The Player and the Played: Max Haiven in Conversation with Rudolf Inderst
New Books in Game Studies (New Books Network). Recorded September 22, 2026.
Rudolf Inderst: Hi everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel, we explore new scholarship that helps us understand games as cultural, historical, artistic, socioeconomic, and technological artifacts. I’m your host, Rudolf Inderst, professor of game studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Neu-Ulm, Germany.
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Today I’m delighted to welcome Max Haiven to discuss his urgent new book, The Player and the Played. Max, welcome to the show.
Max Haiven: Thank you very much for having me.
Rudolf Inderst: To begin, could you introduce yourself to our listeners? You’re a writer and scholar whose work has long explored the intersections of capitalism, culture, and social movements. How did you end up writing a book about gamification and fascism?
Max Haiven: Thank you very much. I work here at Lakehead University in Canada as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination, and my whole academic career has been dedicated to trying to understand the relationship between capitalism and the imagination. I’ve looked at that, for instance, in terms of how capitalism produces imaginary wealth in finance. I’ve looked at it in terms of how artists and cultural producers have challenged capitalism through works of the imagination. And I also look at it through the way that social movements mobilize the radical imagination to provide other visions of other worlds that we could live in.
A few years ago, as one venture into thinking about the imagination, I got very interested in conspiracy theory. This was about the time of the global pandemic, and like many people I was fascinated by this example of the imagination going terribly wrong, a kind of pathology of the imagination. That led me into a very fascinating set of scholarly literature, which appears in my book, about how conspiracy fantasies increasingly appear to be gamified, notably the QAnon conspiracy fantasy in the United States and elsewhere, but other conspiracy theories as well. And that led me to an interest in games and gamification, and what those terms and concepts had to offer in terms of a much broader analysis of capitalism and the imagination at this historical juncture.
Rudolf Inderst: Now, The Player and the Played is very timely, and it’s a deeply unsettling book, to be honest. The title alone captures a central tension. We are told to become players (see my air quotes here) in a competitive, gamified economy, yet we increasingly feel played by the very system we are supposed to master. Could you unpack that core thesis for our listeners?
Max Haiven: Absolutely. My work emerges from a body of research by a group of scholars who over the last 20 years have been trying to understand a phenomenon we call financialization. On one level, that’s the incredible power that the financial sector has over the global economy: the way that asset management companies, hedge funds, and financial markets more generally influence other capitalist firms and also governments. Today capitalism is essentially a system on a suicidal course with our ecosystems, because it’s being driven forward by the short-term profit needs of a handful of very powerful corporations.
My contribution to that literature has been to say, along with others, that financialization isn’t just happening at the level of economics and politics. It’s also happening at the level of society and culture. We can look at the way that all sorts of social institutions, especially in the Anglophone North Atlantic, which is ground zero for a lot of this, are being financialized. University education is being transformed from a social good into a debt-driven factory for producing new workers. They come out the other side of a degree so desperate for a job that they are easily exploitable, but they go into the university as financialized subjects looking to invest in their human capital. Or we can look at housing markets, which have increasingly moved away from providing shelter and community and are increasingly seen by individuals as sources of investment for an uncertain future. In this way and others, I argue in this book, we’ve all been conscripted to become players in the financialized economy.
There are a few more recent examples worth noting. If you look at the statistics, the vast majority of young teenagers today want to become influencers. That’s their number one career goal: YouTubers, influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. This is ultimately a way of financializing their aspirations, so that they do a huge amount of free labor for these corporate platforms, playing on this gamified app in order to try to win a chance at fame and fortune. Or, over the last year especially, we’ve seen the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi and other platforms that allow people to gamble on anything they choose to “invest” in. This emerges out of the long history of cryptocurrency, which presented itself as an opportunity for us little guys who were frozen out of capitalism to compete. Finally, all of us are players in this economy, from the very top, people who have money and assets to gamble, to the people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
And yet the argument of the book is that if we are all encouraged by this system to imagine ourselves as players, the vast majority of us rightly feel like we’ve been played. We feel like we are playing the game as best we can, but we never seem to be able to win. And we see people all around us who appear to be cheating and getting ahead. My argument is that this feeling of the cheated player produces effects, emotions, and political sentiments that create a fertile hotbed for the rise of what I call 21st-century fascism.
