It has been a treat to work with the wonderful Weird Economies project on a new 10-episode podcast, “The Exploits of Play,” which will be launched on 26 February 2024 with new episodes released weekly until May.
This series explores how games and gamification have moved from the margin to the centre of the weird capitalist economy.
It jumps beyond the commonplace and largely uninteresting observation that video games have become a major entertainment industry. It also takes for granted that tech and speculative capital have invested heavily in technologies of gamification as a means to gain and hook new users. Instead, it looks to the deeper sociological roots and effects of these trends and the way they are reshaping many spheres of life, from economics to sexuality. And it meditates on what this means for resistance… the good, the bad and the ugly.
Join us for episodes on the gamification of love, on the playfulness of conspiracism, on the myth of the “cheating other,” on the tyrannical rise and rule of game theory, on the appeal of the Hunger Games… and much more!
The podcast is based on research I’m doing currently for my next book The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism.
Ep01 – Conspiracy Plays – Hugh Davies on the temptations of alternate reality
Ep02 – The Game at War with the World – S. M. Amadae on the powers behind the prisoner’s dilemma
Ep03 – All Against All – Tom Boland on our modern gladiators and the real world hunger games
Ep04 – Frontiers of Play – Mary Flanagan on games, colonialism, and the playful imagination
Ep05 – The Cheating Other – Gargi Bhattacharyya on how racial capitalism scams us twice
Ep06 – Gaming Authority – Thiago Falcẫo on exploitation and far-right politics in the games industry
Ep07 – “It Is What It Is” – Sophie Lewis on Love Island, game shows, and the banality of capitalist eros
Ep08 – Toyed With – Alfie Brown on the gamification of affect and love’s digital futures
Ep09 – The Singularity Bluff – Christian Nagler on Silicon Valley’s dangerous dreams of cheating death
Ep10 – Our Moves and Movements – Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux on the playfully subverting capitalism