ACFM - ACFM Trip 25: Games

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Games are all around us. They let us escape from drudgery and experiment with other worlds and ways of being. But they can be traps too: apps designed to be addictive, producing only the most hollow sense of achievement. In this Trip, Nadia, Jeremy and Keir throw their polyhedral dice to explore how games shape […]

Does Sonic even have a tune, Jeremy? You know, absolutely it does, the best they bid for the tune. Right, hum it then. may not realise just how much violence they're getting. Anyone who plays live-action role-playing games known as LARPS will recognise the gaming elements of QAnon. The game is flawed. You're back in the game!

Welcome to ACFM, the Home of the Weird Left. I'm Nadia Idol, and today, as usual, I'm joined by Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And on this episode, we are talking. about games. So, Keir, this was your idea. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted to talk about games. Well, it's partly because games have been occupying more and more of my headspace over the last

couple of years, but in particular over the last few months, over the last couple of years, because I'm involved in this sort of left-wing political game design collective called Red Plenty Games. And then over the last six months, perhaps a bit longer, me and Gem have been playing tabletop role-playing games over Zoom with various people. We might talk about that a little bit later. But I'd just be more and more interested in this idea of games. And in fact, actually, when we did the Cosmic Right episode, we got some feedback saying it'd be really interesting to do an ACFM episode on games,

partly because of that idea that we raised at that point, which is that people have been interpreting the whole Q and non-conspiracy myth as a kind of participative game. So all of those things have just made the idea of games really in the foreground of my thinking. What about you and Adia? What's your thoughts on there? Well, I'm interested in several aspects of games. So the first one I think is I'm interested in my own perception of playing games versus gaming culture,

which I seem to react to as two very different things. And I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later. I'm also interested in, well, each of our relationships to playing games and which sort of games we play. But in a kind of wider sense, like why human beings play games, whether playing a game produces a different kind of subjectivity and what it does to human and social relations and bonds, as opposed to the other things that human beings do together, like, you know, dancing together or eating together. or playing games that happens on computers versus things like playing a game in a bingo hall, for example, like what that does to human bonds and relations. But I'm also interested in what we learn either purposely or not purposely from playing games, like whether they have power over us and what kind of people we become, I suppose,

but also things like if the practice of playing games allows us to imagine futures, and the importance and politics around that. So those are some of the ideas of why I'm really interested in this topic. Jeremy? Well, I'd say my main reason for wanting to talk about it is because I think there's a good case that games, primarily but not exclusively at all, computer games, are the vital cultural form of our historical moment.

When I say vital, I don't mean essential, I don't mean the only one that's any good, but the one which in some ways most defines the moment and involves people doing things that they weren't necessarily doing decade ago or doing things in a radically different way from the way they were doing them decades ago. I mean, it's quite a common trope

among certain cultural commentators to say that computer games are like the most important art form right now. I don't know if that's true, but as a cultural practice, games and gaming is quite distinctive to our moment. Even though none of the games we're going to end up talking about today are completely original and specific to this historical moment. We should also talk about the way that games have leaked out into wider life.

So, like I already mentioned, Q-N-on is one of these games. If it is a game, some of the players don't realize they're playing a game. But also there's just this huge trend towards the gamification of all sorts of activities. Gamification of management, of work, gamification of exercise. gameification of learning languages, all of these sorts of things. And so that we need to think about how that, why that's occurred and how that might relate to our own sort of interest in games and why I am certainly more interested in games now than I was 10 years ago. Games as an abstract concept have got a significant role in certain strands of theory and philosophy. So,

for example, arguably the most influential strand of 20th century philosophy is Ludwig Vickens work on language philosophy, and his basic concept in his late work is the concept of language games, which is the idea that basically all human activities involve specific sets of procedures with specific rules and specific notions about what constitutes success. And in fact, there is no universal vantage point from which you can judge them. So Wittgenstein sort of says that for thousands of years, philosophers thought they could establish a universal vantage point from which they could judge the multiple language games of, say, asking someone out on a date or writing an essay about philosophy or, you know, playing a role-playing game, or, you know, talking to people in the pub.

And Wittgenstein ends up at the end of it, having started off life wanting to be someone who could purify language of all doubt and ambivalent ends up deciding that you can't do that. And in fact, everything we do is just about these different language games that don't have any overarching language game that can define them all. And then Jean-Frosse I leotard in the late 20th century ends up basically say when he popularizes the term postmodernism or the idea of the post-modern condition, he says what it means to inhabit the postmodern condition, the condition of contemporary culture and politics or cultural and politics at the end of the 20th century is to find yourself living in this world of multiple overlapping language games, which is just what sociologists would call

multiple overlapping social roles. So you're a student, you're a mother, you're a lover, you're a, you know, you're a writer, and you're all of those things at the same time, and they don't really map onto each other in any particularly coherent way. And none of them really have any particular claim to truth or legitimacy over the others. And that is what is meant by the postmodern conditions. So language games have this really central place in that strand of philosophy. There's also theories of games, aren't there? Akear, you know, more about this than me, I think. Basically, we can think about it as attempts to define games and delineate them from non-games

to a certain extent, which is, of course, the opposite of what Wittgenstein is doing. And it sort of goes, people normally start with Johann Husinger's book, Homer Ludens. He has this idea of the magic circle in which you play the game. For that, think about a poker table or something. When you're in that circle, there are different rules apply. They're sort of like temporary worlds within the ordinary world. and then you all sort of like agree to follow particular rules. Other people like James Karsz sort of say,

well, look, those are like finite games, but you can have infinite games which break the bounds of that. So language games would be one of them. Perhaps QAnon would be one of those infinite games. It's you broke the bounds of games. There's gamified aspects, but they've broken the bounds, etc. Other people like Roger Calois, for him, there's probably two important things,

one of which is there has to be some uncertainty. There has to be some uncertainty involved. which is important for game theory, which is never sort of aspect we might want to talk about an aspect of economics to some degree, a sort of mathematicised removal of uncertainty or working through of uncertainty.

But for Roger Calois, it's got to be uncertainty. There's also got to be this conception of a game being unproductive, so like released from the conception of utility that takes place outside the magic circle. And then Calwa also sort of introduces is this distinction between what he calls Luddus, which is rule bound play, and then Padilla, which is free play.

And that might be something which might be useful to bring into some of the discussions that we might have later on about the different sorts of games and whether you can have left-wing games and white-wing games, etc. Because another way you can think about that is you can make a distinction between free play in which are rules like and then sort of strategic play in which the bounds are quite distinct, perhaps chess, basically, and, you know, there's huge amounts written about chess strategy and all these sorts of things. The other person might want to talk about in terms of games is Freud.

So beyond the pleasure principle, he has this concept of a game related to what he calls Fort Dao, which is his name for this game that his young grandson played of a cotton reel where the grandson would chuck the cotton wheel out of his cot and forces. to put it back and he'd make like ooh da sort of noises which Freud sort of meant interpreted as meaning fort which is uh gone and da meaning that there so it'd be gone oh back again oh gone back and we've all played those sort of games with kids basically they check the ball and it's continuous and all that but but Freud sort of conception of that was it was to do with anxiety and the relief of anxiety basically that you could so it's a little bit like

um this idea that um a game is something in which something happens but then the sort of the surrounding configuration, the sort of social material configuration, returns to the same at the end of it, right? So something happens, perhaps in more complicated games than, than, like, for that, is that, you know,

you experience a moment of change, but then things come back to the way they are. So it's like an anxiety release sort of mechanism, which is probably something sort of useful. And then the last thing I'd mention in this is like surrealist games. So surrealism is this art movement in the 20th century, in which game playing was a really important part

and partly in response to Freud's conception of the games which release that anxiety and sort of like build up or reinforce social institutions that their games and so exquisite coerps is the sort of game which is most well known like their surrealist games are intended to sort of break down habitual patterns of thought and imaginary basically

and use of analogue and chance to try to create new ways of thinking about about the world. That's a quick race through some of the thinking about what games are, what their use is. And I think that could be useful to refer back to when we talk about things such as gamification, for instance, which is the spilling of games into wider life. When you were speaking about the anxiety release system, that Freudian one,

it made me think about if capitalism was like the parent and that what it habitually needs to do is to challenge itself by things like welfare statism for a few years and then it can reset itself back to proper capitalism again and that it needs that kind of challenge to enforce its own dynamism, if that makes sense. It is, yeah. I've just abstracted from an individual game playing

to a structural analysis. It works on depending on what your definition of capitalism is, Because if you accept that, like, Labor is part of capital, then it makes sense. But capital is also one poll in the capital relationship, if you know what I mean. So it's not capital that's doing this egalitarianness. It's basically the working class seeking some sort of break from capital. But, yeah, I mean, there is that sort of structure. And its functionality.