Rudolf Inderst: This answer is actually building the perfect bridge to my very next question, because one of the book’s key moves is to connect the financialization of the economy with the gamification of everyday life. You argue that these aren’t separate phenomena but two sides of the same coin. Could you explain that connection and why it matters for understanding our current political moment?
Max Haiven: Absolutely. I think the relationship between financialization and games and gamification happens at at least three levels.
The most basic level is simply to point out that over the last 20 years, video games especially have become a huge business. Recently we saw the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia buy Electronic Arts, within massive leveraged buyouts all around the world. We’re seeing hedge funds and other financial interests take a very keen interest in games and esports, recognizing, as many of your listeners already know, that video games and games more generally are perhaps the most important entertainment industry on the planet at this moment. So on one level, the financialization of games and gamification is simply the incredible interest the financial sector is taking in this industry, which is so pivotal to our lives in the 21st century.
Then there’s a second level, which is the way in which we, as subjects of capitalism, are conscripted into a financialized subjectivity. The way we are made into players, in my terminology, occurs through the processes known as gamification. Probably the easiest place to see this is in the gamification of financial services applications, or fintech. Practically every bank now has an app that you use to interact with its services, and most of these apps, like most apps in general, have integrated gamified elements: little games you can play, little feedback mechanisms, reward systems, leaderboards, and different sorts of interfaces that have been imported from the world of video games. These are used not merely to make our experience of banking or investing more fun, but also to nudge us in directions that are profitable to the people who own or control those apps, or that encourage us in various ways to deepen our participation. Many of these gamified techniques are imported directly from casinos and the proverbial Las Vegas.
We can also observe this gamification of finance and financialization of games, as I mentioned, through prediction markets, crypto trading, even house trading, but also on all sorts of other platforms. Dating apps, for instance, are financialized in the sense that they encourage us to make certain kinds of investments to get certain kinds of rewards, but they’re also highly gamified. Everywhere we look in this society, we see a confluence of gamification and financialization recruiting us into ever deeper participation in an economy that is only realistically working for the top proverbial 1% of the population.
And then there’s a final level, which is the sum result of all of that, what I call an idiom, something that can only be observed as a whole and starts to disappear if you look too closely at its constituent parts. That’s the sense that we are all trapped in a game that we just can’t win, that capitalism has been turned into a cruel gladiatorial spectacle. It’s reflected in television shows like Squid Game, franchises like The Hunger Games, or even game franchises like Fortnite, the battle royale of all against all. My argument in the book is that this feeling of living in a gamed world, what McKenzie Wark even two decades ago called “gamespace,” has fundamentally reshaped our political sensibilities and our way of understanding ourselves and our relationship to other people in this moment.
Rudolf Inderst: You coin the very interesting term “playgrom” to describe a specific form of contemporary political violence, ranging from online swarmings to the January 6th insurrection to the QAnon conspiracy. What exactly do you mean by playgrom, and how does it differ from earlier forms of political violence?
Max Haiven: This is one of the more controversial and emotionally difficult parts of my book, coining this phrase “playgrom,” which of course is a portmanteau word that I’ve created from “play” and “pogrom.” I’d say two things before I define the term in detail.
The first is that I obviously take pogroms very seriously. Real pogroms are happening all the time in our present moment, and they’re getting worse. It’s part of my own family history, and I think it’s important for us to recognize that there’s nothing funny or lighthearted about a pogrom.
The second is that pogroms, if we look at the history, have always in their way been sadistically playful. I won’t go into details to horrify our listeners, but if you look at the history of pogroms enacted against Jews in Tsarist Russia, or against Black people in the United States, or against Muslims in India and elsewhere, one of the horrifying features you see again and again is that this is a cruel, sadistic game played by the powerful on the bodies of the powerless. There’s always been an element of sick fun attached to it. So I don’t think that is new.
What I do think is new is that today’s forms of what I call fascistic swarms of violence are organized as if they were games, in very disturbing ways. I’ll give you a few examples. One I mention is the GamerGate saga, which listeners to this podcast are no doubt familiar with. It happened almost a decade ago, when an anti-feminist conspiracy theory led to a doxing and harassment campaign against supposed individuals responsible for undermining the impartiality of games journalism. It was an absurd episode, but one that did incredible damage, as participants in what I call this playgrom assembled online and began to play a kind of game with each other, seeing if they could encourage each other to up the ante and increase the decentralized swarming of their enemies.
