The following is an unedited preprint of a paper that will appear in the journal Media Theory.
Abstract
This highly speculative paper proposes the term playgrom to identify an idiom of playfully cruel fascistic violence that emerges from, is shaped by, and also exceeds gamified financialized capitalism. Like the anti-Semitic pogroms of late-Tsarist Russia and subsequent acts of racist terrorism there and elsewhere, the pogroms appears to be a forms of spontaneous, unsanctioned majoritarian mob violence against minorities. But we must look to the deeper roots of such phenomena in both dominant ideologies and collapsing socioeconomic systems. I draw on the examples of the 2014-15 Gamergate online decentralized anti-feminist swarming campaign and the 2019 Christchurch white supremacist massacre as examples of the playgrom. As other have illustrated, these acts of mass violence, which I will characterize as fascistic, were gamified, and drew on gaming themes, tropes and communities for their vitality. But I also propose that, to fully understand these phenomena, we must also contextualize them in the current moment of gamified capitalism, and so I propose approaching the playgrom as a form of deep, dark playbor.
Keywords
Fascism; play; games; reactionary and far-right politics; capitalism; playbour; gamification
Introduction
This highly speculative essay attempts to paint, in the broadest strokes, a theory of what I will call the playgrom: a portmanteau of play and pogrom. By this term I am gesturing towards an idiom of fascistic mob violence that emerges within but that also exceeds a digitalized, financialized and gamified mode of capitalism. This term can help us bring into view some of the alignments of ideology, affect, technology and political economy which can enrich our understanding of fascism and fascistic politics in the contemporary moment, when, I argue, the subjectivities and modes of sociality forged under financialized and gamified capitalism (roughly 1973-present) have incubated new forms of reactionary culture and politics.
I will take up the 2015 Gamergate mass anti-feminist swarming and the 2019 Christchurch massacre as examples of the playgrom: both are incidents where dominant groups undertook fascistic mass violence as if it were a kind of game, and with direct reference to digital and commercial game culture. Both events emerged from online gamer cultures and were pursued by their protagonists using gamified methods. While other authors have insightfully dwelled with the gamified elements of these events, I will supplement this with some observations about how this behaviour must also be contextualized within a political economic frame of financialized, gamified capitalism. Here, most people’s lives have come to feel like an unwinnable game, giving rise to both (toxic) forms of countergaming and vindictive political affects.
After introducing, contextualizing and justifying the term playgrom, I will argue that much is to be gained by considering it a form of deep and dark playbor. Anthropologists understand deep play to be forms of play that reflect a society’s (often unstated and misapprehended) values and their contradictions. Game scholars name as “dark” those forms of play that have broader “real life” consequences (often dire), or that dwell with or incorporate non-normative social themes, usually ones which mainstream opinion finds taboo, objectionable or offensive. Several scholars have theorized far-right and fascist online cultures as playing deep and dark games (Grobe, 2022), but my analysis will suggest that we also see these in a broader political economic context where various forms of play and games have been incorporated as never before into the operations of capitalism in its financialized, gamified mode. In presenting the playgrom as deep dark playbor, I am drawing on a literature that seeks to bring play and labour into critical proximity, in an effort to recognize the changing nature of exploitation, especially in technology and cultural industries where user-generated and playfully collaborative work produces assets of significant social and economic value. Yet in identifying the playgrom as deep dark playbor I am also seeking to open a space for considering how it contributes to the reproduction of capitalism much more broadly: as a nursery for reactionary subjectivity, as a form of wage- and demand-suppressing vigilantism, as a means to enforce racial and gendered divisions within the working class that entrench the conditions of exploitation, and in ways that offer psychic compensation (akin to the “the wages of whiteness”) to some of that class’s more privileged actors.
The pogrom as fascistic violence
The word pogrom is derived from the Russian verb that roughly translates as “to destroy.” It seems to have appeared in the 1880s in the first instance to describe unsanctioned, spontaneous anti-Semitic violence. While that phenomenon was certainly not new, it took on both a renewed vigour and terror in the late 19th century as the Tsarist empire succumbed to paroxysms of chaos that would, eventually, culminate in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Civil War until 1922. The grim fate of Jews in that period was widely reported around the world, and the term pogrom was widely applied to other forms of anti-Semitic violence as well as to refer to the more centrally organized and coordinated persecution of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their various fascist clients (Avrutin and Bemporad, 2021).
Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the term has been broadened to identify a much wider range of extra-legal mob violence of majorities against minorities, notably anti-Muslim campaigns in India perpetuated by individuals and groups closely associated with the now-reigning far-right BJP party (Jasani, 2014) or the anti-Palestinian mob violence of Zionist settlers in the West Bank (Iraqi, 2023). There remains a debate as to if the term ought to be applied to the mob violence, race riots, and lynchings that characterized the Jim Crow era in the United States. Whether or not the term is fitting or anachronistic, the events are not dissimilar (Gordon, 2022).
The salient characteristics of a pogrom include that it is an incident or series of incidents of anti-minority collective violence that appears spontaneous and is not officially organized by the state, but that nonetheless emerges from deeply rooted prejudices and forms of oppression, and it takes place in the context of social upheaval and uncertainty.
Historians and theorists of the pogrom warn that we should not see it simply as an ahistorical recurrence of some atavistic human tendency (see Dekel-Chen et al., 2010). Certainly, unsanctioned and seemingly spontaneous xenophobic and anti-minority violence has characterized many horrific episodes across many civilizations. But the pogroms of the Tsarist Empire must be historicized as emerging from a particularly modern confluence of forces that had the effect of unleashing violent racist terror. These, argue the editors of a recent collection of documents contemporary to the events, included not only long-standing anti-Semitic sentiments but also growing fear and frustration and desperation at rapid economic and social change brought about by the increasing integration of capitalist markets; new technological affordances (notably the ability to print and distribute newspapers and tracts and the public’s growing ability to afford and read them), as well as uniquely modern political ideologies that introduced racial nationalism and also the closely connected supposedly scientific rationales for racial, ethnic or religious purity or more generally promoted the management of populations (Avrutin and Bemporad, 2021).
