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Over the past decade, the extreme right around the world has been startlingly successful at hijacking video games and their adjacent online spaces (chatrooms, message boards, fan culture) for recruitment, primarily of young men. But this is not a book about how fascists exploit games.
Their success is due, in no small part, to the fact that many games implicitly echo far-right and fascistic values: the use of apocalyptic violence to restore the world to order; the domination and exploitation of territories and people; megalomaniacal worldbuilding (and worldrazing); the ruthless reduction of everything to a means to an end. But this is not a book about fascist themes, tropes, or ideology in games. Nor is it about the ways fascistic politics are fostered by political economic structures of the massive game studios and the platform-mediated independent game scene.
Today’s fascistic activists, provocateurs, and personalities are notorious for masking their abusive, violent, and manipulative speech and action as “just a joke,” a little game, why so serious? This extends to the recent political ascension of far-right clowns to power in the United States, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere: bombastic jesters who pleasure their followers with a combination of transgressive irreverence and punitive cruelty. But this book is interested in these forms of cruel political play primarily insofar as they reveal something much more profound about the political-economic system in which they incubated.
That is a political-economic system of gamed capitalism, a financialized system where we all transform ourselves into competitive players, where cheating is normalized, and where we are exploited via our agency. And while games may have become, by some estimates, the world’s most popular and profitable form of entertainment, with an estimated 2-billion people playing a commercially-mediated game on a daily basis, this is not a book about games per se. Rather it about a moment of capitalism where we all feel played, and its economic, political, and cultural roots and consequences.
Gamed capitalism and the cheated player
At the core of this book is the argument that, in addition to financialization driving forward forms of drastic inequality that can be fomented into reactionary resentments of “elites” and misdirected rage at less fortunate minorities, 21st century fascistic politics thrive by making an appeal to the cheated player. Forty years into the neoliberal, financialized revolution within capitalism and we has seen us all exhorted and expected to transmute ourselves into competitive, self-interested, speculative agents who embrace the ruthless volatility of a market society to maximize our returns. Whereas once capitalism depended on transforming people into “free” waged workers, today it also converts these workers into investors. As forms of collective insurance are decimated by neoliberal policies and growing corporate power, we are each tasked with internalizing the disposition of the financier and speculating on the future. Everything becomes an asset to be leveraged in a world of scarcity without guarantees: education, housing, relationships, skills and talents, physical fitness, and attractiveness. Whether we flip houses, buy crypto, hit the gym, take out debt to buy a university degree, send our kids to AI coding camp, sell drugs, run scams, or try our luck at becoming a content creator or influencer on gamified social media platforms, everyone has been tasked with recasting themselves as a player in this economy. This imperative has been mirrored and advanced in popular culture, with innumerable “reality TV” series dedicated to lionizing the judicious investor who leverages their assetized self to compete (as a hopeful entertainer, a house flipper, an antiques trader, or a bachelor/ette).
And yet, if we are all players, most of us cannot win. Despite the necessary optimism we might try and manifest about our own individual chances to keep going, most of us are cynics, and for good reason: the rich get richer; most who play the game lose; talent and hard work are merely the price of competing, not a guarantor of success. And the stakes are high in a world where the collective safety nets once (perhaps problematically) provided by the state or community or family are almost everywhere in tatters.
We cannot understand the appeal or the force of 21st century fascistic politics (or discover how to effectively fight it) unless we come to terms with how financialized capitalism produced the cheated player, particularly the cheated player who, by virtue of their moderate privilege within financialized capitalism, believed the game ought to have been fair. Often, poor, racialized, marginalized, and minoritized people have few illusions that the system ought to be fair. As in the 20th century, fascistic politics emerge from and most easily seduce those with some relatively minor status and privilege, who recognize that the current material conditions of capitalism threaten what little they have and want protection and revenge.
The Cheating Other
The success of 21st century fascistic politics is based in no small part in turning the anger of the cheated player away from capitalists (who are often cheating, through tax havens, for one, and through the gaming of democracy in a multitude of ways we will explore in chapter 2) and towards convenient minorities: cheating others.