Yeah, yeah. The card sheet by the clash, which is like a very common. Clash song and dare I say it, it's got a bit of a Dylan-esque, Bob Dylaness, kind of lyric. There's a solitary man, crumbent, he's only because he's a lonely and it's a keeper of time rush, slowly he won't be alive to know. We only had time to sell on all of the things he planned. I think we should say something more than what would he achieve?

It means nothing. And it's closely related to things like public choice theory. Public choice theory is the American branch of neoliberal theory, which is responsible for. convincing people like the Blairites in the 2000s that the only way to manage public services was to see public service providers and their users is involved in a zero-sum competition for resources. So you basically had to discipline teachers, for example, because if you didn't, they would inherently just try to do as little work as possible. And that is a good example

of what game theory, that particular branch of economics tends to assume. It assumes that basically all social relations, including all economic relations, are essentially zero-sum competitions between actors whose only relationship can be conceived as one of competition to maximise their own rewards from the situation at the expense of others. Behind that is like a very distinct concept of rationality and like a model of what a human is.

Basically, people talk about it as like a paranoid model. And so the classic sort of game theory, situation is this thing called prisoners dilemma where basically you have you have this thought experiment where there are two prisoners who are isolated from each other and if they neither of them talk they go free if one talks the first person to talk would get a reduced sentence so what would it make sense for them to do right that's the theory that that people sort of like try to map through the strategies that that should be adapted on that but if you just think for a moment about what is the model of the human it is of a human who's isolated who can who can't who can't

can't communicate with anybody else, basically, and put into a deliberately paranoic... And stressful... Stressful situation, basically. And one of the main theorists who did a lot of the mathematic modelling around game theory is John Nash, who was later, you know, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The film A Beautiful Mind is about that.

The other sort of scenario or sphere in which game theory gained some sort of credence was around modelling the situation of mutually sure destruction so the United States and the USSR facing each other with nuclear weapons and trying to model through what would happen. If you want an idea of a paranoid conception of humanity, well, you know, there's that one. And of course, there's lots of representations in film of that sort of paranoid model of thinking in the Cold War era, etc.

But doesn't the game need a problem? I mean, isn't that why that is devised? in in most of these situations because whether it whether it's internal to you know the prisoner or whatever there is some kind of obstacle that you are trying to jump over overcome destroy etc so so i i guess people think or when they're designing these things they think they think of these kind of or they model it on like these really stressful situations and go how would one act yeah but that's that's true but they're always assuming that some that how a person will act is defined by the fact that what a person is, is a selfish interest maximizing ego.

So what their idea of what a person is, if they're not someone who is ever going to cooperate with people, except for the most others, except for the most instrumental and self-serving reasons. And there's these whole dimensions of human existence. They can't conceptualize. That's why that radical and heterodox economists like hate these people. And they point out that they're good at some things. The economists will tell you, game theory, are good at some things. They're good at predicting some set of outcomes when they are situations which really are just like a few actors, corporate actors and individuals, definitely competing for a definitely limited set of resources. So they are good. The game theory models are good

at predicting that stuff. The trouble is there's this whole ideological project and it's been a big part of neoliberal hegemony for decades not to limit the uses of game theory to those those types of situations, but to try to impose them pose those models on every possible situation. Yeah, to basically create, do institutional reform, so you create situations where those conditions seem to apply, basically. This leads us through to this whole idea of gamification. Yeah, it does.

Really quite directly, because like a lot, this sort of thinking took off really, really massively in the 1970s and 1980s, just at the time where video games were coming about, is gamification, right? Is that the sort of native form of management and the platform capitalism? And has that been developed right the way through the history of neoliberalism?

I think we've got to explain specifically what we mean by the term gamification. So the gamification is when you take any social activity and you try to turn it into a game. The example we put down, one of them was Deuolingo. You know a language by having this app which makes turning a language, learning a language into a game

where you win points of certain achievement and outcome. But it's not any game. I think when we're saying gamification, there's a competitiveness. Exactly. And with the online stuff, there's a definite like dopamine trigger, right? That's what we mean. They all tend to be variations of not prisoners' dilemma, but that sort of idea of what a game is, basically,

where you've got a very definite aim at mind, and your role is to sort of like increase your own standing compared to others. So Duolingo has a whole series of league tables. it measures your streaks or every day how long you've done it. The streak, I wanted to talk specifically about the streak. Like, where does that come from? If you break your street, you can buy yourself out of it. The streak thing comes directly from what they call, you know, at places like

Stanford and MIT, they've called persuasive computing. And they mean literally, how can we make it addictive? I mean, Werdell has a streak on it. That's all, that's all, and that all comes from the fact that all the people designing those at, they all go on these courses at Stanford and MIT. and the thing they study is gambling technology. Yeah. And they study how to make your apps addictive

by replicating the kind of addictive dopamine triggering the gambling produces. This is a very... And incorporating that with this game theory idea of games that they are necessarily competitive in nature. I hadn't really had my head around this properly before we had this conversation. So we're drawing a picture, I think correctly,

of a world in which over several decades, through the way which these technologies have been rolled out, these theories are being influential, the way they've intersected with capitalist interests, in which huge sections, parts of our cultural and social lives now, are quite deliberately engineered by people who believe everything is a game, but they also believe what a game is,

is a competition, a zero-sum competition between, a ruthless competition between individuals. Now, what's interesting, though, is that none of the people who've ever really studied what a game actually is, like starting from the question, well, what is a game, have come to the conclusion that what a game is, is necessarily a ruthless zero-sum competition between individuals.

From Wittgenstein, from the people Keir was talking about, they've all proposed models of games, which have these various features, like they're randomized, they're controlled, there's an element of indeterminitimacy, blah, blah, and they can be competitive, but they're not necessarily competitive. This is one reason why, for so many people, there seems to be this intuition that there is something sort of counter-normative about doing role-playing games, something sort of liberating, and because

role-playing games are the definitive example of games which have the classic features of games as defined by those theorists of games, but are non-competitive, are resolutely non-competitive. But also it necessarily breaks through capitalist realism because it makes you able to imagine, like you're saying in this time frame or in this world, we will imagine things to be different than they are. And so when you break through realism, that's the one thing that capitalism doesn't want,

is that kind of imaginary unless it's controlled within a very specific ritual of license. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And that does come to an interesting question. It comes to an interesting question

about gameplay. Where do you draw the line between saying that, you know, doing something like whether it's playing a computer game or playing some kind of VR simulation or playing Minecraft or playing a tabletop role-playing game?