The chapter fast-forwards to the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in New Zealand who believed in the bogus Great Replacement theory. He murdered 51 people at prayer in a mosque and an Islamic community center, and he live-streamed it as if it were a first-person shooter video game to an audience of enthusiastic far-right game fans, who cheered him on as if it were a live stream of a game.
My argument in the chapter is that, though pogroms have always had an element of playfulness to them, dark play, torturous play, to use Aaron Trammell’s recent formulation, these are also disturbingly appearing as if they are learning from the culture of online games, and affording participants a way to enact forms of violence that feel to them like a game. More generally, I try to associate this with a gamelike idiom and playfulness in far-right and fascist cultures today. It manifests, for instance, in the edgelord-y culture of Trump and his White House staff, who just a few days ago released a set of vibe-coded 8-bit style video games where you round up migrants on the border or otherwise heroically participate in the Trump regime.
But I think we begin to see this more and more in many places. I’ve been writing recently about the similarity between these forms of playgrom and the hounding of the British academic Jason Arday, who was accused of plagiarism and of falsifying various elements of his academic credentials, was forced to resign from Cambridge University, and then tragically took his own life in response. This kind of pile-on and swarming activity is decentralized, it is fun, it is entertaining for the people pursuing it, and it has the marks of the playgrom. I’m also looking recently into an organization called Skull Games in the United States, which is a kind of vigilante group where people get together and use open-source intelligence techniques to hunt down people they accuse of being sex traffickers. But it’s done in a very far-right vigilante idiom, a deputization of people to take the law into their own hands and persecute people they believe are acting immorally. All of which, I think, contributes to a very dangerous far-right culture.
Rudolf Inderst: Just a note for our listeners: we’re recording this on the 22nd of September, 2026. One of the book’s most striking concepts is “derivative fascism.” You argue that today’s far-right movements are not simply a return to 1930s-style fascism, but something new, a financialized, gamified mutation. Could you explain what you mean by that and why the distinction matters?
Max Haiven: Of course. I borrow this term “derivative fascism” from the German professor, artist, and lecturer Hito Steyerl, who presents it in a book several years ago but doesn’t quite develop the concept as far as I think it can be taken. There are a few things to say here.
The word “derivative” at first connotes something insufficiently original. If you speak about an artwork as being derivative, it means it’s too indebted to or too imitative of another artwork. It’s usually a kind of art-world slur to say that something is not good, and particularly not modern, not sufficiently contemporary. I’m interested in that meaning in the sense that fascism today is increasingly a kind of pastiche of the past. You see fascist actors drawing on tropes, images, and aesthetics of fascism from the 20th century, whether in Italy or Germany or elsewhere, but also drawing on iconography and images from popular culture in highly derivative ways. You can see this in the meme culture of the far right, which is not particularly interested in being original, but in reappropriating and recycling images, meanings, and ideas. So that’s one meaning of derivative fascism.
But I want to go deeper on a couple of levels. One is that the word “fascism” is so loaded with infamy from the 20th century that when you use it, it immediately conjures horrifying memories of the Nazi regime, or Mussolini, or the imperial Japanese regime. Especially given over 80 years of Hollywood, it fills our minds with very dark images that have a certain lexicon and repertoire. When you say “fascism,” you imagine the jackbooted Nazi, or the sneering fascist in Italy. But that has the effect of obscuring the fact that fascism always takes different forms in different historical periods. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it in their new book, End Times Fascism, the fascism we’re seeing today is a sequel, not a rerun. It has a new form, though it inherits much from the past. And my argument in the book is that what new forms of fascism inherit is also the legacy of the system out of which they grow.
I’m in agreement with a number of scholars, and a tradition in anti-fascist scholarship, that says fascism is not just the resurgence of human tyranny, which exists in every human civilization. Rather, fascism always grows within, and as a kind of failed response to, the crises and contradictions of capitalism. It is a particular form of anti-modernism that emerges as more and more people become dissatisfied and furious with the contradictions of the capitalist system, and it offers false and very violent solutions to those contradictions: declining wages, declining certainty about the future, the diminishment of people’s skills and abilities to cope. All of these feed certain forms of fascism that emerge in historically specific ways.