Migrants are accused of cheating the border regime and gaming the labor market to deprive hard working “native” populations of jobs; claimants of social benefits are accused of taking advantage of threadbare state programs to live lives of ease on the public purse; trans people are accused not only of cheating at sports and, more generally, of dangerously cheating the natural order of sex; racialized and other minority “special interest groups” are accused of abusing the tolerance, benevolence and compassion of the majority to game the capitalist and institutional meritocracy by passing DEI politics that install unworthy and incompetent people in universities, government, and corporations. Environmentalists are rumored to have fabricated an elaborate climate crisis at the behest of nefarious funders to scam the nation of its prosperity and individuals of their liberties. Nebulously defined “elites,” too, are held to be cheating by using power and wealth to crush rivals, sabotage democracy, or avoid the law, but in ways that usually focus on the loathsome morals of particular individuals, and rarely on features at the heart of the economic system. In Brazil, in Turkey, in the Philippines, in the UK and in America, fascistic politicians and commentators have thrived not only by citing “traditionalist” values and the promise of order, but though insinuations that conspiracies exist to cheat the hardworking everyman of his due. Often this “elite” is imagined to include not only those with political and economic power, but useful scapegoats who appear to have cultural and intellectual authority, who are held to be in cahoots with the plutocrats to both cheat and humiliate everyone else.
The “public feeling” of being cheated is ideological not simply because it rehearses a common narrative, but because it helps all of us players make sense of the pain of capitalism’s material reality. We live in a world where corporations and the powerful act largely with impunity and transparently manipulate society, the economy, and politics. But even more intimately, neoliberalism and financialization have ushered us into a world of maze-like public and private bureaucracies where we feel we are always being cheated: a labyrinth of fines, fees, and penalties. It is a digitally mediated capitalist world where the apps, services, and infrastructures are gamed in someone else’s favor, corralling or “nudging” us in ways we sense but do not always know, including through the processes known as gamification. There is something deeply infuriating in being an object or a non-player character (NPC) in someone or something else’s game.
Perhaps because of this, although 21st century fascistic politics organize themselves around the sentiments of the cheated player, there is something dark at work in them that accepts and even celebrates cheating. This helps explain why so many successful far right and fascistic political actors are themselves cheats, even conspicuously so. There may be a surface narrative, such as the one Donald Trump articulated in his first successful electoral bid in 2016, that as a career cheat he knew the game and could be trusted to catch his fellow cheats.
But this is only part of the story. Part of the lure of fascistic politics is that they respond to the complexity of the world with a single unifying claim: power is, and is all that is. Those with it owe nothing to those without. Those without power must accept their fate, seize power in some way, or find a protector (a man, the state, a boss). It is a power not only to have one’s way but to create reality. It is a primordial power emblematized in the conspicuous and arbitrary making and breaking of rules. Laws and norms but also values like truth and reason are only relevant to the powerless, whom they confine: those with power and know all these can be broken and remade. The fascist cheat is the ultimate player, the game master, the worldbuilder and razer, the political apotheosis of financial power.
Derivative Fascisms
The next chapter will be dedicated to clarifying the terms that animate this book. In the first place, I will be deepening the analysis of financialization as a period within capitalist accumulation, a set of transformative processes that subordinate society to the speculative market, and a paradigm within which social institutions and subjectivities are transformed. I will propose that financialization is deeply entangled with games on a number of levels: the growth of the games industry and its ever more pivotal role in our lives; the arrival of gamification, where game-like elements are integrated into digital life, often in highly exploitative ways; but also the emergence of a broader idiom of gamed capitalism, in which so many of us feel like we are trapped in an unwinnable game. This sets the stage for a more thorough definition of fascistic politics, which again is a three-layered concept: manifest fascism refers to parties or individuals who espouse fascistic ideas or policies, whether they call themselves fascists or not. By contrast, latent fascism refers to the way that liberal capitalist democracy contains fascist elements within its world system (eg. dictators, apartheid regimes) and domestic institutions (eg. police, borders, prisons). Microfascism identifies the kernel of fascism within each of us and that also expresses itself in xenophobia, patriarchy, sovereignty and the yearning for or worship of power. When we see all three together, we are better equipped to understand today’s fascistic politics, and the rest of the chapter explores the links between financialization and fascistic politics, financialization and games, and games and fascism.