Where do you draw the line between these things being exciting, ways of expanding your imaginative capacities and experiencing a sense of cooperative, creativity and solidarity with others that you're playing with, and those things just becoming a substitute for having those experiences in real life. Which, of course, is something we never stop talking about on this show, because we're very interested in leisure and pleasure, and the risk of anything that's pleasurable or therapeutic or fun is that it can become a distraction, it can become a form of escapism, it can just become a substitute for the actuality

of the things you're looking for in life and that we think only socialism can give people. Now, suppose in a way I'm answering my own question because I tend to think, there's obviously a long history of a kind of left Puritanism, which is very anxious, that anything that's too much fun and anything that feels too much like

the way you're only really supposed to feel after the revolution is a danger. Is it a danger to the moral fibre of the revolutionary? On the other hand, it's pretty clear, and we've talked about this in different ways, lots of times that as humans trying to survive capitalism and without succumbing to crippling depression, anxiety or pessimism, then you need things to do, which might be, at their best, genuinely prefigurative of, you know, other ways of imagining or being in the world, or might,

you know, at their worst, might just be a really fun kind of group therapy that isn't hurting anything. The balancing out of discipline and like historical understanding and trajectory with joy and fun rather than vacuous hedonism or you know mindless authoritarianism yeah if you think about different games though it's obviously going to be a continuum towards one end of that continuum the idea that this would provoke something which would which would allow you to sort of like break out of of contemporary ideology is pretty unlikely and towards the other end it's more likely and but not guaranteed you know what I mean Janet kate city games uh joe my partner suggested this Kier suggested it

it was a 1979 Lover's Rock hit that was given a new lease of life by being on that fantastic episode of Steve McQueen's Small Axe TV show the great episode called

Lovers Rock but again as a lyric it's basically complaining about somebody seemingly playing games like gamifying their social relations But I've got no time to live this life. No, I've got no time to play your silly game.

Over the last year, I've had an Xbox series S. I did not know this, actually, that you had an Xbox. Well, I had a sort of, you know, I had ZDX-801s and like really early computer games and played in the 80s when I was a kid and played, you know, a few games on them. I wasn't particularly massively, massive gamer. Then in the 90s, I used to sort of play computer games with friends, primarily in a sort of social way where we'd all get drunk and play, click turns playing the game or whatever and at the games console for like 15 years at least and then

just before COVID I had a really really torrid time at work lecturing and during COVID actually and just decided that I needed some way to switch off so it was either it was either getting a games console or taking up yoga sorry Jeremy I chose the game console I'm not sure I stand by that choice. So it was like basically discovering how much games had changed in the last 15 years, which was quite a lot, which is sort of interesting. And then role-playing games, I played a little bit of Dungeons and Dragons when I was, you know, 11, 12.

I was mainly the Dungeon Master, so running the game at that point. And then I hadn't played any computer game, any role-playing games until a year ago. I can't quite remember. Yeah, it was a bit less than a year ago. where me, Jeremy, and a couple of other friends decided to produce our own role-playing game, basically, just wanted to do some role-playing game. We played a game called Microscope, which is a game

in which you create a shared history, an imaginary history, basically. And we created this imaginary historic line and then chose a particular point on that line to play. We call it The Time of Floating Cities. It's a game which features quite a lot of of mushrooms, mycelial networks becoming sentient, seems to be one of the big, big themes of the game.

Mycelium Industrial Complex returns as a theme on this show. But interestingly, in preparation for this game, Jem ran a game called Comrades, which is a table-top role-playing game, with us three in it, and Matt and Chal, who were the two people who produce ACFM, We had a game of this last week. We'll talk about that a little bit later,

but we basically played that on a different part of this timeline that we'd created for the game, Microscope. And then Jeremy has recruited me into some other role-playing games. So that's my experience of games. Yeah, mine is probably a little different. So I was really into, when the Game Boy came out, that kind of changed my life, I think, because I thought most humans were stupid when I was a kid.

just really computer games really kind of computer games and books were the thing that allowed me to kind of explore worlds that because I thought everybody else was either boring and stupid I was not a very social kid I've turned out to be very different but both that and the Super Nintendo which I later understood people in the UK called a SNES I didn't realize that that's what it was called here but I bought or my mom bought me one I think it must be really early 90s

because it was the time when it was like Nintendo versus Sega and I was a pure Nintendo person and I'm like, what? You were Mario rather than Sonic. Definitely. Oh dear. Definitely.

Yeah, yeah, there we go. So, yeah, I had the Super Nintendo but interestingly mostly enjoyed playing fighting games and racing games which was quite similar to the kind of play that I enjoyed as a smaller child when it was very much like trains and cars and tracks

and building tracks and stuff like that rather than platforming games. At the same time, though, I was playing platform games on Dad's computer when I visited him, things like Prince of Persia, and also like Return of the Tentacle like sticks in my head as a game. But I really, really enjoyed playing those games

kind of with my family. It was a social thing kind of mostly in person that I enjoyed doing. And then once I became an older teenager and kind of discovered boys and drugs, I completely became disinterested in any of that. Having said that, though, there were other games that I was playing.

Like, I really enjoyed playing Monopoly and some of those kind of board games and playing cards and a little bit of chess. But then later, I think the games that I, got into was I played a lot of mafia in university, mostly as the kind of MC or facilitator, which we did do during lockdown with some of the world transformed people, which is, I think some people called Werewolf, that sort of game where you're trying to discover, you're a group of people sitting in a circle. It feels a little bit like a seance, which is kind of maybe why I like

it. But then there were board games, semi-political board games. So at the time of the Bush and Blair years, there came this game called War on Terror, which is a little bit like risk, and it plays really well. It's a three, four hour game that you play on a board. It was kind of a piss take on the war on terror. So even though I've played lots of games, and now my favorite game is Dixit, and I don't feel like I have enough game playing in my life, and I wish I had more game playing in my life, I don't consider myself a gamer. And that I thought is a really interesting thing that I'd like to interrogate as part of this episode is, for me, a gamer is, is a kind of like, it's a boys, it's like a boys or in cells or it's some

kind of like misogynistic space. And I'm, and I'm not sure if that's fair or if it is because that is the dominant sort of form of of, of playing games, kind of online by yourself in a room that exists in culture. So yeah, I'd like, I'd like to think about that. I see. it more as something that I do rather than an identity, I suppose. Like, I've never associated myself with it. Eight-bit music. We should play a little bit of that. I don't know about the songs, though. Let's play the Mario's. It's sort. I guess from age of 1112, I was really interested in games.

Like I liked strategy games like chess and especially Go, the classic East Asian board game, which I still really like playing sometimes. And then like a lot of people, when I was kind of 1112, I got. got into Dungeons and Dragons, but I also, I'm going to presume people listening basically know what Dungeons and Dragons is, the basic format of a tabletop role-playing game. If you don't, we're going to record a microdose about the kind of history of that cultural form. The thing is Dungeons and Dragons is like, it's by far the best-known tabletop role-playing game in the world. It was then, and it still is, and it's by far the most played.

There are lots of others, and even from the early 80s, there was a whole kind of culture. there were sort of multiple cultures around role-playing games, and I got very interested in this I guess sort of a subculture which revolved around fanzines and smaller press games and there was quite a lot of kind of abstract

discussion about what did you actually want to achieve with a role-playing game? Like what was the point of it? Like how could you draw on different kinds of literature than just kind of standard fantasy? You know, how could you tell different kinds of stories with it? And of course,

I could never really find anyone else close to my age at all at all, really, who was interested in any of that. I knew that people existed, who were also interested in that aspect of role-playing games. But I didn't really start, I wasn't really in a position to start making contact with any of those people until I was about 16, 17. By that time, indeed, I had sort of, you know, started to get into sex and drugs. It's a standard story with people who go through that process is So I gave up on, you know, I sort of gave up on it because it was geeky and embarrassing. And it really wasn't, to be honest. It was, you know, I had a group of friends of six form who were, none of whom had been

interested in those games, but they heard me kind of wax lyrical about the idea of these games as sort of experimental form of almost kind of collective art practice. And they were quite excited by the idea of doing it. But like none of them had any previous experience or really had any interest, like outside my enthusiasm in the hobby. And in the end, it was just too much effort to carry on with it from that. And we just decided to form a band instead and just do other stuff. So I became, by the time I was late in six form, I was very, I was, you know, I became a cool guy.

