What are antifascist games? Political imaginaries and collective agency beyond Nazisploitation - a talk by Max Haiven

Abstract

There are plenty of digital and tabletop games where you get to kill Nazis, but as satisfying as that may be, it will do nothing to challenge the rise of new forms of fascism in our gamified times. In this presentation, we outline three perspectives on fascism and use them to analyze a range of recent and historical games that dwell with (anti)fascist themes. The best among them challenge fascism as at once an mutating ideology, a pervasive tendency within capitalism, and a way of being. While the mainstream games industry has typically promoted games that have implicitly fascistic values, games are uniquely poised to help us imagine and create an antifascist life based on radical forms of individual and collective agency.