In the book’s second chapter, I take up Hito Steyrl’s underdeveloped concept of derivative fascisms by way of an analysis of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, which came to widespread public attention during the Global Covid-19 Pandemic and because of its prominent role in the far-right storming of the US Capitol in January of 2021. Inspired by research that likens QAnon to a participatory alternate reality game live-action roleplaying, I draw on the cultural theorist Randy Martin’s notion of derivative sociality to explore how financialization does not repress our creativity, playfulness and social powers but excites and reshapes them in profound but confusing new ways. In this view, the word “derivative” indexes aesthetic pastiche and also one of finance’s capitals’ signature technologies: the derivatives contract (essentially, a tradable agreement to make an exchange in the future). For Martin, financialization creates possibilities for emergent forms of swarm-like “collective movement” of risk-taking bodies outside conventional frames. But while he was optimistic (inspired by movements like Occupy Wall Street), I argue the same forces also breed derivative fascisms which are, unlike their 20th century ancestors, playful, creative, prosocial, and fun.
The Rule of Cheats
How is it that cheats have come to rule? In the book’s third chapter, I begin with the reliance of 21st century fascistic politics on the myth of the (usually racialized) “cheating other” held to be responsible for society’s decline and the terrifying success of far-right politicians and pundits who succeed not despite being cheats, but because of it. To unpack this, I turn to several notable moments in the genealogy of financializaed capitalism where, contrary to official claims the system is essentially fair (if occassionally betrayed by exceptional miscreants), it is in fact built on cheating. The “Great Game” refers to the way European empires that incubated capitalism mercilessly turned the world into a vast exploitable chessboard while, at the same time, insisting they were bringing fair play and the rule of law to benighted peoples who were not yet ready to play the game of civilization. I turn to game theory, which, far from an academic curiosity has, since the second world war, fundamentally reshaped geopolitics, economics, public policy, evolutionary biology, the development of computing and much else besides. It is a paradigm that, beyond promoting a highly competitive and instrumental view of human behavior also presumes cheating to be normal and brings it to the centre of its analysis. Perhaps because of this, finance itself, as a vital field within capitalism is also fundamentally built on cheating and the exploitation of loopholes, grey areas, and new technologies.
This sets the stage then for the second half of the chapter, which explores prominent forms of normalized cheating within our moment of gamed capitalism, starting with the popularity of pyramid schemes. These are basically transparent scams, but they appeal to their victims (who are also perpetrators) with a narrative that frames the broader system as a scam that can be gamed, offering agency, hope, and social fun to people who often feel played, hopeless, and alone. Many of these tropes are echoed in the narratives of romance and lifestyle influencers who suggest that heterosexual love, sex, and companionship are games to be played, and they have been pivotal to the startling the success of fascist and misogynistic personality Andrew Tate, who promises to teach his paying fans how to “win at the game of life” with “cheat codes” that will allow them to master a system that is cheating them of wealth, fame, health, and women. The chapter revisits the spectacle of “professional” (staged) wrestling which is entirely organized around the lionization of the conspicuous cheat, the “perfect perfect bastard” and his delightful power to bend reality. And it concludes with a meditation on the political category of fairness, and if those of us who struggle for collective liberation and a world beyond capitalism may need to revisit its salience.
The playgrom and fascist worldbuilding
I argue, in the book’s fourth chapter, that the portmanteau playgrom (play + pogrom) can help us understand gamified fascistic violence in our financialized moment. Here I take up the example of the 2014-15 Gamergate saga, in which male video game fans launched a vicious but playful online harassment campaign based on a conspiracy theory that feminists were seeking to undermine the impartiality of game journalism. This incident was seized upon by the new far right as a template for how to mobilize reactionary sentiment around the feelings of being cheated and through playful online communities. It also takes up the 2019 Christchurch massacre, in which 51 people were murdered at a Mosque and Islamic centre by a terrorist convinced he was saving the white race from “replacement”, and other similar fascistic murder rampages that emerge from and are celebrated in extreme-right online game communities and that play themselves out and are livestreamed as if they were first-person shooter video games. I take up the playgrom as a form of deep, dark playbor that does the work of fascism (even if its protagonists deny it). Deep play refers to a form of play that articulates something profound about the society from which it emerges, including its underlying systems and structures of power; play is dark when its consequences reach beyond the consensual “magic circle” (the voluntary space, set aside from everyday life) or when it dwells with that which is taboo or transgressive; playbor names the way that, under contemporary capitalism, play is put to work and made economically productive, usually on digital platforms and typically in ways that are exploitative or reproduce the dominant economic order. When placed in conjunction, deep dark playbor asks us to focus our attention on how playgroms do the work of fascism, producing gender and racial terror that serves capitalism’s reproduction.