In this sense, we might say that, although pogroms are rarely (and perhaps by definition) not planned or coordinated by leading economic actors (the state or firms), and indeed in spite of the fact that sometimes these actors officially (and perhaps even earnestly) decry the pogrom, they nonetheless do the work of the dominant order. By this I mean that they typically enforce, entrench and extend the forms of oppression, inequality and exploitation on which that dominant order, or significant powerful factions within it, depend. The Tsarist regime officially decried the original pogroms and claimed it was helpless to prevent them, and indeed the pogroms in some ways undermined some of its plans and embarrassed it on the world stage. And yet the pogroms were initially and frequently undertaken in the name of the Tsar and his regime, and in many ways contributed to the perpetuation of his regime. Pogroms can be observed to serve various factions within the broader political economy. For example, small capitalists and farmers who were indebted to Jewish lenders could rid themselves of their obligations. Employers could exploit racialized divisions within the working class. The class tensions at work could release themselves without any meaningful consequences to the political and economic elite.
Obviously, not all pogroms are fascist in the limited political sense that they are conducted by or under fascist regimes or by members of fascist organizations. Indeed, pogroms predate the emergence of fascism by at least half a century. However, I will hazard here that all pogroms articulate a fascistic politics in a much broader sense.[1] Pogroms are a form of terrorism that aims to achieve political outcomes through mass violence, even if not all participants share or can articulate those objectives. Pogroms emerge from and contribute to a culture suffused with fascistic ideas about the imperiled purity of a majority (see Griffin, 1991). Pogroms, like fascism, articulate collective violence in a uniquely modern form, and are reactions to the rapid changes of capitalist modernity (Bauman, 2000). Like fascism, pogroms emerge from, resemble but also exceed the regimes within which they incubate: they often appear as a vicious parody or excessive microcosm of the kinds of violence that already persists all around them (see Toscano, 2023). And while the proponents of fascism or the protagonists of pogroms might espouse all manner of (often contradictory) philosophical or political positions, the ideology behind them ultimately always boils down to what I see as the sine qua non: the worship of power through spectacular and transgressive cruelty.
For this reason, I will associate the pogrom with fascistic politics, a term that strives to identify something broader than fascism: a set of cultural, affective, political, economic and social tendencies that take inspiration from, resonate with or contribute to fascism, but that often lack the centralization, ideological unity or political ambition of fascism. The reason I insist on framing these in terms of fascism (rather than “authoritarianism” or “reactionary politics” or the “far right”) is that it brings my analysis into proximity to a tradition that (a) seeks to demonstrate that these political forces are uniquely incubated within capitalism; that for that reason (b) both inherits traits from and rebels against that system or its contradictions and crises; (c) cannot simply be defeated or ameliorated by liberal capitalist social institutions, nor understood within their dominant frameworks (see Horkheimer, 1973). My analysis here echoes the project of Jack Bratich (2022) to understand the affects, relationalities, subjectivities and broader cultural substrate within which fascism takes root. There is a risk, of course, that the notion of “fascistic politics” is analytically imprecise and easily swallows the nuances between fascism and other expressions of conservatism, nationalism, reactionary politics and so on. The risk, in this context, is worth it, as my ambition here is to bring to light a broad cultural-political trend and its relation to the continental drift of capitalist political economy.
Playful fascism
My concern here is with the form that fascistic politics take when they emerge from what I am referring to as gamified financialized capitalism. In conjoining these adjectives to capitalism I am drawing attention to two entwined dimensions of the transformations in the socioeconomic world system since roughly the 1970s that have seen, on the one hand, the rise to prominence and the widespread influence of the speculative FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector of capitalism and, on the other, the way that this system is increasingly invested in the competitive participation of social subjects which has been achieved in no small part through processes widely known as gamification, as I shall describe later in this paper.
My argument is that the forms of fascistic mob violence we see today must be read in the context of the capitalist contradictions from which they arise and to which they offer a (false) remedy. To that end, I now want to turn to some elements of what I will call playful fascism.
Of course, fascism has always, in its way, been playful. We are ill-served by stereotypical Hollywood images of pathologically severe, unsmiling Nazis. We have ample evidence that humor was (and remains) essential to the cultural politics of fascism and numerous critics have explored and illustrated how cruel and racist jokes can conscript fascist subjects through a politics where innuendo, insinuation and stereotypes work as proxies for arguments, ideological statements and policies (Herzog, 2012; Gundle, 2015; Askanius and Keller, 2021). Indeed, Arendt was among those observers and theorists who noted that it’s rarely fruitful to take fascist ideas, rhetoric and arguments too seriously: not only are they often a joke, but debating or analyzing them seriously makes a joke out of the broader democratic frame of debate or analysis (Arendt, 2004). We might say that it is a conspicuous fascist “flex” to trick or compel “serious” intellectuals or politicians to stoop and contort themselves to deal seriously with fascist ideas.
To this we might add the consistent fascist obsession with sport. Much has been written on the way this dovetails with racist and supremacist notions of the martial and muscular body, as well as the way modern sport often wraps itself around notions of nation (Bolz, 2016; Gilroy, 2000, pp. 137-176). Less has been written about the way that a fascist obsession with sport is itself a kind of game, where a form of organized play is transmuted into a matter of life of death, for example when football hooligans undertake righteous violence in the name of their chosen team.
There is also a widely-held association of fascism with sadistic play as well, made famous in literature and film and having given rise to a substantial kink subculture that fetishizes Nazi aesthetics (Moore, 2011). More historically, Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies offers a window into the kinds of nihilistic violent misogynistic sexual fantasies of wanton playful cruelty that subtend the fascist imaginary (Theweleit, 1987).