So 20th-century fascism emerged from industrial capitalism, from a moment when most workers were forced into factories or into slums and where there was a massification of culture, where mass media and one-to-many forms of communication were the norm. My argument in this book is that 21st-century fascism, or what I call in that chapter derivative fascism, emerges from a much more decentralized, digitized, platform-based capitalism where we’re each encouraged to be a player. In the 20th-century fascist regimes, you were expected to be a follower. You were expected to be a cog in a vast machine and enjoy your subjugation to the mass. You were supposed to sacrifice your individuality in the name of becoming part of the nation. In 21st-century fascism, all of us are supposed to become entrepreneurs. All of us are supposed to be players. In fact, one of the successful things about 21st-century far-right and fascist forces is that they offer many opportunities for people to exercise their individuality, their creativity, their entrepreneurial spirit. We can see that in the incredible success of the far right in co-opting social media platforms, or articulating themselves in online forums that allow for a proliferation of subjectivities and identities. That’s the deeper meaning of what I’m calling derivative fascism.
And it’s connected, and I’ll stop here, I promise, to the financial technology of the derivative contract, which is a central piece of the architecture of financialization. Very briefly, a derivative is a contract that two parties sign to make an exchange at some point in the future. So I say, “I’m going to sell you a ton of grain in one year’s time for $100.” And you take that contract and sell it on to someone else, not for $100 but perhaps for $90, because you believe I’m not really going to be able to deliver $100 worth of grain, but maybe somebody’s willing to buy it. These agreements to buy and sell in the future become independently traded financial commodities. The derivative contract is a key technology on which the financial system is built.
But here I was following the thinking of my late mentor Randy Martin, a theorist of financialization, who argued that the derivative is not just a way of thinking about what financiers do. It’s also a way of thinking about how financialization seeps into everyday life, popular culture, and the way we interact together. In his landmark book Knowledge LTD, which I think came out in 2014, he argues that what he calls the cultural logic of the derivative has sunk so deeply into our civilization that we are all encouraged to see ourselves as financiers, as speculators, what I present in my book as players. That means that instead of coming together under a nation or based on shared economic interests, we increasingly come together in risk-taking swarms. His example at the time was skateboarders or break dancers or contemporary dancers. But we could look, for instance, at the Occupy movements of 2012 and 2013, where people came together seemingly out of nowhere in a swarm-like formation, in a decentralized, horizontal way. For Martin this was very hopeful. It represented the possibility of a new politics emerging from financialization, through what he calls “derivative sociality.”
My somewhat more pessimistic argument is that this is true not only of anti-capitalist uprisings like Occupy. It’s certainly also true of the far right in our moment, which is also assembling in these risky, risk-taking swarms that seem to have no center. For that reason, they’re much more difficult to confront using conventional anti-fascist strategy.
Rudolf Inderst: I was particularly struck by your observation that we’ve learned to love the cheats who hold power but to loathe the cheats without it. There’s a selective moral outrage at work here. Billionaires and corporations wreck the game, yet it’s the poor or marginalized who are accused of “gaming the system,” air quotes. How does this asymmetry function politically?
Max Haiven: It still confuses me. It begins with a question one always faces when studying fascism, which is how this strange beast works. In my book I use the symbolism of the Greek sphinx to talk about fascism as a hybrid monster that asks us an unanswerable riddle. So in the methodology of the book, I’m very fascinated by the upside-down worlds that fascism is able to create.
In this context, it begins with a fairly simple question, which is perhaps easiest to see in a figure like Donald Trump in the United States or Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, but is certainly the case with other far-right figures around the world. These people have become incredibly successful politically by claiming that they and the people who support them are being cheated. They’re being cheated by migrants who are sneaking over the border to take jobs and to take women. They’re being cheated by welfare or benefits claimants who are living high on the hog with their stolen money. They’re being cheated by environmentalists who are destroying the economy in the name of some deplorable fantasy. They’re being cheated in all sorts of different ways. This accusation that the good, hardworking people are being cheated is extremely successful.
That in itself is not all that new. Both the Italian fascists and the German fascists in the 20th century made the idea that the public was being cheated a central part of their ideological operations. It functions both to erase their own horrific policies and to aggrandize the people they’re speaking to, as if they are the hardworking, honest people who are being exploited, who have been patient and tolerant long enough, and who now, at this eleventh hour, need to stand up and say no. This is common to many fascist and far-right narratives more generally.