But I sort of became a cool guy because my attempt to be a sort of game geek, it just failed. They sort of found, they founded on, it was also, because there was a massive, like, D&D club at my six form. But it was all full of, like, acne-ridden, male science students who were into heavy metal. Like, none of the, and when I went into the room and said, look, of any of you, ever played a game other than Dungeons and Dragons, they looked at me like I was crazy. And I think that was the day, like the first couple of weeks of six where I thought,

I'm just going to park this. Maybe I'll come back to it one day. And then, you know, 30 old years later, you know, in the middle of the pandemic, I'd sort of become aware through listening to various podcasts and kind of just living in the culture as one does, that the whole role-playing game scene had really evolved,

that actually there were far more people involved these days who were into the same kind of game those gaming ideas and and you could do it online now so you didn't have to sleep to somebody's house and then at the depth of the pandemic i was um you know joe my partner was getting quite worried about my complete lack of any sort of social activity because obviously parties and DJ and yoga classes and all that stuff all of it wasn't happening so she really encouraged me to sort of start that start playing role playing games is just something to do with my friends online and the fact that keir was also really

really interested. It was a big motivator. I'm now in the situation. I've acquired yet another hobby and like the pandemic's over and people are wanting me to go out for beers and DJ and do talks and I don't know how I'm going to manage it all, but life goes on. And computer games, like I was around for the sort of birth of arcade culture when I was living in the States since 1980, 81, which is where I also discovered Dungeons and Dragons. And so me and my friends we were too young to have lots of quarters to put in an arcade machine so we would go we would we would like trek for 20 minutes I love arcades I love okay to go to the arcade and we'd all we'd basically be able to play on these machines for like five minutes and then

we'd run out of money and we'd spend 20 minutes trekking home again but it was so kind of magical and captivating that we would do it and then console culture I was sort of participated in a bit in the in the um 90s just because you know i was living in a shared house and my friend john you always had a console and games so to my 11 year old is still kind of fascinated and impressed by this fact that i i did complete sonic the headshot that's my one my one achievement and um but i did i also really like sort of fighting games and stuff and some sort of platform games and then but then the end of it for me was um tomb raider everybody was getting really into tomb raider but it was just so much time people were putting in like 300 hours

like of their lives to finish tomb raider and i so i started it like i spent like a day learning the basic moves which is basically you have to put in hours and hours just to be able to like you know learn the basic moves to like manipulate the little character on the screen and i just thought this is ridiculous this is like i'm not but this is interesting right because It's like what was the other thing that you would rather do than put the 300 hours in? Well, yeah, no, that's the bit of interesting.

Well, there were, I had to list. I thought I was either going to start getting into football, start going down late in Orient, or I was going to go to Tai Chi classes and the Tai Chi one out. I thought, I'll learn Tai Chi. No surprise there. Well, it was a good choice. I stand by the choice, frankly.

I'm just glad I didn't start going down late in Orient. That would have been, that would have ruined my life. I'm obviously very interested in the way Tabletop role-playing game hobby has evolved and the way its cultural status has changed but also, you know, I've got friends who are really into these kind of really complicated board games which is really interesting

there's actually a game called hegemony lead your class to power I backed that on Kickstarter as well it looks so complex he does look really complicated but it looks like the kind of organ, I'm just going to look at that and think why would we play this board game. I'd rather do a role-playing game. I'd rather do a game we're acting out a story

about leading our class to power, not some weird abstraction of it on a board. You know, just before you go on the hegemony game, because in Red Plenty games, the last game we produced was called Parts Per Million. We wanted to do a climate change game, and we knew what we wanted was you would have to play different sectors, political groups or sectors, and you would have different interests and therefore different win conditions and the lesson of the game would be, we're not all in it together. You have to form alliances,

and some alliances will be, you'll be more compatible and others wouldn't. And we started off trying to make a game like Hegemony, which in some ways it's like what they call a Euro game of these board games, these really complex, like resource management sort of games and all this stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And it just got, it would end up looking like hegemony, basically, because you're trying to recreate something incredibly complex. And in the end, we went much back, it ended up as like a more of a negotiation game with a little resource management. and basically back towards a sort of role-playing game, once you go along that route of simulation

and you're trying to simulate like particular aspects of how capitalism works, it just becomes incredibly complex. We decided that in preparation for this episode, that the team, the ACFM team, should play a game together. The game that we played is a game called Comrades and there's a whole school of role-playing games now which all borrow a particular rule set

from a game called Apocopon. world. And basically, that is a rule set. It's not the first one. People have been developing rules sets like this since the 80s, but it is a very influential example. The idea is it's supposed to be very easy. There's very few rules to learn. It's very easy to adapt to any kind of setting. The original game was for some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario. But people have adapted those rules for games set in like the Regency Romances of Jane Austen and her imitators or classic fantasy scenarios or just anything. It's a really adaptable rule set and it really encourages players just to think about their characters and their relationships to each

other and to other people they meet in the story and not to worry so much about simulating every physical aspect of the world in the game or all trying to make your character like a superhero or something like that. One of those games, one of those many, many games, which borrows the Apocalypse World Rule Set is a game by William Mackers called Comrades. And it is just a set of guidelines, really, for playing sort of archetypical revolutionaries in some sort of imagined revolutionary scenario, whether it's a historical one based on an actual historical revolution or an imaginary one set in the present. And we had a talk about what kind of setting people would enjoy playing in. And we decided that what we were...

Ilford. Yeah. Elford was the local. Well, I decided on Ilford. Ilford, London. I decided on Ilford, and it would be set in Ilford in 2171 during a Britain in Civil War. Years and years ago, a friend of mine asked me, if you could make a film, if you could make a feature film, like, what would it be? I said I would make a sort of cyberpunk film, but it would be based on the life of Antonio Gramsci.

It would be set in a version of an image. imagined future Britain. Some of the events would be based on Italy in the 20s. I invented the kind of future history of Britain and the world from now into the next 150 years. So Nadia and Keir and Chal and Matt were playing the roles of these characters who were basically having to deal with the fact that Britain was in the throes of civil war and the oppressive government forces, like Mike, were expected, like, soon to come and try to occupy Ilford, which is on the border of the Socialist Republic of London. Yeah, it was a long session.

We played on Zoom together for like six hours, and everybody really seemed to enjoy it. Let's find out. What did you think, Nadia? Yeah, what did you think about playing it? I mean, I was, it's not that I was skeptical. I found it really difficult to engage with the prep. thought playing the game is going to be different to reading about the game. And I kind of knew that, but I found the reading about it very difficult. Like, I just didn't know whether I was going

to enjoy it or not. But I really enjoyed it. One, I thought Jeremy was an amazing emcee. I thought I was really surprised to hear you say there this, you've not done this many times. It was a really simple game. And what was interesting for me is that it was sort of like halfway through, I started seeing all of these people on screen as their characters rather than the people that I know and work with well and started thinking, right, what do I need to do to convince these people to do the thing that I think is the best outcome for the group? Because there's all of this stuff happening. There's an invasion coming from the north. And I just really enjoyed the creativity of it. And I really got into it probably about half an hour or an hour before the game ended.

I was just like, oh yeah, this is going to end in a really ACFM ending, isn't it? And of course it did, which is that everybody was obsessed, was putting on a big rave. And that became kind of like the solution to the world's problems, which I really enjoyed. So yeah, like in the end, I found it actually very energizing in the same way that I found the consciousness raising that we were doing online energizing. And I didn't see that coming at all. And I think it was more about the play. I didn't feel like, oh, this has taught me how to be a better comrade.

