Playing Within, Against and Beyond the Gamed Economy: A Workshop

Because they typically afford consensual and intentional experiences of rules-bound improvisation, artificial scarcity and convivial competition, games have often leant themselves to the exploration of agency within broader economic structures. The bestselling board game Monopoly was initially created as a satire of the system of rapacious landlordism that it is now taken to celebrate. Today, economy simulators are among the highest grossing video games on the market. The worldwide popularity of The Hunger Games and Squid Game suggests that many people sympathize with characters trapped in an unwinnable game. And reactionary political discourse is increasingly obsessed with gamed systems and cheating others. All these examples and more impel us to ask: what opportunities for aesthetic reflection and critique can games (particularly those played socially and in person, typically with printed matter) offer us as we contend with a rapidly changing global economy? In this workshop Max Haiven will explore themes from his forthcoming book The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and his forthcoming board game Billionaires and Guillotines. Participants will use simple elements to create their own games to explore the intersection of political economy and cultural meaning-making.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and serves as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination for the Government of Canada. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization(2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL), a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice, and decolonization.