At the same time, figures like Trump and Farage are themselves transparently cheats. They even brag about it. They have been credibly accused, or even convicted, of cheating on all sorts of things: in their personal sexual relationships, on their taxes, with election rules again and again and again. A huge part of their success is bragging openly, or at least winking to their followers, that they are cheats who get away with it.
My argument is that this form of gamed capitalism, where we are all encouraged to be players and we all feel like we’re being played, produces in each of us both a loathing and a love of the cheat. On the one hand, most of us feel fundamentally cheated, because we are being cheated by capitalism. That’s true. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the world is on fire. We have been cheated out of the world that we could create and that we deserve. But unfortunately, in the fascist imagination, this phobia around cheating is directed down the socioeconomic ladder, to vulnerable populations, along channels that have been cut by decades or centuries of racist ideology or poor-hating.
At the same time, I think this nihilistic world that capitalism has created builds in each of us a grudging admiration for the cheat, because we realize that in this form of capitalism, only losers or delusional fools don’t cheat. We all have a little “scamlet,” as I call it, a little scam that we’re pulling. Maybe we don’t report all of our money on our taxes. Maybe we steal office supplies from our boss. The vast majority of people, though perhaps not everyone, are engaged in these small forms of cheating in order to make life livable. And for people trying to survive in this austere capitalism, those scams and cheats are increasingly necessary. But it fills us with a cynicism toward any claim that there could or should be any form of justice outside the exercise of power.
So when these larger-than-life personalities appear before us, bombastically bragging about their cheating, or giving us a nod and a wink so that we know they’re cheating even though they don’t say it explicitly, we look at them and think, now that’s a smart person. And more than that, they tell us that we’re the smart people, if we vote for them, even though we’re going to be cheated by them. We like them because we’re the real survivors, the savvy individuals. We’re not delusional fools who are going to be the victims of the scammers and the cheats. We’re the real smart money, and we can be like them on some fundamental level.
Rudolf Inderst: You talked about this before, I think, in your first or second answer, but let’s circle back to it for a moment. You read cultural phenomena like The Hunger Games, Squid Game, Game of Thrones, and reality TV as reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, a society where we’re all forced to become miniature corporations of one. That’s a really nice picture in my head. What do these cultural artifacts reveal about our relationship to the game of capitalism?
Max Haiven: I think it’s not a coincidence that the most popular television and film spectacles of the last couple of decades have featured otherwise well-meaning, decent characters caught up in an unwinnable game, often a game within a game. Obviously there’s Squid Game, which is explicitly, on the surface, part of a new wave of Korean cinema that’s critical of capitalism. We have The Hunger Games, which similarly depicts a world where children are recruited to do gladiatorial battle, and even when they rebel, they discover that their rebellion is a kind of game within a game. Or we have The Three-Body Problem, the Chinese trilogy of novels that was made into a very successful Netflix show, in which malevolent aliens are able to infiltrate Earth’s defenses by seducing the world’s top scientists and politicians into playing a kind of unwinnable game. Or you have a series like Game of Thrones, which was just season after season of bloodshed as aristocratic families war against each other in an endless game.
I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think it speaks deeply to the general feeling that we’ve all been made players in an economy where we just can’t win. The problem, of course, is that these are all products of a corporate culture industry that has a very difficult time delivering the kind of fables and images that we need. Ultimately, in all of these films we’re presented with forms of rebellion or resistance that hinge on the moral acts of particular individuals. Without gainsaying the importance of morality (we all need to take a moral stance against injustices in our society), there are no solutions to this problem except through collective action. We need social movements, and those social movements need to demand fundamental systemic change. But 80 or 90 years into the repertoire of cinematic spectacle under capitalism, we have almost no ways of representing collective struggle. Where these representations fall down is that they offer us solace for the conditions we experience, but they offer no realistic solution except individual moral action or apocalypse, the idea that only a cataclysm can free us from this condition.
I think that’s very tragic in this moment, because what we desperately need are bold visions that teach us how to work together, how to cooperate differently, how to seize a common agency through which we could change the system of which we’re a part. Maybe we’ll come to this a little later in the conversation, but I actually think that’s where games can step in. What’s so special about games, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen points out, is that they give us a theater within which we can practice or rehearse other forms of agency, including collective agency, what it would mean to act together in a new way. Unfortunately, the major games industry is oriented again toward individual heroism and the protagonism of the lonely, vengeful individual. But I think there’s a huge amount of room for games to help us imagine what it would mean for millions of us to come together and, through some form of collective agency, demand a different system.