I will now, you know, behave in certain ways in like meetings, because, you know, there was a big meeting. We kept being pulled into meetings, which my character kept rolling their eyes at, I understand. This is my idea of a great role-playing game, listeners. Jeremy was obsessed with meetings. I kept saying it's the meeting scene from Ken Lachie's London Freedom over and over again. And I was constantly trying to find a way to, you know, escape these meetings and actually, do like real world activism which is kind of quite similar i guess to what i do in in real life but i found it really enjoyable when we played the social strike game which is a red plenty game which is

a red plenty game like back in the day when it was being developed in when me and keir were in plan c like there was stuff happening like that when we were playing the game over a couple of hours where it was like this you know there were bombs going off here and the factory was exploding and whatever but it felt like this, it didn't feel like the stakes were as high as this game when I played, and maybe it's to do with trust and bonds. And that's something I'm interested in, whether because I know and like everyone who's playing the game. I was like, shit, you know, I really don't want this invasion to happen without us being ready, which was slightly different to when I was playing with a group of Rantabue. So that's something I'm interested in. I'm not sure what

the answer is. But yeah, that was my experience of it. What was it like for you to emcee? I mean, it really seemed like you did this a lot. like play characters of different kinds of left-wing tropes. I was doing games a lot over the pandemic, so I've got into the habit of role-playing, and it's just playing multiple characters at the same time. But also, I think, you know, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Like, I really enjoyed it.

I spent a lot of time preparing it, which I wouldn't normally do. I thought everybody would probably like it. And like, I knew that it would be in his element. But I was really, I was pleasantly surprised how much everybody got into their characters and kind of got into the whole concept. I had sort of already started doing it a bit, but I sort of feel like Keir and I sort of decided last year

we'll get back into role-playing games and together. But one of the big motivations was that, in fact, we'd become aware that there were loads of political games on the market now. There's a loads of kind of left-wing games. So this is the most explicit and kind of simply explicit kind of revolutionary role-playing games. But there are loads, and the whole politics of the scene has really shifted, to be honest,

and it mostly sort of shifted to the left in a lot of ways. And this seemed like a good opportunity for us to play this left-wing game that's been published called Comrades. But there were moments when I thought, is this a bit of a busman's holiday for us? I was sort of interested in playing a left-wing game, particularly because it was a left-wing game, basically. And I'm sort of interested in thinking through what you can do with these things.

And there was one moment in when we played comrades, where we actually sort of fell into a discussion about whether it was right to deceive other characters, non-player characters, for revolutionary ends, basically, or whether you should be honest all the time. You produce situations and you talk through real sort of dilemmas, basically, because it's not a particularly obvious answer to that question, and we sort of talked through it a bit,

without putting ourselves completely on the line because I was playing a character whose life involved quite a lot of deception anyway. It made me think that left-wing role-playing games could prove a function of producing situations in which you have to think through these questions in a way which could be useful in real life. Yeah, and I mean, that is politics, effectively, like thinking about do I want to build coalition and alliance here, and does that involve some kind of politicking about interests? I mean, we all do that all the time.

The extreme of that is being lying and deceptive. and the other extreme is being completely non-tactical and like taking everything and speaking at face value all of the time which doesn't work either when you're trying to build worlds and it's that it's that kind of dance where you're trying not to be a complete deceptive knob but you're also trying to get what you want because you think it's what's right

which happens all of the time especially at moments of you know crisis or movement in real life classic bit of late 60s country rock in a way with social commentary as Joe South's games people play which I think is pretty typical of the way in which the concept of games operate in the rhetoric of the 1960s you know Timothy Leary for example before he became the great acid guru was the proponent of what he called transactional psychology which was essentially was closely related in different ways both to nation game theory and to Wittgensteinian theory of language games And it was basically based on the idea that people are always playing social games with each other.

And that's just what the nature of social interaction, and that's how to conceptualize them. And then when Leary gets into acid, he decides, actually, you can escape all those social games through the advanced, you know, the practical mysticism of the psychedelic experience. And the idea that somehow social routines, social conventions are all just sort of meaningless games. And in this sense, games is a negatively marked term. It's a really key theme in the lyrics of countercultural rock. It's absolutely central to Bob Dylan's kind of songwriting in the 1960s. So in all these contexts, games is like a bad thing.

Games are a bad thing. Games are counterposed to the authenticity of meaningful interaction. Oh, the games people play now, every night and every day now. Never meaning what to say now. You never say is what they mean Wally Wally away the hours In their ivory towers Till they covered up with flowers

In the back of a black limousine You can understand games like Candy Crush Which are, you know, the games on your app Which are just a sort of distraction game But very, very addictive In fact, I think you can probably understand them In terms of anxiety as well And if we expand the idea of gamification

into just like what is the contemporary model of management of work, basically, you know, which is all about like quantifying activity, usually through some sort of arbitrary form of measure. It doesn't really matter. Then you do the audit, you audit activity according to these quantifying systems of measure, and then you do a rank, you rank these things. Like if you work in a university, you'll know all about that. That's exactly what systems of management are about, basically.

And you're trying to get a situation through that sort of quantifying auditing and ranking. You're trying to get a situation in which competition with everybody else seems natural and cooperation between your work colleagues becomes more costly or more difficult. You know what I mean? And that is a game. That sets up a game. And like, you know, that seems to have sort of set a dynamic up in which, you know, you end up with things like algorithmic management, which uses those sorts of techniques

and which are very easy to add sort of gamified aspects to gamified bonuses and these sorts of things. But most people don't have the consciousness around to what extent that is ideology or to what extent it's a gamification. No, it's not. Yeah, no, totally, totally. It's supposed to be implicit. No, but I think one of the things that comes out of that, right, that sort of individualised management according to these sort of really arbitrary forms of measurement is, is like a huge amount of anxiety. Do you know what I mean? Because you're not, you're never sure when you've done enough because it's a moving target, you know what I mean? You feel responsible.

And so I think it really makes a lot of sense that basically people use games like Candy Crush as distraction, as a relief from anxiety in a sort of Freudian way. Do you know what I mean? Because quite often you're probably doing similar patterns of behaviour do at work. But there's no consequences from failure on Candy Crush. No, but there is because you do feel like a failure. Like you said, in relation to the involvement of gambling, logic and technology in it, Yeah, but you get those highs and lows, but everything resets.

The social and material conditions around you, everything resets. If you, you know, there's a real possibility that these games you play at work can end up with you losing your job and being destitute. Now, that's something which has got real, real consequences. Then you can retreat into this addictive world where there are no consequences or the consequences are just around your feelings, etc. So I think, yeah, I think you can sort of see that. And so that's why you might want to do these distraction games.

But I think it also sets of a situation where these more complex games and much more towards free play games, like the more rule-like role-playing games, etc. You can also see the attraction of that, because that is the sort of like modeling of agency in a way at which there are no consequences either because the worst that can happen is your character dies, and all these sorts of things. So you just have to create a new one. There's a continuum through, from like real explicit gamification to just like this is what neoliberal institutional reform and management looks like. Yeah, I wonder, wonder as you're speaking, to what extent it relates to self, what's it called the self-responsibilization.

