In this email:
🎲 Another pitch for Billionaires & Guillotines (OMG when will he shut up about it?!)
👾 The call for a symposium I’m organizing on July 11 in London “What is the Antifascist Game”
🎙️ Episode 1 of my podcast “Against the Fascist Game,” featuring Luce deLire
📰 Other news about me and my friends and family
Thanks to all of you who supported Billionaires & Guillotines in it’s initial weeks!
Don’t worry: the crowdfunding campaign continues until May 1.
You can read a bit more about the ideas behind it in this recent article I penned for Tribune.
You can pre-order the game now at a discount, and also get interesting things like books and stickers.
Why it’s important to support this project now(ish)
We reached the 66% mark, but unless we get about 100 more backers, we can’t manufacture the game, and that would be very disappointing.
When you back the project, you only pay if the project is a success.
You don’t need to buy the game to support the project. You can make a donation, or use the platform to claim discounted stickers and books instead. It all helps!
Thanks!
{insert a rant about fascism here - I’ll spare you}
And that’s why…
What is the Antifascist Game: A Symposium (July 11)
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.
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.
…
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.
Learn more and apply
https://reimaginingvalue.ca/antifagame/
Exploits of Play, season 2: Against the Fascist Game
It’s a pleasure and a privilege to once again be teaming up with Weird Economies to bring you season 2 of The Exploits of Play, this time very topical theme “Against the Fascist Game.”
Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.
PROPERTY PIETIES
Luce DeLire on digital tyrants, trans panics, and revolutionary hospitalities
In our first episode, we interview the inimitable and brilliant Luce DeLire
Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and she lies down by the quay. As a philosopher, she publishes on the metaphysics of infinity and early modern philosophy but also on art, queer theory, anti-racism, postcolonialism, and political theory. In her performances, she embodies figures of the collective imaginary. She is currently an assistant professor at the department of philosophy at Humboldt University, Berlin.
Luce speaks about her latest work on digitalised tyranny. About how private property structures the terms of the contract and gives rise to ever more terms; how the far right are both breaking the rules and playing by the rules to break the game; and about the overall structure of desire across society and what it’d mean to exit the transsexual contract of libidinal intelligibility, towards a horizon of hospitality and indeterminacy, driven by joy.
Future episodes feature guests including Alberto Toscano, Meghna Jayanth, Danny Dorling, Malinda Cooper, Jack Bratich, Adrienne L. Massanari and more.
Interviews, Writing and Talks
I wrote for Tribune about radical games.
Scott Stoneman interviewed me about Billionaires & Guillotines and my work on games for Pretty Heady Stuff
Brussels, April 28-29
Billionaires & Guillotines - Game session and book presentation by Max Haiven - Monday, April 28th, 6pm
Game designer and radical social theorist Max Haiven will bring his board game Billionaires and Guillotines: 2-5 players take on the role of rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
As intro for our game session, Max will present his current book project The Player and the Played: How Financialization Incubated 21st century Fascism. The process of capitalist ruination known as financialization, leaving many people feeling like cheated players in a rigged, unwinnable game, has fueled a new form of 21st-century fascist politics...What role, if any, might games play in antifascist and anti-capitalist thought and action?
Game-Making-Workshop with Max Haiven, followed by a FAU0X SALON play session hosted by Wassim Alsindi + food & drinks. Tuesday, April 29th, 5pm
In this workshop, Max shares some examples and theories of how gamesmight be used for the radical imagination. Afterwards, we invite you for a play session of techno-esoteric cartomancyproject FAU0X SALON. We will channel chance and dissonance into a conversation about Brussels' past, present, and possiblefutures through the chaotic and autonomous moderation of a deck of tarot-style oracular cards. Friends, there will be food & drinks.
Congratulations
Drs. Drs. Judy and Larry Haiven
My parents, Judy Haiven and Larry Haiven, are to be awarded honourary doctorates from Halifax’s Atlantic School of Theology in recognition of “their work through Independent Jewish Voices [Canada], a grassroots organization they helped to found and one that opposes all forms of racism and advocates for justice and peace for all in Israel-Palestine” as well as “for their lifelong commitment to human rights.” I’m very proud of them!
Don’t Talk About Politics
My friend and co-conspirator Sarah Stein Lubrano’s fantastic book Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds is out May 15th from Bloomsbury! Catch us speaking about it together in Berlin on May 20th. Pre-order it now!