Rudolf Inderst: You also engage critically with Silicon Valley’s world-building ambitions, the tech industry’s desire to remake reality through platforms, algorithms, and virtual worlds. In what ways is this a form of world destroying as much as world building?
Max Haiven: I think one can’t write about fascism in the 21st century without speaking about the industry in which it is incubating and has its greatest influence, which is the convergence of high finance and high tech represented by Silicon Valley. By Silicon Valley here, I don’t just mean that particular location in the United States, but more broadly a certain vector of power within capitalism.
What we’ve seen is that many of the Silicon Valley titans, especially over the last five or six years, have abandoned what little pretense they had of being great humanists who promised to take humanity to the stars, or aid in the evolution of our species to ever greater horizons of understanding and technological achievement. They’ve gone into a “mask off” moment of what, as I mentioned, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call end-times fascism. It’s the recognition that the world has already been poisoned, in many ways by them and their efforts, and that not all of us are going to survive the coming apocalypse, and therefore only the chosen shall be given the tools and resources to thrive. This has meant that an industry that was very much built on ideas of world building has now committed itself to the flip side of that, which I call world razing, or world destruction.
I begin with the observation that the vast majority of the major figures in Silicon Valley that we might name, whether it’s Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Marc Andreessen, credit a history of playing tabletop role-playing games, especially Dungeons & Dragons, as key to the formation of their thinking. This builds on scholarship over the years that has noted the importance of these arenas of the imagination to what Richard Barbrook some years ago called the Californian Ideology, the strange merger of hippieish, leftish thinking with techno-libertarian hypercapitalism.
My argument is that if we go back over a longer history of capitalism, we can see that at many points, the ascendant part of the capitalist class, the most powerful subsection of capitalists, has delighted in various forms of world building that have always had, on the other side of the coin, a destruction of worlds as well. In the earlier days of capitalism, for instance, we had utopian schemes for the land that is now North America, which Indigenous people call Turtle Island, where capitalist speculators began to imagine magical worlds they could build on what they insisted was unoccupied land. But in order to build those utopias, or even dystopias that were marketed as utopias to settlers and investors, there needed to be a genocide of Indigenous people on those lands.
I fast-forward that to the horrific scene of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace proposals for what Gaza will look like after it’s been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. Those circulate in the kind of playgrom meme culture that’s so common on the far right, where you don’t know if they’re joking or not. In some ways it doesn’t matter, because ultimately it’s not about whether what is being represented will come true. It’s about the power to say, “This is the world I want to build, and no one can stop me.” It’s what I call a fascist flex, one that says to followers and prospective followers, this is what power is. Power is all that has ever existed. Power is all that ever will exist. Power not only to dictate who lives and who dies, who has the resources and who will be starved, but even the power to define what reality is.
That power, I think, we see again and again from people in Silicon Valley who are actively working to undermine what few institutions still exist in our society to hold power to account and to maintain a common understanding of truth. For example, Peter Thiel’s well-funded efforts to attack academics, including the previously mentioned Jason Arday in the United Kingdom, or his new startup that will attack journalists who displease him. These are attempts not only to attack his political enemies but to monopolize the production of truth, to monopolize our vision of reality. That’s something that’s also being accelerated the more we entrust our attention and our reality to social media platforms and streaming media platforms that are owned by these Silicon Valley companies.
Rudolf Inderst: Now Max, you end the book with a rather simple question, but we know the truth about simple questions, right? What is an anti-fascist game? That’s not a rhetorical question. You seem to be suggesting that we need to imagine and build alternatives. What would an anti-fascist game look like, and how do we start playing it? Maybe without the right arm.
Max Haiven: Quite, quite. It’s a question that vexed me throughout the entire writing of the book, because I’m sure, like many of your listeners who are interested in games, I really do fundamentally believe in their revolutionary potential. I think we’re in a moment of game making that is truly unique and incredibly exciting, so I don’t want to be totally cynical about it, even though in my book I’m very critical of the mainstream game industry, both for the way that it treats workers and for the games that it’s creating, and for its contribution to game capitalism in the broader sense.