Yeah, totally does, yeah. Called it about, yeah, about like to what extent you feel therefore, like you said, responsible that you need to get to the next level at work. You need to, you need to keep on going because there's constantly something that you've. got to lose, but you don't quite understand what it is because you don't have these old school leftist management where you know how much you're going to earn and you know when you're going to get your pay and those kind of things that lead to a kind of social stability, frankly. That's right. Yeah, I think that's definitely right. And if you think about like algorithmic management like Uber, the app gives you the route and then measures how long it takes you to get

from one point to the other. And then you get rewarded based on those sorts of things, basically. All of this just comes back to the key marks in question of power and interests. Like, where are the power and interests behind these mechanisms and the adaptation and the application of these mechanisms? And to what extent do they actually, are they supposed to work in, in non-explicitly gaming environments, like, you know, the workplace or in management, or where actually does it end up folding in a lot of capitalism's essential bureaucracy, late capitalism bureaucracy, and it actually doesn't work in the end, except it just stresses everyone out. Productivity has dropped off a cliff during this period as well. So it hasn't worked in terms

of like, if you think management is about increasing efficiency and productivity, it's been a disastrous failure. Disastrous failure. If you think management is about preventing controlling people, preventing class consciousness and preventing organization in the workplace, it's worked very well. Because productivity has been as basically flatlined, but so of wages. So profitability is up. Hurrah. We circled around but not really answered the question. What's the limit of a game?

What makes something a game? I mean, role-playing games is a good example of where that question gets tested because you can't do something that looks very like role-playing games. It doesn't really have any gamey elements, which is just people are telling each other a story, basically. People are making up a story collectively.

And then the usual, I guess the consensus within that sea, within the world of role-playing games, is that most people involved in them don't just want to do that. They want it still to be a game. And what makes it a game is, we've already said a bit, is there's a bit of randomisation, and there's some kind of rules, like however thin they are, however flexible they are.

There's some set of parameters, which you then have to gain. You end up learning how to use those to achieve goals within the context of the game, even though the goals you're achieving, not necessarily competitive goals. They're like they're your group of imaginary characters figuring out how best to prepare the local community for the possible invasion of fascist government forces, for example. One of the things we were talking about when preparing all

this, we're thinking about the differences between, say, a game like comrades, a role-playing game and board games. You could think about computer games as well. And one of the suggestions we came up with is that within almost all games, there's a sort of continuum which might run between sort of pure role playing where you're just acting out characters in a story. And that even in a really abstract game, like say, go, there's a little element of that in that some part of what's going on in your brain is you're imagining you're like a general on a battlefield. And the game refers to the spaces of the board that PCs occupy as territory. And at the other end of the continue. There's a set of rules and procedures which are purely abstract. And there isn't

necessarily randomisation, because there isn't randomisation in chess or go. Although, I mean, the individual player experience is a certain kind of randomisation in that they cannot, it's unpredictability. They can't predictability. They can't predictability rather than randomisation is probably the term. But all games have some of those elements, like to a tiny extent. And what makes different games different is that they have, they have them to different extent. Tiny tempers, big hit, pass out, I thought was interesting just because he was doing a degree in computer game design when he made it. And I think the sort of 8-bit computer game music and its bleepy, you know, qualities definitely had some sort of influence on the music he was making.

and the cards and the car's out let's have a toast of celebration get a glass out and we can do this until we pass out I'll be reading this book Experimental Games by Patrick Gigodo you know he's basically a social theorist who writes about games and gamification

and he's got this distinction between games which are problem solving but you solve a problem which is given basically and so of course that's what game theory is you know here's the problem which is given and hear the assumptions behind it now work out, now try to remove the unpredictability by working out, by strategising it, basically.

And then he says, the other games, you know, and he prefers the latter term, are problem making or problem finding, are you create your own problem that you then attempt to solve. Yeah, role-playing games lean more towards the problem-finding sort of game. So when we played comrades the other day, there were some problems there we had to solve. But we invented our own problems about,

we wanted to put a rave on. Where are we going to get the decks? Yeah, yeah. We were finding our own problems and then addressing those, basically, and then complicating them because we suddenly discovered that the M1 was a waterway, etc, etc. So, yeah, so that's the sort of distinction,

I think. The book is full of social theory, so he's got, he's quoted Lazarato about, you know, basically the ability to define your own problems and, you know, being a really key moment in radical or critical theory, are you understanding the sort of conditions which produce the sort of constraints

and limitations on your life and therefore refusing the problems that are given and creating your own ones. You know, that's the sort of, I suppose it's this sort of definition of freedom or something like that. So you can sort of see how that could feed into something which might look like something like what's the difference between a left wing game and a right wing game. I'm not sure I could actually justify that last statement. But that's sort of what I'm interested in as well. Are there left wing games and right wing games? or perhaps right-wing games and critical games, and what's a distinction between them?

I don't think there are... I think the themes are, of course, yeah, I don't think essentially you have left or right games. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I'm inclined to think there are sort of, within both computer games and role-playing games, at least. I think it's harder to say this within board games. In the book that Alex Williams and I have just finished,

we have a little sort of slightly throwaway quip about chess versus go and how basically they imply different conceptions of power and different conceptions of politics and our contention which will annoy all the chess players I'm really sorry, it's probably wrong

but is that chess is actually all about tactics from a go player's point of view chess is all tactics. It's not really about strategy but it calls itself a strategy game. This somehow models the way in which Western political science and theory and philosophy tends to conceptualise politics. It's not really a left-right distinction

But it does raise an interesting question about the extent to which even very abstract games can possibly embody certain sets of preconceptions about the way in which, to some extent, just the way in which relationality works. With things like role-playing games and computer games, in which a lot of the time very specific themes or very specific narrative concepts are thematized, you might be able to say there are right-wing and left-wing games. And I would say definitely there are lots of people within the worlds of tabletop role-playing games who think that you can have left-wing games and right-wing games or that you can have themes, narrative things. But they're really, I think Nardia might be right, actually, from that point of view.

Because if you think about where those debates are usually in a lot of computer games, not always, but a lot of the time. And a lot of the time with role-playing games, really the debates people are having about whether certain games can be left-wing or right-wing. are just the same, they're just analogues of debates about whether certain kinds of fiction can be right wing

or left wing. I just don't understand the question or like the motivation behind the question, I guess. Well, my motivation is I want to create left wing games. Not yours, but like in general. No, but I think, yeah, so I think beyond sort of like the narrative that it's put in, so they're like the content or whatever, is that like games

are about, like the difference between a game and a novel is that games model the agency, that there's a level of agency involved in it. Yeah. And so you can have different forms of agency. And so that could just be as simple as, like, most computer games are individual competitive games. But there's been a real burst of, like, cooperative games.

So games you can only play if you're playing with other people online, basically. So it's a game called It Takes Two, and you have to play it with somebody else. It's also a game called Sea of Pirates, where you have to sail a pirate ship. But also just Minecraft. I mean, Minecraft's one of the biggest things happening in games the past 20 years, and it can be played in a competitive way. But most of the time, when kids play Minecraft, what they do is they collaborate to create and or explore,

like they're a virtual environment of their own. These other two games, they see a pirate. You literally can't sail the ship because you need somebody to steer, somebody to do certain functions. You can only play the game efficiently if you work as a team efficiently together. So they're deliberately created in that sort of way.

What is the agency that's modelled in role-playing games? Is that the agency of a group? It's the agency of a party to some degree, isn't it? Not the political party, by the way, just the group of explorers. I think that's really interesting. I think we should talk about that in the microdose. You might be right.