And yet today’s fascist cultural politics are playful in historically unique ways. Numerous critics point out that the rise of fascistic politics in the last decade have emerged in no small part from and been deeply inspired by a “gamer culture” that has grown up in a complex dialectical relation with the emergence of digital games as, by some estimates, the largest entertainment industry to have ever existed (Did 2024; Salter, 2018; Hammar, 2020). As we shall explore in more detail momentarily, the avowedly fascist Steven Bannon, architect of Donald Trump’s first successful presidential bid and, more recently, doyen of the global far right and celebrity broadcaster, has profoundly inspired by gamer culture and the events associated with the #gamergate harassment campaign, where (almost exclusively male) gamers organized a vicious online campaign of revenge against a hallucinated conspiracy of feminist game critics and designers (Bezio, 2018). Not only was he to recruit many protagonists to his movement, he also credits them with teaching him to leverage the affordances of online culture to gamify reactionary politics to make them much more widely appealing (see Donovan, Dreyfuss and Friedberg, 2022, pp. 78–107).
The affinity of gamer culture with a new form of fascistic politics is hardly surprising, given the themes, tropes and formats that have been promoted by the hugely profitable video game industry over the past three decades (Hammar, 2020; Did, 2024). While few if any video games openly promote fascism (quite the opposite: there are plenty that revolve around killing fascists), many (indeed, most) are organized around perspectives that are broadly in line with explicit fascist principles and more generally revolve around the worship of power. The “first person shooter” genre of games, perhaps the most popular, places the player behind the eyeballs of a lone, paranoid, violent, superhuman actor who typically uses catastrophic violence to achieve his apocalyptic goals (Voorhees, Call and Whitlock, 2012). The “4X” strategy genre affords the player a gods-eye view of a terrain which he may “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate” to achieve dominance (Rezny, 2016; Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023). While obviously playing these games does not make someone a fascist, and while one cannot say that the medium of digital games or these particular genres are inherently fascism, and while there are interesting (but rare) exceptions within these genres that challenge the dominant paradigm, it’s hard to avoid the fact that, had they been available in the 1930s, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have celebrated them as fitting educational tools for the German master race.
Besides this, we can note, along with Massanari (2024) and Paul (2018), that gamer culture, like the tech sector ideology with which it is intertwined, organizes itself around the (delusional) notion that games are politically neutral and (when not gamed by biased do-gooders) present meritocratic arenas where the naturally talented, hard-working or perseverant rise to the top. This perspective implicitly and often vituperatively denies the existence of preexisting social inequalities and the gendered, ableist and other biases inherent in game design, which has largely been guided by the fabricated desires of its largest client base: able-bodied boys and young men (Salter, 2018). The result has been the emergence within gamer culture of a vicious backlash subculture that has carried through into some of the most influential sectors of capitalist society, notably the tech sector, whose workforce and leadership are disproportionately young male “geeks” raised in video game cultures (Massanari, 2024).
Gamification
And yet something even more insidious and profound is at work here in the emergence of a gamified fascism. Already almost 20 years ago, McKenzie Wark (2007) noted that a winner-take-all, competitive mode of neoliberalism had produced a world eerily haunted by what she called the “gamespace,” a kind of parallel reality where everything felt like an inescapable game, and noted the reactionary sentiments it awakened. Over the past 40 years, the forces we associate with the financialization of the economy and the neoliberal restructuring of governmentality and social institutions have, as has been widely observed, a transfer of social risk from society at large to the individual and the family unit (see Mader, Mertens and van der Zwan, 2019). This transfer, which has been experienced by most people in rising inequality and precariousness, has not, by and large, been experienced as a punitive imposition but, rather, as an expansion of agency, responsibility and possibility, albeit in a highly delimited financialized idiom (Haiven, 2014; Feher, 2018). As state “investment” in social care and security has been eroded, individuals have been exhorted to embrace risk and view themselves as not only an entrepreneur but an investor. Education, once a public good, is increasingly (structurally and culturally) reframed as an opportunity for personal or familial investment in human capital; housing has been financialized not only at the level of banks and other large financial actors, but at the level of the retail consumer, who is increasingly told to secure their and their family’s economic future through judicious investment in property markets; collective defined benefit pensions are quickly being replaced by private investment plans; health, diet and physical and mental fitness have been recast as “investments” in wellbeing; the increasingly fragmented and precarious labour market recasts each worker as a (individually cultivated) portfolio of skills, connections and capacities to be rented on a competitive market, increasingly via digital “platforms” that, on the model of Uber, allow unprecedented “flexibility”; romantic, parenting and psychological advice books, television and online content routinely mobilizes a rhetoric of “investment” to insist that individuals take on the responsibility for future success (and failure). One could go on, and hundreds of scholars have, in the last decades, traced financialization as not only a phenomenon that affects the economy at large and politics, but also social institutions, popular culture and subjectivity (see for example Mader, Mertens and van der Zwan, 2019).
For our purposes, I would summarize this research as follows: Financialization has exhorted, expected and to a certain extent rewarded most people for adopting the disposition of the player, the savvy, self-maximizing risk-taker.
The financial sector, since its pre-capitalist origins, has always had an uncomfortable proximity to games, often taking pains to distinguish itself as a science or a productive enterprise, rather than (mere) gambling (de Goede, 2005; Bjerg, 2011). More recently, the whole oeuvre of famed financial journalist Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker; MoneyBall; Going Infinite), or cautionary tales like the Martin Scorcese’s Wolf of Wall Street or Oliver Stone’s Wall Street reveal the centrality of games to financiers, not only as recreation but as a powerful and versatile metaphor for their vocation. In his tell-all memoir The Trading Game, former champion foreign exchange trader Gary Stevenson (2024) explains how new financiers (almost all of them young men) are recruited, trained and retained through games. Their appropriation of the hiphop-culture moniker of “the player” (originally a reference to gangsterism and especially pimping) is of a piece with a hypermasculine culture that in so many instances excuses and normalized personally abusive and systemically destructive behaviour. Echoing Ice-T: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” – financiers, like the war criminals who use drones to commit mass murder, supposedly cannot be held responsible for their actions because they were “just playing a game.”
