 to Thursday May 29 from 10:30 to 3, including a lunch together, with a combination of facilitated group discussion of assigned readings and small group work. We’ll ask you to do some structured journaling and share how this fits in the wider work you’re doing. 

When and where will it take place?

We’ll be meeting in a small lovely building in Palermo each day. You can book accommodation nearby at a variety of price points, and you will book your own travel.

What does it cost and how do I apply?

To apply, please fill out this short application below. We will charge a programme fee of £200 or equivalent, which includes lunches on the 25-29. You will be responsible for your accommodation and other mealss

What are we reading/discussing?

• We will read from the old and golden texts understanding the desire for fascism including Frankfurt School theorists like Adorno, Fromm, and Benjamin. 
• We’ll look at the role of gender, including male fantasies about power, enemy feminisms, and the role of the tradwife. And we’ll wrestle with why the fash are so obsessed with trans people (not in a good way). 
• We’ll consider some very different kinds of fascism in the global south, and look at the ecofascists and their allure. 
• We’ll look at digital fascisms in particular, and the strange modern forms of fascism that have been inspired by accelerationism.

We will share our reading list soon.

Who are Max and Sarah?

Sarah is a public intellectual who writes about the breakdown of the public sphere. Her book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, comes out in May. It looks at why persuasion through exposure to ideas doesn’t work, what does change people’s views on politics, and why the internet is good at division and bad at everything else. She has a PhD in critical theory and cognitive science from Oxford. 

Max is the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and author many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism. He edits the VAGABONDS book series and makes games, including ​​​​Billionaires and Guillotines.

Together, Sarah and Max run Sense & Solidarity, a platform where movements for collective liberation and radical interventionists (artists, writers, thinkers) gather to study what actually works to change hearts and minds. They produce a podcast, host regular schools and workshops, and support the next generation of radical public intellectuals.

How to apply

Please complete this form by March 31: https://senseandsolidarity.org/dreams/

Upon collecting all of the applications we will adjudicate them based on what we perceive to be the best fit and also to ensure a good mix of participants relative to personal and professional background. We will endeavour to let selected participants know by the first week of April and may also create a waitlist. we may require a small non-refundable confirmation payment to help us with upfront costs.

Those wishing to participate who would be prohibited from doing so by the registration cost should please include a note in their application and we will do our best to ensure that money is not a barrier.

200 GBP for participation (including lunch) but we’ll accept less. A large percentage of our costs are covered by rival: the reimagining value action lab. Registration fees cover the cost of food, logistics, and a small honorarium for the course leader. 

Do you want to volunteer to be our assistant?

(and get to participate and stay for free?)

Based on past workshops, we have found that including an assistant helps everything run more smoothly. To that end, we are inviting inquiries from people who can be present for the entire duration of our study workshop and–in return for free tuition, accommodation and some assistance with transportation costs–will assist the course leaders with administrative tasks in the lead up to the event and take charge of preparing lunch and cleaning up for the five days of the workshop. This assistant is welcome to participate in the programming, however their first priority must be to facilitation, so we can’t guarantee they will always be able to participate in all aspects of the program.

An assistant would need to…

• Arrive one day early (on May 24)
• Buy groceries and prepare a light lunch each day for participants and take responsibility for coordinating cleaning up from lunch (with help)
• Help Max and Sarah with occasional administrative tasks in the lead-up to the gathering (maybe 1-2 hours per week of work)

They would get…

• Free registration to the event (though you may not be able to participate in everything)
• Free accommodation from May 24-30 (your own room)
• Free lunches
• Some assistance with transportation (depending on budget and distance)
• Ongoing mentoring from Max and/or Sarah (if it’s helpful)

Desirable qualities: fun and/or easy to be around, responsible, interested in the topic, would find this an important opportunity in their personal development, bonus: speaks Italian.

If you’d be interested, please write us a quick email by March 24th about why you’d like to do this, what makes you a good choice for the position and if you have any concerns etc. We will schedule some interviews (on zoom or in London) the week of March 24.

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