How much longer will they toy with us?
A sketch of my new book | Sophie Lewis, Alfie Bown, and Christian Nagler on games and capitalism | autumn events in Europe and North America
My new book project, The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism, begins and ends with a deceptively simple observation: the vast majority of humans living under capitalism today feel trapped in a deadly unwinnable game.
This general feeling, which has many different expressions, helps explain the profound global popularity of The Hunger Games entertainment franchise, or the Squid Game serial, or the Fortnite game empire all of which feature a lethal artificial spectacle where only one player can survive.
The material context of this feeling is an uncaring, digitally-accelerated financialized system that transforms nearly everything of value into a competitive arena, from education to romance, from housing to employment, from our interests and passions to our most intimate relations.
The sentiments that fester in this shared condition incline towards fascism, a term that draws our attention to the way authoritarian, racist, xenophobic, patriarchal and revanchist politics arise from within capitalism in historically and geographically specific ways.
Those of us who have been habituated under financialization to imagine ourselves as “players” in the capitalist game feel cheated and are keen for narratives that help us make sense of who is to blame. The very system that caused the problem spawns a fascist politics of misdirection so that we look away from the system and its beneficiaries, who have been rigging the game for decades (subverting democracy, proliferating tax havens, privatizing the means of life). Instead we become cruelly infatuated with those “others” we are told are cheating the system: migrants, the poor, “special interest groups” and more.
This political storm break over a society that is playing games like never before. Billions of people play a digital and commercial games day, and these are far from innocent passtimes. It’s not just that most of these games have emerged from an industry that exemplifies the cutting edge of capitalist exploitation and competition, and that reproduces these values in its products. It’s not just that the far-right are adept at using games and game cultures as fields for recruitment (especially of angry young men). It’s not just that tech capital is eager to use “gamification” techniques to infiltrate our minds and “nudge” us towards behaviours that are ever more profitable (for them). It’s not just that the paradigm of “game theory” (famous for its bizarre Prisoner’s Dilemma) has become unquestioned doctrine in economics, tech, neoliberal governance and military strategy. It’s that games in many ways have become the idiom of 21st century capitalism, a network of interlocking, contradictory metagames.
If we want to turn this situation around we need to take games seriously, and not only in terms of seeing them as a field of ideological struggles. We also need to recognize how capitalism and fascism today prey on and give expression to our fundamental drive to play. We are ill-served by 19th and 20th century images that depict capitalism as driven by the austere striving of Weber’s protestant work ethic, or that depict fascism as only severe, rigid and draconian. Today both of these entangled systems are dangerously and cruelly playful.
But what other political formations and subjectivities could we form that give play its due? How might play and games be more central to our urgent struggles for the worlds we and our descendants deserve? We need revolutionary change; it’s serious business. But it will nonetheless involve play or it will fail.
As with many of my past major projects, I’m advancing this one by doing a kind of research-in-public.
In 2021-2 I produced a podcast, Conspiracy Games and Countergames, with A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.
In the summer of 2021 and again this summer I’m leading courses on games and politics for Lakehead University’s English department and Social Justice Studies program.
And over the past couple of years I’ve been meeting with academic colleagues, game designers, artists and others to discuss these matters, including in Brazil, Germany and the UK.
And I’m also working on a few analog games, notably the party game Billionaires and Guillotines, which hopefully will be published next year.
Also…
The Exploits of Play
There are several banger episodes of The Exploits of Play, the podcast on the role of games under late late late late capitalism that I host for the wonderful Weird Economies platform.
e09 - The Singularity Bluff - Christian Nagler on Silicon Valley's Dangerous Dreams of Cheating Death
e08 - Toyed With - Alfie Bown on the gamification of love
e07 - "It Is What It Is" - Sophie Lewis on Love Island and the banality of capitalist eros
e06 - Gaming Authority - Thiago Falcão on exploitation & far-right politics in the games industry
Our tenth and final episode, with Jay Jordean and Isabelle Fremeaux of the Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, will be released in July!
The World After Amazon?
In 2023, we at the experimental Worker as Futurist Project supported about a dozen rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction about “The World After Amazon.”
This summer, we’re delighted to be working on collecting 9 of the resulting short stories into a book, which will be available in print, as an ebook, online, and read aloud as a free podcast and audiobook.
We previously wrote about the project for publications including Jacobin, the LA Review of Books and most recently Triple-C. And we produced a podcast, The Workers Speculative Society, that includes interviews with people including Cory Doctorow, Robin DG Kelley, Charimaine Chua, Marc McGurl and Jamie Woodcock.
This fall, we’ll be launching the book in London, Berlin, Toronto and New York - stay tuned for more information.
Would you like us to come to your city or do an online event with your organization this fall? We’d love to! Please get in touch!
Princeton and UCL in 2024-2025
I’m gratified to have two incredible opportunities to share my work and convene with colleagues in the coming academic year.
In October, I’ll be a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English at Princeton University, thanks in large part to the support of my friend Dr. Robbie Richardson. At Princeton I’ll be giving a public talk on October 21 on the aforementioned Worker as Futurist project and also leading a game design workshop.
From November through May I’ll be a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at London’s UCL, working in part with the new Centre for Capitalism Studies headed up by my friend and collaborator Dr. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.
While there, I’ll continue to work on my next book, tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism, as well as game design and the development of the VAGABONDS publishing series, including a new offshoot newsletter, MISSIVE, due to launch in the fall.
I continue to be extremely grateful for the support of Lakehead University and my colleagues there, and to the Canada Research Chair program and the people of Canada who fund it.
Sense & Solidarity
Sense & Solidarity is an outfit where Sarah Stein Lubrano and I host workshops and develop media to support social movements to learn about what makes people tick and how they can better transform hearts and minds. We draw on Sarah’s fanstastic research on ideology and cognitive sciences (her newsletter is amazing) and my work on the radical imagination. We are also building infrastructures of mutual aid for the next generation of radical public intellectuals.
In April we hosted a workshop in Sofia. In May we hosted a week-long activist training camp in Berlin. Also in May we hosted our second writing retreat for public intellectuals.
Right now, we’re hard at work on a podcast What Do We Want, which many of you were kind enough to support earlier this year in our crowdfunding campaign. We should be ready to share episodes later this summer. Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, we are planning for another in-person activist training camp in November in London and one in New York early in 2025.
Maybe you’d like Sarah and I to come to your city or campus to lead a workshop? Or perhaps online? Please get in touch!