Perhaps young men in many civilizations and throughout history justify their heinous behaviour by saying they were “just playing a game.” There is no shortage of examples of lethal games that the powerful impose on those they dominate, notably the Roman gladiatorial games. Nonetheless, the financial maneuvers are particularly good at both articulating itself in game-like ways (Aitken, 2014). The violence it unleashes in terms of economic volatility and rising inequality, only appears to its authors in abstracted form, on game-like interfaces like Bloomberg terminals or in the high-testosterone arenas like the trading floor. It is not unlikely that this kind of dehumanizing “abstract violence” of finance (LiPuma and Lee 2004) is akin to the sort invited of drone pilots: the affected and afflicted “other” disappears into the digital screen and the code, an disposable externality (Steyrl 2017).
Like the gamers who have been recruited to 21st century fascism’s ranks, financiers also believe that their game-like sphere is a meritocracy and typically resent what they see as heavy-handed or even corrupt efforts to correct for systematic inequalities (which they deny exist or are relevant) or reign in their boorish behaviour (Littler, 2017). They, too, have supported post-fascist political parties (Aronoff, 2017; Bourgeron, 2024; Copeland, 2024) not only because they promise forms of deregulation and tax cuts that will benefit their industry and their class, but also because a revanchist reactionary ideology is consonant with the subjectivity they have been encouraged to and rewarded for adopting in their industry: the ruthless player.
It is this subjectivity that, through financialization, has become the template we are almost all instructed to adopt now. In part, this has been encouraged and normalized by gamified apps and platforms which make the financialization of the lifeworld more easy, enticing and addictive (Hon, 2022). There are, of course, stock trading and investing apps that have us checking our pocket every 20 seconds for market news, either on conventional stock exchange-traded shares or all manner of para-financial assets or tokens including cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens or collectables (see O’Dwyer, 2023). This is only a small subset of the “fintech” (financial technology) industry, which also includes apps (including those from our banks and even governments) that use state-of-the-art game design techniques and neuroscience research to “nudge” our behaviour towards more beneficial outcomes (beneficial for whom?) (Bernards, 2019). But the gamified financialization of life also advances through fitness, diet and health and self-improvement apps that allow us to chart the progress of our personal embodied investments on charts and through metrics eerily reminiscent of a Bloomberg terminal; they include dating apps that encourage us to use algorithms to leverage our assets in the search for love or companionship; they include a vast array of education apps, including many that have become part of public school curricula, that promise to maximize learners’ return on investment (of time and effort) and provide legible and reliable quantitative metrics on progress and potential which can themselves be leveraged in the hunt for employment; and of course the include the gamified app platforms that platform corporations like Uber, Amazon or AirBNB use to entice their worker/users to higher levels of profitable (for them) productivity(Woodcock and Johnson, 2018); and this is to say nothing of the gamified interfaces of apps like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, Twitch, Amazon and more where cultural producers and would-be influencers are given data and “nudged” to compete to invest their time and talent and hope in producing ever more appealing content in the hopes of fame and revenue (Gupta, 2025).
Gamification in a limited sense refers to the use of game or game-like elements to contexts (especially digital interfaces) for purposes other than fun. But in a broader sense, gamification might be seen as idiomatic of financialization: the transmutation of more and more aspects of life into competitive games of investment and return, and the transmutation of each of us into players.
And yet if we are all players now, most of us play to lose. The rising inequality and shrinking middle class characteristic of financialized neoliberalism means that while, numerically, there are more millionaires and billionaires than ever, the vast majority of humanity makes do with a smaller share of social wealth (Blakeley, 2019). We players are, evidently, being played. If the popularity of spectacles like Squid Game or Hunger Games are any indication, we resonate with stories of protagonists caught in an unwinnable game. In Arlie Hochschild’s (2016) influential ethnography of reactionary sentiment in Louisiana, her interlocutors regularly refer to the idea of a “rigged game” to refer to their feelings about life in 21st century American capitalism. And yet the same forces that encourage the financialization of our subjectivities also deprive us of the frames of analysis we would need to understand the systemic and structural reasons why the game is rigged and so few of us seem to win, in spite of the fact that we play by the rules. The culture of competitive individualism, the culture of “the player” denies us the resources we would need to see the bigger game: financialized capitalism. Instead, we feel individually cheated, and we search for the cheats.
It is in this context that a form of genuinely 21st century fascistic politics brood. Whereas 20th century fascism took hold of workers of an industrial economy, an economy of dehumanizing mass exploitation, 21st century fascistic politics appeal to a society of lonely, competitive investors whose sense of agency, creativity and sociality has become a lever of their exploitation. 20th century fascism used the then-new technologies of mass broadcast media to seduce people habituated to the myths and ideologies of nationalism; 21st century fascistic politics leverages emergent game and social digital media to appeal to isolated individuals unified only to the extent they are all playing the same compulsory game. Walter Benjamin’s (1969) warning of the “aestheticization of politics” in the 1930s sought to help us comprehend how the fascists of his day appealed to citizens whose sensoria was both shaped and wounded by unforgiving capitalist industrialism and urbanization, offering the vengeful expression of suffering without any real transformation. Then, the signature media were the broadcast and the mass rally where, like workers in a factory, the addressee of fascism was massified and took pleasure in their massification. Today’s aestheticization of politics likewise gives vengeful expression to (but will not transform the circumstances for) that aspect of each of us that has been encouraged to play the financialized game and just keeps losing, who feels cheated. Now, the signature medium is games, where the addressee of fascism is hailed as an individuated player.