Because I think there is a whole history, but I think we have to get into the weeds a little bit. I think there's a whole back and forth to the left-right debate within the history of role-playing games about exactly that question. Who is the subject? Is it the group or the individual? What I meant by who's coming up with that question

is it's a question coming from a place of identity. It's like wanting to ascertain that something is left-wing to allow you to do it or like to designate something as right-wing so you can cancel it. Like there's a lot of that discourse, so that's why I was asking. That might well be true, but like that's not, that was my motivation. It's more that I'm like, I'm interested in game designing, designing games and like thinking what can be done with them. But it's also like, if we think about gamification as this thing that spills out of the magic circle

all of the time, becomes an infinite game in James Karses' conception, then it's pretty important to decide whether you can have counter games which follow a different logic, basically. Part of the interest in that sort of idea of games and counter games for me is this idea that QAnon, the Conspirity Theory, is an alternative reality game. So that's a specific set of games, alternative reality games, are games that you play that sort of overlap your everyday life. They spill out of the bounds and you play them as you go about your everyday life. And so people have made the argument that like Q and on is a textual interpretation game

and a game designed around what they call a guided apophonia. And apophonia is the tendency to perceive connections or meaningful patterns in random data. It's a game where you're trying to guide people to make connections which aren't there in order to draw them into a right-wing game. That obviously makes it intriguing to me. That's a point where political activism overlaps with these sorts of game design. It includes this debate that we started having comrades about whether you can have deception as part of that. And so people who've engaged in this discussion about whether QAnon is a game or not, such as Wooming 1, Roberto Bui,

he makes this distinction by saying the difference between a right-wing game and a left-wing game in that scene. is whether the deception is revealed or not. He calls it the Great Reveal. Wu Ming and his group in Italy, they were invading sort of like media pranks in the 1960s. But they always had this moment where they revealed that it was a prank, and the idea was to expose, like, you know, the gallability or the stupidity of the media and this sort of thing.

And if you don't do the Great Reveal, then it's just deception. Do you know what I mean? It's not, there's no moment of critical analysis where the reception is revealed and then you sort of understand a bit more about how the world works. I just find that a very interesting way to think about how, not how do you gamify activism,

but like how do you do activism in a gamified world, basically? Another anti-game song, really, is Chris Isaacs, the 80s, adult-oriented rock, classic Wicked Game, been remixed. It's just like countless times, but the one that we've historically played at Beauty and the beat a bit is the Trondt-Muhler businessman dubby mix. I mean, one of falling in love with you. I mean, one of the things that's worth saying about games, and one reason we're talking about them today

is that cultural social attitudes to games, I think, have really shifted. They've really shifted over the past few decades. I mean, the two main types of games we talked about today, tabletop role-playing games and computer games, they were both the object of major moral panic. in the 1980s. They were both seen as things which risked corrupting the youth, demoralising people,

partly because of their perceived addictiveness, partly because of their escapeism, their perceived escapism. I would say there's still quite a lot of social concern about the amount of time young people in particular spend on screens. But today, I would say, typical parents today, They're primarily worried about kids being completely obsessed and sucked in and subjectively destroyed by the ultra-gamified world of social media. And I think attitudes even to computer games have really shifted.

Like compared to your adolescent daughter, like spending all her time, you know, on Instagram, like just playing like Zelda for hours or something seems like wholesome. Does Zelda still exist? Yeah, Zelda still massive. In different iterations, there's new versions of Zelda. it's a proper activity, you know, it's a story, you know, she's not going to get bullied playing Zelda. She's not being trained into massively paranoid forms of self-regulatory, you know, narcissism, the kinds we've been talking about on Zelda. So Zelda, which once would have been seen something to worry about, oh, my kid's addicted to these platform games and is playing the per hour's all day.

Now it just seems like positively wholesome. And tabletop role-playing games, which like back in the 80s were, they were subject to this moral panic, from the Christian right who thought they were leading people into Satanism. But even people like my kind of left wings of activist parents were very, you know, looked very askance of what seemed to be the slightly degenerate escapism of like doing role-playing games. Now, I can't think of any parent who doesn't think of them as an incredibly wholesome activity compared to all the other things

that, like, kids could be doing. I'm sure there are still parents that are thinking, I wish my kids were playing outdoors in the fresh air. You can forget about that one. That ship has stales. That's the point. Yeah, but we are talking about, sorry, but we just need to ground this a little bit in, like, Anglo-America. Yeah, we are.

Because that's where this main problem is. And, of course, like, a lot of Asia, I'm not saying it doesn't. But, you know, there's a Mediterranean culture and other parts of the world where people want to get out and kids want to get out. And it's less of an issue. Well, I was down in the south of France the week that Pokemon Go got released. like people it was all over the place like people were mad for it Pokemon Go gets played outside

but that's what all the kids it was a big deal because the kids were going outside for a change and that's like you know the beautiful Mediterranean I take your point but I think it is pretty ubiquitous one of the things that's really interesting to think about

when thinking about changing cultures and gaming and attitude to gaming is gender politics and there's been anxiety like within gaming cultures as again going back as as far as the early 80s, about the idea that these were really male-dominated spaces. There's been both the kind of social reality that like if you went to an arcade or, as I mentioned earlier, to like a D&D club in the 80s,

you would see maybe some, maybe none, definitely very few, like girls or women there. And there's been anxiety about that ever since. And that's clearly that's something that's changed, to some extent. Clearly it's changed that gaming is seen as a sort of exclusively male activity, that it isn't part of the culture of so girls and women. I just want to speak briefly about how I relate to gender around games. And I think there's two things that I think about before we start talking about, you know, GamerGate.

I mean, obviously it's related to it. One is if men and boys are able to spend so much time in front of a screen playing a game or anyone really, then my question immediately that comes to me from the vantage point of a woman is who's cleaning the bed sheets, who's cooking,

who's making them dinner, who's keeping them alive. So I'm thinking about the social reproduction around that. And because of patriarchy, women are less able to get away with having all of that catered for them.

So that's one thing that comes to mind. The second thing that comes to mind is that when you do have men under patriarch. I mean, the same would happen to women as well, but not with the same effect. When you do have men or young men, especially spending a lot of time doing all of their socializing without there being other women, then women both in the gaming world and in reality become fetishized as some kind of objectified other. If you are not socializing with women, then you

start to have a fantastical idea about what women are and you stop seeing women as people, which feeds hugely into the whole in-cell culture, of course. So those are the things that I think about when I think about gaming culture and the problems with gaming culture. But we can talk more about GamerGate for those who don't know about what happened

in 2014. It is really interesting that whole in-cell thing and that it's relation... Because basically the whole in-cell thing is like people are involuntary celibate, not because they can't find somebody to have sex with them, but because there's a gamified

conception of sexual relations and so they only want to have sex with a seven because they think they're a seven and they don't want to have sex with a six or something and of course you know there are gamified apps you know dating gamified apps etc where you swipe left and all these sorts of sorts of things so yeah I think it's a really really like that like patriarchy getting embedded in the in the architecture of games I know and the conception of agencies around that is absolutely tied into it yeah we could almost do a whole episode on the gamification of sexual and human relationships and dating in itself. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that.

Alison Wynch and Ben Little have done a recent book about sort of patriarchy and digital culture and Silicon Valley and that touches on a lot of these issues in quite an interesting way. Another song talking about The Losing Game is the beautiful Love is a Losing Game by Amy Winehouse, which has just got such a kind of honey, fluid, melancholy vibe to it. about Gamer Gates. Okay. Yeah, I mean, basically the incident was a female games reviewer got picked on. The idea was that people were trying to add wokeness to gaming culture,

and she was relentlessly harassed and doxed in a horrendous way, basically. And had threats of rape and death threats and all the rest of it. Yeah, it was horrific. And that was an important moment on turning a cohort of young male gamers towards the organised far right, basically. The way you'd look at it in a wider term is that what was going on was that the game industry was trying to expand its market, basically, away from young boys, tried to create new forms of games, which would appeal to other people around new narratives, but also just like new conceptions of agency in games. Those young boys didn't like losing their world. But I think that it had a fairly serious impact because I think it plays into the reason that the right one social media,

a long time in terms of they won YouTube, et cetera. I mean, people call it a precursor to the alt-right. Like, that's the statement that's made. Yeah, very much so, yeah. I think you can think about it in terms of the design of games in that as well, because a lot of that sort of competitive games, digital games, the game is you try to discover the algorithm that governs the game. And so, you know, you want to get through this particular platform,

and there's a big boss, and you have to learn the boss's moves in order so you can adapt to them and kill the boss. So it's about learning the algorithm and then adapting to the algorithm, which is, of course, exactly the same for social media. That's what you do in social media. If you want to win social media, you have to learn the algorithm and the way that people interact with those algorithms and conform to it. And I think that whole Gamergate thing fed into the alt-right,

and I think it gave the old rights an advantage in the new emerging hegemony of the social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., perhaps a bit less than Twitter, actually. But also it was one of the big incidents that built the mechanism of this kind of behaviour of really going for the extreme harassment of a female, which we see as commonplace now of women in public life. And it's not like, you know, she came up and said something that was that radical. Do you know what I mean?

