Ludic War Machines

Three years after the 1905 Russian Revolution’s barricades were dismantled, a telling photograph was taken at Maxim Gorky’s villa in Capri. It shows Vladimir Lenin screeching in agony as he likely blundered yet another chess piece into the hands of Alexander Bogdanov, his intellectual rival.1 Despite Gorky’s efforts to mediate, the game would soon deteriorate into ideological conflict within the party, with Bogdanov eventually succumbing to Lenin’s vicious attacks. Like animals rehearsing the brutal reality of territorial fights through play, their shared obsession with the striated space of chess invites interpretation as a playfulness between revolutionaries that would soon sediment into strategic calculation and party discipline, leading to the October Revolution a decade later. The Bolshevik lust for the state seems to slumber in this ludic domination.

Yet playful engagement with strategy, as it manifests in the game of chess, transcends cultural boundaries. In the following decade, while the bloody power struggle against the Russian counterrevolution still raged on, a parallel fascination with chess would flash up at the heart of the capitalist art world, when Marcel Duchamp became increasingly possessed by the game shortly after gaining fame, confessing in a 1919 letter to painter Florine Stettheimer: “My attention is so completely absorbed by chess. I play day and night, and nothing interests me more than finding the right move … I like painting less and less.” While remaining a highly functional chess addict, still able to produce art until his death in 1968, his attention became increasingly devoured by hedonistic calculation. From 1923 onwards, Duchamp constantly competed in chess tournaments. After spending an entire week on his honeymoon playing chess all night, his newlywed wife allegedly glued his pieces to the board in frustration.2

Larry Evans playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, 1958.

As the war game par excellence, chess is not only the point of departure for strategists like Guy Debord in developing their own ludic experiments, but also exemplifies the ways artistic engagements with games have unfolded. In a mode of art for its own sake, surrealist artists like Man Ray and Max Ernst, and later the Flux Chess variants of Fluxus contributor Takako Saito, reskinned chess boards to sculpt the sensual or aesthetic experiences of play, but in ways that left the game mechanics untouched. Inspired by the latter, Yoko Ono’s pacifist hack White Chess Set (1966), on the other hand, illustrates how artistic interventions within the engine room of games can fundamentally alter the mode of play while simultaneously overriding its political standpoint. By dipping the chessboard and all the pieces completely in white, Ono symbolically raises a white flag to break with the masculinist ethos of war games, robbing players of all differentiation between friend and foe that, for Carl Schmitt, represents the existential root of the political. But with the intention to end hostilities, Ono’s intervention eventually deprives the game of its ludic qualities, terminating play altogether and replacing it with critical dialogue.3

Yoko Ono, Play it By Trust, 1986.

In the meantime, the role of games has drastically shifted, with video games becoming a mass cultural phenomenon with over three billion active players worldwide, dwarfing the music and film industries in terms of financial turnover. A similar development took place in the arts, starting from the niche of early internet art and growing through works such as Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009–10). The medium of games has been increasingly canonized as a serious form of artistic expression. This reunification illuminates the affinity between art and play as aspects of human existence possessing an intrinsic purpose never to be fully subsumed by instrumental reason. At the same time, video games today constitute “generative fictions” for Hito Steyerl, and offer “the agency to create new worlds, not just inherit and live within existing ones” for Hans Ulrich Obrist.4 Both rightfully frame game worlds as playgrounds or as praxis engaging actively with nonidentity and the other, thus holding a promise of challenging social reality. Even if not revolutionary, games can at least manifest as a critical mode or concrete medium of political art that allows for active participation rather than passive reception.

It stands to reason that games can also assist in speculating on a future after capitalism—one that aims to reconcile liberty and equality as a communist ideal left unfulfilled by the interpretation of a red bureaucracy.5 But is such emancipatory potential congruent with game mechanisms that are inherently violent or that establish agonistic relations between players? Today, leftist game designers and many serious, cooperative, and social simulation games tend to eradicate these traits entirely. Rather, the scope and key challenges of such games designed as supposed forces of good appear dependent on the foreclosure of difference, nesting their stimulus instead in the pacification of subject relations and the othering of enmity. But this ethical commitment comes at a price. Too often these types of games are bound to an extensive logic,6 depend heavily on rich narrative structures and highly sophisticated rulesets to make up for a lack of intuitive playfulness, or, in the case of puzzles, suffer from diminishing returns when replayed. As a result, they struggle to achieve the thrill and intensity of their competitive counterparts.

It is not that cooperative games like Pandemic (2007) cannot be captivating, or that there is no merit in the free play of Minecraft (2011), or that it is somehow wrong to immerse oneself in the narrative depth of games like Disco Elysium (2019). Rather, their design process starts from a deficit that has to be overcome first. Already the first theoretician of games, Johan Huizinga, recognized an essential lust for domination within play, which, according to him, becomes more fervent “the more play bears the character of competition.”7 How else can a game as simple as rock-paper-scissors bring about a feverish rush? There seemingly exists an inherent complicity between power and games: ludic violence induces an existential intensity unmatched by other forms of play—gambling being the only serious competitor. But should socialist games truly negate such violent flows? While desire for domination and physical violence are increasingly unacceptable in social contexts today, games offer a medium for exploring aggressive drives without real-life consequences beyond the wounded ego following defeat.

Let’s Give Raw Materials to the Factories, 1930.