The playgrom
My effort here is not to justify or explain what motivates forms of fascistic violence I am understanding as the playgrom; rather, the foregoing has been an attempt to map the contours of the political-economic and cultural-political context within which new forms of fascistic violence gestates. My effort is to map only one usually overlooked part of that context, but there are other significant parts, notably the persistence of racist ideologies and structures, the ethos of religious fundamentalism, as well as the intentional, decades-long campaign of far-right or fascist think-tanks and their billionaire backers. But tracing the context of a gamified financialized capitalism does help us better understand what is distinct and historical about what I am calling the playgrom.
The playgrom does not describe a specific set of actions but, rather, an idiom of playfully cruel fascistic violence that emerges from, is shaped by, and also exceeds gamified financialized capitalism.
Let me break this working definition down, before turning to two grim examples that I see as representing two poles of the playgrom: the #GamerGate swarming and the Christchurch massacre.
I have spent some time above sketching the lineaments of gamified financialized capitalism and the revanchist subjectivity of the “cheated player” it incubates. When I insist that the playgrom “emerges from, is shaped by but also exceeds” this valence of the system, I intend to echo the work of critical theorists of fascism in the 20th and 21st century who encourage us to recognize it not (as liberals would often insist) as the ahistorical resurgence of some sort of atavistic barbarism, but rather as a kind of devil child of capitalism (Renton, 2020; see Toscano, 2023). This is why we must insist on using the term fascism (rather than authoritarianism, totalitarianism, the far right and so on): it brings us into alignment with an intellectual and militant tradition that sees reactionary thought and organization as something that incubates and offers a false resolution to the agonies of capitalist contradictions and crises. This also means that fascism appears in its incipient or nascent form even within other moments of capitalism, and as a result that individuals, organization, parties, ideologies and cultural producers who don’t see themselves as fascists or fascistic (and may even bray about “freedom” and accuse their opponents of being fascists) can in fact be doing what I will call the work of fascism, a work that has its place and rewards within capitalism, a work that, like all work under capitalism reproduces that system but that is excessive (even destructive) of that system, a work that may be undertaken by actors who are unaware of their participation or protagonism, or who may call fascism by many other names. Certainly, this can make a definition of fascism and fascistic politics analytically imprecise and easily politically weaponized (theoretically and in practice, almost anyone and anything can be accused of incipient or micro fascism). Yet such an ambiguous definition is necessary to grasp a particular strange confluence: first of all, the fact that capitalism produces and reproduces itself a social totality, and hence its pathological or cancerous fascist growth is likewise to be found throughout that totality; second, as noted that what fascists say or think about themselves is untrustworthy, misdirective and largely irrelevant: speech and ideas, in the fascist mode, are merely disposable pieces in a game whose name is simply power. Together, these produce the weird condition where fascism can appear both everywhere and nowhere at once, a fascism without fascists (no one identifies as a fascist, yet fascism is manifest) and fascists without fascism (fascistic actors without any overarching organization, ideologic unity or agenda) (Traverso, 2019; Toscano, 2023).
Gamergate is difficult to narrate, in part because it is not a distinct event but rather an archipelago of related events, and in part because the events are shrouded in disinformation, myth and the sabotaging of reporting. In brief, it refers to a campaign that crescendoed in 2015 of online harassment of (alleged) feminist video game designers and critics and their (alleged) supporters, that can be traced around the use of the #gamergate hashtag (Bezio, 2018; Salter, 2018; see Massanari, 2024 especially chapter 2). Its protagonists were an amorphous mob of online game fans who appear to have almost all been men, most of them young, who claimed they were forced to act by the decay of journalistic standards in game journalism. This was primarily based on a conspiracy theory that certain feminist game journalists and designers were benefiting from their sexual relationships with men in the industry, and that this represented only the toxic fruiting of a much deeper network of rotten actors who were conspiring (either intentionally or due to being duped by woke ideology) to destroy game culture and Western civilization. The flames of outrage were stoked by notable far right media personalities on social media and cited as evidence of the corrosive influence of “politically correct” discourse and of “social justice warriors.” Protagonists coordinated their campaign of harassment on social media as well as on online forums like Reddit, 4chan and more. While there were more influential and active voices, the campaign was largely leaderless and took the form of a self-perpetuating online swarm which gleefully dug up sensitive personal information about their targets (addresses, employers, etc.) and used this to harass them with death and rape threats, as well as anyone imagined to be associated or sympathetic with them. Using online forums, the protagonists developed a justification for their actions, encouraged one another to crowdsource information, and celebrated individuals for proposing and enacting all manner of activities, including targeting advertisers and institutions said to support those held responsible for the decay of “ethics in game journalism.”
My summary here has been dismissive and prejudicial on purpose. Like the Nazis, plenty of the supporters of Gamergate had “legitimate concerns,” were “just asking questions everyone was too afraid to ask” or “agreed with the concern, but not the methods.” There was indeed a wide diversity of approaches, perspectives and tendencies. It’s hard to see how or why any of that matters substantively, except to furnish the vanity or excuse the cowardice and complicity of those who imagine they were peripheral.
Eventually, the Gamergate campaign “died down,” but its influence lived on. It inspired and many of its protagonists participated in subsequent similar campaigns, for example against “wokeness” in science fiction publishing (Wilson, 2018). It brought several highly influential right-wing media personalities into the spotlight. It enriched several online chat forums that would, later, become breeding grounds for a new generation of reactionary thought and action. It defined a generation of gamers. It had a massive chilling and intimidating effect on the games industry, particularly on women and non-binary people. And perhaps most significantly it was highly inspirational to an emerging group of far-right political and media strategists, notably Stephen Bannon, said to be the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and, since that time, a luminary figure of a new fascistic politics and advisor and confident to many or the world’s fascistic politicians and actors.