The penultimate chapter of this book revisits the question of worldbuilding, a term of recent coinage which has generally been greeted with enthusiasm by critical scholars for naming practices which produce imaginary worlds that might challenge the presumptions of the dominant order or prefigure or inspire social change. I, however, want to tell a story here about the centrality of worldbuilding (and worldrazing) to fascist imaginaries, particularly to those aligned with the far-right of Silicon Valley, which for me signals the extremely consequential political-economic intersection of American-led finance and digital technology, though its influence stretches well beyond that (retail via Amazon, culture via Apple, real estate via AirBNB, advanced manufacturing via Tesla/SpaceX, everything via AI). I begin with the curious fact that nearly all the major SV magnates and financiers enthusiastically played the worldbuilding game Dungeons & Dragons in their youth, and many use game references and metaphors to describe their worldchanging activities. The chapter borrows a labyrinthine methodology from the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, which I find helpful in exploring the recursive question of how coercive fictions make themselves real, a question probed in his famous and highly influential 1940 short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Tracing the worldbuilding/worldrazing impulse back to the settler colonialism, this chapter parses how financialization is a form of worldbuilding where fabulated “fictitious capital” makes itself real and the way this power inspires and empowers fascistic personalities today (see Haiven 2014b). Their unprecedented wealth inspires a megalomania in which the obverse side of their worldbuilding powers is a apocalyptic worldrazing, emblematized by the genocidal war on Gaza.
What is the antifascist game?
What, then, is the antifascist game? The conclusion begins by reviewing some recent and historical games that dwell with this question. While there are many games, notably the germinal first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, that offer players a chance to shoot a Nazi, these typically fall far short of challenging the ideas, ideologies, sentiments, and forms of sociality and subjectivity on which fascism feeds – indeed sometimes they do the opposite. While recent award-winning games like Disco Elysium and Through the Darkest of Times offer more complex and nuanced perspectives, there remains much work to be done, not only in creating games that contest fascism’s appeal, but in studying games for what they can teach us about antifascist political organizing, intellectual and artistic work, and living an antifascist life. Accordingly, I revisit the three-part model of fascism proposed in chapter 1, examining how manifest, latent, and micro fascisms play out in the context of play and games.
I then offer a comparison between three antifascist strategies: liberal antifascism, which aims to strengthen and defend democratic institutions and triumph in the marketplace of ideas; socialist antifascism, that recognizes its enemy as emerging from capitalism and seeks to organize working and oppressed peoples to defeat both; and antiauthoritarian antifascism, which prioritizes community-level organizing and building infrastructures for antifascist life. As the threat of fascistic politics grows in the years to come, game-makers and people who care about games will need to be attentive to these distinctions. Antifascist games should strive to confront fascistic politics on the level of its ideological and institutional manifestations, on the level of its deep roots within capitalism, and on the level of everyday life, community, subjectivity, and sociality. But antifascist organizers, artists, and intellectuals can also learn a great deal from games. If, as I argue throughout the book,21st century fascistic politics emerges from a form of gamed, financialized capitalism that seduces and exploits our agency then games provide us a way of thinking about what it would mean to create movements, forms of collective study, and cultural experiences that are transformative in their playfulness.
I am not for a moment suggesting that antifascism needs to be more fun in any simplistic sense, and we should be extremely skeptical of outdated (and probably suicidal) claims that fascism is a dour and mirthless phantom to be dispelled by the power of joy. But in the struggles to come, that emerge within and may lead us out of gamed capitalism, how we create space and opportunities for playful agency is vitally important.
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