I would begin by saying that I am a game maker. I make analog social games. This year I published a game with Pluto Press called Billionaires and Guillotines. I have another game coming out next year called Comrade Orca, where you attack billionaire yachts as a pod of orca whales. I can talk a little more about those later. I’m definitely interested in what games can do as vehicles for the radical imagination and for coming together and exploring new forms of agency. And yet this book, The Player and the Played, in spite of being published in the games list of MIT Press and announcing itself as being about games in the very title, is in some ways asking a different question: what can those of us who are struggling for collective liberation and against fascism learn from games? I’m interested in how we can make anti-fascist games, but, as the title of this final chapter asks, I’m interested in the anti-fascist game more generally, and in what many different kinds of people, some of whom aren’t interested in games at all, could learn from thinking through games as part of this broader strategy.
With that said, there are a great number of games on the market that propose themselves to be anti-fascist. Going back to the ’90s, we have Wolfenstein 3D, a video game literally about killing Nazis. There are board games like Antifa: Le Jeu, a card game from France that simulates the work of an anti-fascist collective, a really amazing game. There are video games like the award-winning Through the Darkest of Times from a Berlin studio. There’s great interaction and gameplay in that strategy game, but it’s also a bit of a playable novel about what it would mean to be an anti-fascist cell in Nazi Germany. There are many other games that simulate anti-fascist struggle, and I find those games very interesting. I analyze them and offer some commentary on them in this final chapter.
But as I mentioned, I’m interested in something even broader. What I come to is the idea that for a game to truly deserve the term “anti-fascist,” we need to focus on each of the elements of the so-called fascist sphinx, to come back to the metaphor I introduced earlier. Your listeners will recall that in the Greek myth of Oedipus, the hero is met at the gates of Thebes by a monster with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings and talons of an eagle. It asks its riddle to everyone who tries to pass, and Oedipus is able to succeed. I think about fascism as a hybrid monster made up of three parts. The first is what I call manifest fascism. The second is what I call latent fascism. And the third is microfascism. My argument in this final chapter is that to think about an anti-fascist project, and even an anti-fascist game, we need to think about all of these as wrapped into one creature. A truly anti-fascist politics will need to address all three.
Briefly, then. Manifest fascism is the obvious kind, the overt fascist ideology: the white supremacist, misogynistic, revolutionary-reactionary worldview that suggests the good, hardworking, honest, normal people have been abused, undermined, and almost destroyed by virulent minorities that must be wiped out. That’s a fairly conventional understanding of fascism. My contribution here is to say that manifest fascism sometimes has the decency to announce itself as fascist, but often it’s hidden. In fact, many people who today espouse a fascist ideology claim that it is their accusers who are guilty of fascism, because they’re suppressing their freedom of speech. Elon Musk is famous for doing this. He goes out and says things that sound like they came from Hitler’s or Mussolini’s notebooks, and then claims that anyone who points out this fact is themselves a fascist because they’re somehow suppressing his freedom. The freedom of the richest man in the world, who had the ear of the president of the United States, is somehow being limited by people on his own social media platform. Ridiculous, but nonetheless, there it is. So that’s manifest fascism, the direct fascist ideology.
Then we have latent fascism, which I take from a long history of anti-colonial thought, and thought from the worlds of Black liberation and Indigenous liberation in the Americas, which suggests that fascism has always been part of liberal capitalist democracies. It’s just not evenly distributed. In the postwar period, during the Cold War and after, the United States and the NATO countries and the so-called West sponsored and supported fascist regimes around the world, from Indonesia to Uganda to Guatemala, in the name of protecting capitalism from the threat of socialism, or protecting the profitability of corporations to exploit land and people in those countries. So fascism has long existed within capitalism. It’s just not necessarily been felt by the most privileged sectors of the capitalist global economy, who happen to also be the people who get to write and publish books and political analysis. If we take an anti-colonial perspective, we can recognize that many places around the world have been subjected to fascism for a long time, and indeed colonialism and slavery themselves could well be seen as predecessors, or early forms, of fascism.