On 15 March 2019, a 28-year old white Australian man used Facebook to livestream himself massacring 51 people at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (Lakhani and Wiedlitzka, 2023; Lankford, Allely and McLaren, no date). The protagonist was deeply inspired by fascistic and white supremacist conspiracy theories that argue that the “white race” is being intentionally “replaced” and subjected to genocide by permissive immigration and equity-related policies, theories he found and discussed primarily on video game forums. His actions, which were inspired by previous livestreamed attacks and would go on to inspire several others, were undertaken in an idiom that directly referenced and reflected game culture, notably the “first person shooter” perspective of the livestreamed footage, as well as the obsessive preparations he made, including scrawling white supremacist names, symbols and messages on his weapons. His actions were followed and celebrated by a network of sympathetic game fans, who framed his actions in terms of in-game goals and achievements familiar from violent video game genres: the modding and skinning of weapons; a scoring table to celebrate “kills” and other violence; references to favourite games; sadistic jokes.
The murderer acted alone, and so his actions may at first appear to contradict the notion of a “pogrom.” However, his actions emerged from an online subculture that celebrated, encouraged and broadcast his actions, which would go on to inspire other seemingly isolated acts of violence. These acts have been framed as “stochastic terrorism,” where a broader ideological and technological context creates the conditions where it is increasingly likely that such events will take place, but where they cannot be predicted (Angove, 2024).
What connects these two horrific events? A number of elements that demonstrate the many of the contours of today’s fascism can be revealed by looking through the lens of games. I am not arguing that games cause fascism, but rather that games and game culture are particularly revealing of a much broader fascist idiom, in part because games and gamification have been such an element of restructuring capitalism and capitalist subjectivity, from which fascism emerges but which it also opposes (sort of) and exceeds.
First and foremost, both are offshoots of a much broader gamer subculture, and both events organized themselves as if they were a game.
Second, in both cases, reality is transgressively bent: Is it a game, is it real? This contortion of reality is part of a fascist “flex”: serious business (mass murder, for example, or mass harassment) is “just a game”; conversely, a game or “game culture” is made into a matter of life and death. It’s not that fascism always insists that everything is game, or that all games must be taken seriously. Rather, it delights in transgressing the line between the serious and the frivolous, the game and the real because this transgression is, ultimately, the expression of a nihilistic form of coercive power whose worship is at the core of the (otherwise utterly contradictory) fascist worldview (see Bratich, 2022).
Third, in both cases, the protagonists of the pogrom are motivated by or at least marshal around a narrative in which they have been cheated. The protagonists of #gamergate espoused a vast array of asinine and puerile opinions, but they ultimately all boil down to a (hallucinatory) idea that the games industry and games culture are open, meritocratic and fair but have been sabotaged or corrupted by nefarious and dishonest feminists and the cowardly and/or venal supporters. They believe themselves to have been cheated of their opportunity to compete. This metanarrative is also common to other far-right reactionary movements and ideologies, notably the very proximate Incel (involuntary celibate) subculture, who believes feminists have ruined the otherwise fair and natural game of heterosexual hierarchy.
Likewise, the Christchurch murderer and those who inspired him and whom he, in turn, inspired, subscribed to a narrative that, in broad strokes, held that non-white people had exploited the generosity of his colonial settler state’s border regime as part of an intentional scheme to outnumber, outvote and culturally and genetically “replace” white people and their supposed unique culture. This narrative has its variations: in some cases, it’s simply the fault of bad immigration policy that is the result of unquestioned and unquestionable woke ideology; in some cases, it is part of a Judeo-Bolshevik or “cultural Marxist” conspiracy. The details hardly matter, the story is the same: the most privileged group in society (white men) have, somehow, been, as a group, cheated.
In the fourth case, both the Christchurch massacre and the Gamestop events were accompanied by the production of voluminous texts and arguments. #Gamergate protagonists posted and traded and debated extensive essays. The Christchurch mass murderer wrote a manifesto and inspired many others. These texts espoused a wide variety of positions and take themselves very seriously, in spite of typically being poorly argued, ill-informed and ridiculously bombastic. But their content is, ultimately, not the point, even if their authors insist that they be taken seriously. Regardless of what positions they espouse, they ultimately function as justifications for (or bad faith misdirection away from) the “public pedagogy” of the events themselves (Giroux 2004), which is essentially propaganda for conspicuous fascistic cruelty.
Finally, in both cases, this cruel and transgressive violence is enabled through what I will call NPCization. In gaming lingo, the acronym NPC signifies a non-player character: an actor within a video or other game who is not controlled by a unique person but, rather, by some kind of program, artificial intelligence or human game master (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023; Halpin, 2024). In other words, NPCs fundamentally lack any real agency or reflexivity, even if they act like they do. NPCs can be enemies but are more often helpers or “extras” who contribute to the atmosphere of a game, or provide some artificial challenge or assets. There are rarely any meaningful consequences to killing, abusing or otherwise mistreating NPCs, and players often do, with joyful abandon.
By NPCization I mean a process of dehumanization where real people are reimagined as NPCs and thereby devalued and offered up for sport. Hannah Arendt is only one of many scholars of fascism to chart the importance of dehumanization and in her study of its European varieties she correctly sees it as derivative of the kinds of dehumanization practiced by Europeans in their colonies, insightfully pointing to the rhetoric of the Great Game that European colonists used to cynically reflect on their manipulation of non-European population on the imperial chessboard, with catastrophic consequences (Arendt, 2004; Lang, 2017).