It's just that once you decide that she's a target, a female is a target, then everything is game. Yeah. And I'm using the word game there, like, you know, right? That sort of culture was rife on message boards like 4chan, etc. Totally, yeah, you're right. They didn't necessarily have a political direction. The direction was like teenage nihilism, basically.

But you should remember around 2011, Anonymous came off out of the 4chanes, and basically they were, some extent, they were a left-wing collective who would go after Scientologists, but they would also support the whole 2011 movement. And it was, like, instance, like Game of Game of Game, that 4chan culture was escaping 4chan, getting wider, but it took on a very definite pro-fascist direction, basically,

which I think is only just, well, not 4-Chang, but that whole wider culture is basically only just adjusting or recovering from now. We should say her name, Anita Sarkisian, at the least. So I thought we should play Pinball Wizard by The Who, which is this really energetic song, about this deaf, dumb and blind kid who's just like an absolute wizard in the arcades

and it's a really fun song with great energy and I just love it. Ever since I was a young boy I played a silver ball from so hard down to Brighton I must have played them all but I ain't seen nothing like him in any amusement hall

that deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a meme in ball My sense around GamerGate, and this also relates to analogous debates that have taken place, mainly around Dungeons and Dragons, really, really since around the same time, is that these are perceived as sort of sites of struggle, especially by quite young people who are very invested in them, but also by some older people. They're seeing the sights of political struggle, but mostly the struggle often seems to be between sort of liberalism and conservatism. Like it often feels like the left as such, like radicalism as such, doesn't have

much of a dog in the fight. We've got liberal feminist, anti-racist, so liberal cosmopolitan games, and you've got just, just proto-fascist games, which is just about shooting people you might or might not look different from you, but they're definitely your enemies because they're other people. And the question of, well, what a socialist, what do socialists, what do socialist games look like, doesn't even really get addressed because the left haven't had the material resources or the ideological weight to be part of that conversation. Maybe us becoming interested in this is partly a symptom, it's partly a function of that. I think sort of changing a bit as part of the broader, you know, incomplete, inconsistent, you know,

halting, stuttering, but real revival of the left since about 2015. I think it's not an accident that like a game like Comrades got published. I think it was 2017. or 2018 it was like the year you know it's not an accident that's when it came out do we know how many people are playing it or very very few people are playing it yeah very because it's called comrades right to which is 99% of society think is a is a word from ancient history I think there are successful left wing games or games that I think are left wing this disco elysium which is this computer game so I keep saying that's out of date isn't it this digital game which started off as a role playing game actually so that might feed into our discussions a bit which is sort of set in a post-revolutionally situation. After a failed revolution, the developers are from Latvia, they're leftists. And it makes it pretty obvious that they have left of sympathies. But you can play it as a fascist, as a neoliberal, a centrist, moralist, or as a communist, and it's the communist one, they have more sympathy with you.

There's no doubt about it. But the question is, are those characters able to develop into each other? Yeah, you'd go down. on one of those routes, according to the decisions you make, basically. Right, okay. If you start trying to collect loads of money, you end up going down a particular route. Right, right. So it's like a series of decision trees.

That makes sense to me because that's, well, then that is what, if there is anything that can be called a left-wing game, I would feel like that is what that is because it's based on structures and decision-making and actions rather than some kind of essentialist. Yeah, it's not a utopian game. I think it's a game about left melancholy, actually. You know, you play as a detect. He plays a detective who has basically lost his memory and he's basically he's mourning for something.

He's gone into an alcoholic stup and it's to do with a relationship breakup. But that is like mirrored by this general feeling of melancholy because a revolution was defeated 30 years ago in this area, basically. But anyway, so that and that sort of fits, that sort of fits into, you know. That's good. Let's play that. It's a one person computer game. Oh, one person. They'd ever published the RPG they, you know, they played it through an RPG and then created it.

a game of it. I mean, in role-playing games, there's a big wave of leftist games. We kick-started a game called Eco Punk. There's a game in development. I think it's coming out soon called Out of the Ashes by Paul Michener, which is a post-apocalyptic game, but it's about building a community. It's explicitly about building your community in some post-apocalyptic scenario. And it's quite, as I understand it, it's quite self-consciously resisting the sort of,

you know, the sort of neoliberal dimension of classic post-apocalyptic tropes, where the world of Mad Max is basically just a war of all against all in which people can live out their right-wing libertarian fantasies. There is quite a discernible effect of the kind of leftward shift. I mean, really, all this is what you would expect. I mean, given that political attitudes of Americans under 40, who are by far the biggest cohort of game players in the world, I mean, given that their political attitudes have been,

on all possible measures, been shifting dramatically to the left over the past 10 years. I mean, it's exactly what you'd expect. It's very intriguing, gratifying. You sort of move through this idea that gamification seems to be this really widespread thing. Perhaps games are like the native form of management or perhaps activity in relation to platform capitalism because platform capitalism collects up all of this data, which then can be used to be quantified and audited and ranked, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore, you know, you automatically lead through to the, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to,

the games are probably quite important, you know, games as in consciously thinking about producing and playing particular types of games and understanding what games are trying to nudge you into doing is probably important part of political activism. So that completely justifies the fact that we're spending so much of our week playing, role-playing games. It makes me feel better about going and playing a couple of hours on Eldon Ring a bit later this evening. So as long as I've justified my activities, and of course,

What's my Red Plenty stuff? That's a successful episode for me. As long as you're also still cooking dinner. I am cooking dinner, yes. I happen to know that Jeremy sends out for pizzas when he plays role-playing games. I've seen him. Sometimes. Cut that bit.

But that's the interesting stuff to me. Like what allows you to do that? In the same way, they're like, what produces the worker, what produces the gameplay? in society. Somebody else's labour, usually. And we're not going to end on that. But this is important. No, but like, just think about it. Somebody's come home from work absolutely exhausted, feeling anxious about whether they're going to maintain their job or get promotion because of the whole gamified management apps or gamified management techniques that run their work life. They get home. They want to distract themselves by playing games. So they order some food

from Deliveroo. DeLiveroo Riders got this gamified app which is like sending him on a particular direction and timing how much he gets there and being in ranking him, etc., etc. We live in a gamified world. Yeah, that's spot on and that's a really great account of why

games and gaming have become so central to contemporary culture and contemporary capitalism. And I guess it really does bring home to us how important it is that we think about the question of how gaming can be sometimes creative, empowering, democratic, even just therapeutic. I mean, what all this conversation really brings home to me is the importance of asking ourselves now in the 21st century

whether we can have some control collectively over the games that we play rather than just letting the games play us. Hi, I'm Rivka Brown, commissioning editor and reporter for Navarra Media. A few weeks ago, we set out with a huge ambition to grow our monthly supporter base from 6,000 to 10,000 people, giving us the strong foundation we need to plan. our future, produce more and better podcast videos and articles, and bring independent journalism to an even bigger audience. We're now just a few hundred people away from reaching our goal. So if you've ever thought about supporting us, now's the time to head to navaramedia.com

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