Similarly, these critics point out that there are fascist institutions within liberal capitalist democracies already: the police, the prison system, the border regime. These are authoritarian institutions that enforce the racial color line, that dictate who can live and who can die based on racist assumptions, based on the categorization of people into belonging and unbelonging, the valued and the surplus. It’s not coincidental that the greatest support for manifest fascist policies and political parties tends to come from police, from the military, from prisons, and from border guards. So that’s the argument around latent fascism. It’s already here. It’s not a question of “is it fascism yet?” It’s always fascism for someone, maybe just not for us, or for you.
Then there’s the third meaning of fascism that I take, which is microfascism. This is the idea that the seeds of fascism are already planted within each of us. They just require the right conditions to grow, the right fertilizer, the right accelerant. This argument emerged, I think, in the decade after the Second World War, and especially in the 1960s, to try to identify how any of us could be conscripted into the service of a fascist project. It’s an attempt to understand how we all long for the clear simplicity that fascist demagogues offer. It attempts to explain how we lust for authority and also lay ourselves at the feet of authority. It attempts to explain how authoritarian tendencies even begin to enter projects and movements for collective liberation. There is something in all of us that fascism can grip onto, unless we do the constant work of challenging our own habituation to various forms of coercive sovereignty, unless we do the feminist work of challenging our own habituation to patriarchal ideas of domination, including domination over nature, for example.
So we have the manifest, the latent, and the micro. Where I end this book is basically saying that if there is going to be an anti-fascist game, in the broad sense of a game like a strategy, and if there are going to be anti-fascist games, it isn’t enough to have a game like Wolfenstein where you go around shooting Nazis. It’s going to need to address all three aspects of the fascist sphinx. And unfortunately, I don’t know what that game looks like. I can only really explore it in my own game-making practice. For instance, in the game I’m working on now about orcas, which is really about giving us an opportunity to cooperate differently, to learn what it would be like to work together and coordinate our activities, and to discover a form of agency through our relationship with a nonhuman other. But I don’t know if that’s the solution. It’s just the problem that the book ends with.
Rudolf Inderst: As we have learned, your book has very profound implications for how we understand games as cultural artifacts. For scholars, students, and activists, and of course our listeners today, what do you hope readers will take away from The Player and the Played?
Max Haiven: On a modest level, I hope to have done a few things as a scholar. I think I offer in the book a useful and perhaps even original synthesis of anti-fascist scholarship, to try to shed some light on the thing I’m calling 21st-century fascism. I think the book does some original work in linking financialization to games and gamification in ways that are only being discovered now. From a scholarly perspective, that feels satisfying, and I think it’s a book that contributes to a growing body of work within game studies that insists that games must deeply engage with the contemporary issues of our time.
I also hope the book will be useful and inspirational to game makers. As I mentioned, games are one of the transformative mediums of 21st-century politics and ideology, and there’s so much fascinating and exciting work to be done in orienting and aligning games with an anti-fascist project. I really hope the book is clear enough and urgent enough that game makers will be inspired not only to make anti-fascist games but to be more precise and strategic in the interventions those games are making.
And more broadly, finally, I’m someone who’s been involved in anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist social movements for my whole adult life. If I’m honest, most of those social movements are boring and demoralizing. I think those movements have a huge amount to learn from games and gaming about how to captivate people’s agency and attention. One of the things that 21st-century fascism does so devastatingly well is seize upon this gamified moment in order to offer people a politics that is ultimately suicidal. It will destroy the world, and it will destroy even its adherents, but nonetheless it feels fun. When you join these far-right social movements, you’re not just becoming a cog in a machine. You actually feel empowered. You feel creative. You feel like you’ve found a community that supports you and your particular approach to things.
Those of us involved in anti-fascist struggles and struggles for collective liberation can’t ignore the incredible success of fascists in conscripting games and game spaces. We know, for instance, that the far right is organizing extremely effectively in Discord groups and other adjacent game spaces, and even in games like Minecraft and Roblox. They’re very active in these spaces, and we need to confront them there. But also, and I think this is the key thing I would love people to take from this book, as part of an anti-fascist struggle we need to embrace the power of play and the promise of games. We need to do so in the name of a world that isn’t just a future of misery and toil, but a world where we can take the incredible resources and capacities that we’ve generated as a species on this planet and put them toward a life of leisure, where games and play become the substance of life rather than work and toil and exploitation, as under the current order.
Rudolf Inderst: Well, Max, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your insights on The Player and the Played. It has been a real pleasure discussing this thought-provoking book with you.
Max Haiven: Thanks so much for the opportunity.