Under 21st century fascism, emerging as it does out of the context of gamified financialization, the NPC has become a dehumanizing insult that first emerged in reactionary gamer culture to refer to so-called “normies” who are deemed to have an unthinking, uncritical or obsequious devotion to allegedly unquestioned liberal values and social justice attitudes, the implication being that, like the robotic extras of a video game, these individuals are not fully agents. Within this rhetorical world, this makes them disposable without consequences. In this world, there are real players and the NPCs, who represent at best distractions, at worst stupid threats to the players.
It would be too easy to blame video game culture alone for NPCization, but the roots go deeper. In the War on Terror, for example, American drone pilots and marines licensed themselves to murder non-combatants based on the principle that, because they were subjects of what was framed as an authoritarian regime and from a “backwards” culture, they did not possess full agency: they were like those slaughterable NPC automatons (Brady, 2015). Of course, this echoed hundreds of years of racist imperialist ideology that dehumanized non-Europeans and non-Christians as already unthinkingly enslaved to their dark fetish gods, their crude ancient customs, their tyrannical shamans, or their self-important absolute monarchs. This made them, in the eyes of colonists and imperial operatives, functionally indifferent, not truly individual agents deserving of dignity and value (see Silva, 2007). If they could already be deemed pawns in someone or something else’s crude and bestial game, they could be likewise manipulated and sacrificed in a greater and more elevated game, the “Great Game” of empires, as Kipling so famously captured it.
Deep, dark playbor and the work of fascism
To understand the playful aspects of fascism today and in the past it is instructive to turn to the work that critical theorists of play and games have done on the concept of deep and dark play.
Since it was introduced by Clifford Geertz in 1972, deep play has become a common theoretical term in anthropology to describe the way that games provide a venue for the expression, negotiation, testing and transgression of a society’s most profound norms, values, power relations and ideals, even (perhaps especially) where the players and observers of a game are unaware of the fact or deny the game’s significance (Geertz, 2005). In our context, to call the playgrom a form of deep play signifies that, although it may appear to be a (cruel) transgressive game that would horrify or offend the vast majority of people living in financialized gamified capitalism, it nonetheless is an expression, extension and extreme articulation of many of that society’s core structural and ideological tendencies. Notably, the playgrom instantiates, weaponizes and works to entrench endemic forms of misogyny, racism, cruelty and dehumanization that subtend that system.
At its most expansive, dark play refers to any form of play where there are meaningful real-world consequences, although more useful definitions stress forms of play that transgress social norms, that are not or not fully consensual for all players, or that dwell with themes that are generally considered to be distasteful, offensive or provocative (Mortensen, Linderoth and Brown, 2015; Grobe, 2022).
In his provocation Repairing Play, Aaron Trammel (2023) draws on the long history of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of American chattel slavery, as well as their aftermaths of Jim Crow institutional racism and today’s more cryptic forms of anti-Blackness, to argue for the centrality of what he calls torture in our analysis of games. Against a dominant Eurocentric approach that is uncomfortable with non-consensual games, or games the dwell with dark themes, or games where one players’ suffering is another player’s pleasure, Trammel encourages to look again at what others have termed “dark play.”
What if we were to see deep dark play as work?
In the wake of the protestant reformation, Eurocentric and supposedly modern societies draw a stark distinction between work and play (Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971; Huizinga, 1971). Work is thought of as mature, purposeful, goal-oriented, productive and typically not (or not primarily) fun, whereas play is rendered immature, intrinsically motivated, frivolous or inconsequential and, fundamentally, fun. Still, we can and should ask: what work does a game do? Here I mean work in a few different valences.
I am interested in so-called playbor, a portmanteau of play and labor that was introduced in 2005 and has since come to signify at least three things. First, the kind of work being done by players in digital ecosystems, such as the kind of investment of time and energy some players put into online multiplayer games to collect in-game resources in the hopes of being able to later exchange these for real-world resources (Kücklich, 2005; Goggin, 2011). Second and more broadly, the way that a new generation of platforms including YouTube and Instagram not only monetize content creation but introduce gamified elements that aim to entice creators to participate (Yazdanipoor, Faramarzi and Bicharanlou, 2022). Third, playbor can refer to the more nefarious inclusion of games in the processes of capitalist value extraction and exploitation, as for instance the gamified elements of the interfaces that Amazon workers or Uber drivers are compelled to use, which aim primarily to increase worker motivation and productivity (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018).
More generally, however, I am interested in the broader question of how an activity, in this case a structured playful activity, might serve a broader productive system, in this case financialized, gamified capitalism. As feminist theorists of social reproduction have argued, we are left with an incomplete understanding of capital’s process of valorization if we ignore how it subsumes forms of work that fall outside the wage relation (Federici, 2012; Bhattacharya, 2017)? So too are we remiss if we neglect to ask: how do certain forms of labour (paid or unpaid) reproduce a system whether their protagonists intend to or not? And how is this labour disciplined and ensured? This is a question that has also captivated those studying the role of policing under capitalism, but also the role of deputized and vigilante actors, who take it upon themselves to do the work of class repression and racial terror on which that system relies.
In the speculative mode of this paper, I want to suggest that there is much to be gained by approaching the playgrom as a kind of deep, dark playbor. I mean this not simply insofar as its protagonists apply intention, planning, effort and skill to their games. Nor do I mean that, in either case, some capitalist actor generates profit. Rather, I see these events as doing what we might call the “work of fascism” even within capitalism.
As Toscano (2023) makes clear via his reading of Angela Davis and other mid-century Black critics of American fascism, fascism is not anathema to but, in its “incipient” form, is an important part of a liberal capitalist order. The persistence of fascist institutions (prisons, police, militaries, one might add corporations) functions almost like mitochondria in eukaryotic cells: a foreign lifeform that has evolved to find a vital, symbiotic place within a larger system. The “work” of fascism, in this sense, is to help reproduce that larger system, even if that work is quite unlike other forms of work, insofar as it is rewarded/extracted differently and may be subject to dissimilar forms of discipline. (We might think, for example, of the “work” of gambling, or of organized crime within capitalism: both have been there since the system’s beginning, and are arguably, each in their way, very important to its operations and reproduction. But neither are subject to the same structural pressures as other industries, and both are organized very differently than typical licit firms. We might equally think of the heteronormative nuclear family: it is essential to capitalism, but is disciplined by the wage relation only indirectly, and appears autonomous).
In the case of the playgrom, the work of fascism in this case serves several overlapping and at times contradictory purposes. In the first place, it supplies a version of what DuBois theorized as the “wages of whiteness”: the material and immaterial benefits offered to a privileged but disempowered minority as a means to secure their fidelity to the dominant class system (Roediger, 1999). In this case, the “fun” of the pogrom, as well as the meaningful sense of righteousness, is a perk afforded to preferred subjects that offers dignity, purpose and sadistic pleasure as part of an overall systemic compensation package that, nonetheless, feels to the protagonists righteously anti-systemic. Here, the playgrom appeals to that aspect of the authoritarian personality that Fromm (1942) labels as the conformist rebel: the oppositional-defiant child of the system whose anti-systemic antics merely emerge from a kind of intimate envy and resentment, rather than any substantive wish for transformation.
Second, the playgrom functions as part of a larger disciplinary apparatus that cheapens the labour and the lives of their groups whom it targets. In line with DuBois and those who continue his tradition we must look at the political economy of racial terrorism as having the effect of depressing the wages and options of racialized workers, as well as their capacity to organize effectively and make solidarity with other workers (Roediger, 2005). The Christchurch massacre may have been motivated by the conspiracy theory that “Western” governments were “flooding” their nations with cheap migrant labour as part of an effort to “replace” white people, but it was part of and contributed to a racist cultural atmosphere that sought to intimidate migrants and non-white people such that they did not fight for their legal rights and economic advantage (see Kundnani, 2023). So-called “Western” countries depend on and have always depended on the systematic cheapening of racialized migrant labour power, and one key method of this cheapening is freelance terrorism. The Gamergate swarming effectively set back equity relations in the game industry by a decade and contributed immensely to the atmosphere of intimidation, harassment and alienation experienced by women and other minoritized people in that industry (Did, 2024). It is an industry well-known for mobilizing the individualized dreams and meritocratic ideology of its workers in order to prevent unionization and other forms of worker organization. Much more broadly, both these “playgroms,” beyond the intentions of their protagonists or their intended ideological orientation, act much more broadly as a kind of “propaganda of the deed”: they tell people who would struggle that they can expect and should fear reactionary vigilante violence for the crime of inhabiting the wrong kind of body.
Third, the playgrom is also directly profitable to certain factions of capital, notably companies whose digital platforms facilitate it. Though the policing of violent content (such as the livestreamed Christchurch massacre) is expensive and complicated for streaming and social media companies, the media that surround such events is highly productive of the churn of content, attention, anxiety and discourse on which these businesses thrive (see Massanari, 2024). The argument here is not that these platforms encourage or directly benefit from such acts. However, it is certainly the case that they prioritize their profits over taking meaningful action to moderate or supervise their platforms to ensure the kinds of poisonous fascistic discourse that contribute to them (Fielitz and Marcks, 2019; Mirrlees, 2019). And, more generally, they have generated between them a forms of online culture that harvests attention and cultivates profit by fostering vitriolic and vituperative affect and the illusion of debate. It’s not that tech companies are explicitly encouraging playgroms (neither did the Tsar promote the pogroms). But they have cultivated and benefitted from an online ecosystem that contextualizes and encourages the kinds of political affect and ideology that enable the playgrom’s emergence.
Finally, we would be well-served by examining how the protagonism of the playgrom echoes with work in a gamified platform economy, and also echoes with the work of the financialized subject. This echo is more than happenstantial, and it reminds us that fascism always both emerges from and exceeds the forms of capitalism within which it incubates. The #Gamergate protagonists organized themselves to do their work in ways reminiscent of the emerging modes of decentralized, user-driven, “bottom-up” collaborative work that has become central to digital capitalism, not only insofar as workers organize themselves to pursue elective tasks (like co-developing open source software or editing and maintaining Wikipedia) but also in terms of how startups and even larger tech firms organize their workforces (Just, 2019; Hewa and Tran, 2024). The delightful work-game of #gamergate resembled the approach of Agile project management common to the tech sector, where many individuals take on component tasks of a greater effort, with regular check ins, which keeps hierarchical command and control to a minimum in the interests of encouraging each participant to take responsibility and test their limits.
As we have seen, the Christchurch massacre may have been planned and executed by an individual, but it was facilitated by a community of individuals who mutually encouraged and informed one another, not unlike the way that a great deal of software innovation these days builds on a common repository of collectively- authored and -edited open source code and only, in the final instance, provides the patentable coup-de-grace, generating a proprietary variation, usually at the point where code meets world. In this case, the culture, the ideology, the subjectivity and the idiom of the terrorist attack is generated collaboratively online, and the entrepreneurial murders simply instantiates it IRL.
In sum, we are well served by asking the question: what kind of work is the playgrom? It is a deep and dark form of playbor, a playbour that reflects and extends the historically specific forms of capitalist discipline, enticement, reward and valorization that incubated it.
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[1] I am throughout this essay using the term fascistic as a means to gesture to a broad and ongoing debate about the presence of fascist thought, action and organization that falls short of but nonetheless often sets the stage for the full emergence of a fascist political party or the implementation of authoritarian rule. Some scholars (Paliewicz and McHendry, Jr., 2020) use the adjective fascistic, others terms like microfascism (Bratich, 2022), incipient fascism (Toscano, 2023) or the “fascist minimum” (Griffin, 1991).