Most educational games aspiring to mold a player’s moral cosmos also lack this libidinal intensity, as their didactic nature makes them a rather patronizing pastime.8 Though many such games retain competitive elements, their central purpose becomes political indoctrination, which eventually drains the game’s ludic qualities. Such instrumental use of game formats is independent of the ideology they are put into service for. For instance, in a desperate propaganda effort at the height of the Second World War in 1942, Nazi Germany developed a simple racing game called Hunt for the Coal Thief to condition the Volkskörper to save energy.9 Similarly, in the Soviet context, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wife of Lenin and soul of the People’s Commissariat for Education, was convinced that in the same way animals can be trained through games, so could a communist be educated. Like the Nazis, Soviet educators used board games to bootstrap the country’s industrialization, agitating youth to collect scrap for factories needing raw materials.10 Whereas board games served a critical function in shaping Homo sovieticus in the Soviet Union’s formative years, mirroring the instrumental use of the arts in socialist realism, playtime was apparently over when a ministry directive concluded in 1936 that games “vulgarize political education” by exchanging “a serious attitude towards political matters for a playful one.”11

Nowhere does this opposition between pedagogical objectification and ludic pleasure manifest more than in history of the board game Monopoly. Long before the version played today was introduced by Charles Darrow in the 1930s, the game was first conceived by Lizzie Magie in 1902 as “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences” and as an educational vehicle to promote the economic principles of Georgism, an economic theory based on the redistribution of wealth through a single land value tax.12 Magie’s The Landlord’s Game (1906) had two game modes, one similar to today’s Monopoly, and the other based on The Single Tax, which, aligning with the gospel of Henry George, redirects due rent to a public treasury to eventually raise mutual prosperity, with the game ending when the last player doubles their initial capital.

The Landlord’s Game, 1906.

After being turned down by a publisher, the game was self-published by Magie in 1906 but failed financially, unable to satisfy the desires of a growing mass culture. Only after Darrow eradicated any tropes of solidarity did the game spread like wildfire. Was this success eventually a result of the Parker Brothers’ marketing power? Or should we rather ask what it is that, compared to being lectured about the injustices of capitalism, stimulates an ecstatic frenzy with the chance to bleed out family and friends in their move to Boardwalk. What is it about domination on the chessboard that is so enthralling?

One can certainly argue that pleasure from such cutthroat games is bred through patriarchal class society. Monopoly came at the right time to cater to the preachings of the American Dream, simulated here as a fierce zero-sum game. But can this lust for domination be truly overcome, or is it rather some primordial inheritance that can only be suppressed or at best sublimated? Drawing from his anthropological studies on Balinese cockfights, Clifford Geertz once remarked, that “every people … loves its own form of violence,” suggesting a transhistorical validity despite its uneven distribution within populations and its prevalence among those thirsting for political power.13 If this violent kernel cannot be completely extinguished by pacifying our game worlds, among other measures, then the question becomes how to best channel it to serve society at large. Where capitalism unleashes and intensifies these violent flows to the distress of others, a more humane society ought to discover new ways to relate to them.

There are certainly also circumstances where violence appears legitimate as a last resort of liberation movements breaking free from oppression. Walter Benjamin referred to this as the law-destroying function of divine violence as it manifests in the general strike. Of course Marx and Engels considered revolutionary violence a righteous reaction to the economic violence of the capitalist system.14 Rosa Luxemburg conceded the same (though she tragically ended up on the losing side), and the idea is taken to an extreme in insurrectionary anarchists’ propaganda of the deed. For the liberation of the colonized subject, violence comes to the surface in the right to self-defense as proclaimed by Malcolm X. In Frantz Fanon’s reflections on decolonial uprising, it becomes the “absolute line of action” for the colonized man, who “finds his freedom in and through violence.”15

The board game Class Struggle was designed by Prof. Bertell Ollman and released in 1978.

It is therefore no surprise ­that games dealing with revolutionary scenarios draw heavily from ludic violence. For instance, the socialist board game aberration Class Struggle (1978), created by Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman, remains an antagonistic zero-sum game, where either the workers succeed in their revolution or barbarism prevails with the capitalists retaining their grip on the means of production. One of the game’s chance cards for the capitalist player reads “Paperback edition of the Marx/Engels Collected Writings (100 volumes) sweeps the country. Your days are numbered—2 debits.” Note how strongly the game resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of a “war of position.” In opposition to the capitalist state apparatus, “every political struggle,” even the more positional altercation over cultural hegemony, “always has a military substratum” and is structured “like the trench-systems of modern warfare” according to Gramsci.16 Only when this battle for influence within the superstructure erupts in direct political action or even armed insurrection does it transmute into what Gramsci called a “war of maneuver.” Although Gramsci’s terminology acknowledges an essential difference between those two states in means and intensity, it still seems to suggest a Clausewitzian continuity between politics and war.17

The war of maneuver finds expression in Danielle Brathwaite Shirley’s art game SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE (2021), where passivity equates to complicity and the player is confronted with the contentious question of whether to take up arms to protect Black trans lives.18 This mode of confrontation manifests as well in the war game Angola (1988), simulating the country’s civil war between politically opposed liberation movements vying for power at the height of Cold War imperialism. Also the card game Class Fantasy (2024), designed by artist Joshua Citarella, creates an ideological battleground where players clash to establish their vision of utopia derived from the projection of the Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart onto the four quadrants of the Political Compass. Although bound to an utterly nihilistic view of the future, the ultraviolent and anti-capitalist tropes in the morbid first-person shooter Cruelty Squad (2021) could be said to have somehow anticipated the cold-blooded assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City.

Class Fantasy is an action RPG card game that pairs fantasy character classes with political ideologies. Joshua Citarella, 2024.

This militant confrontation is present as well in Bloc by Bloc (2022), a game that unites players representing different revolutionary elements within society in their insurrection against coercive state power. In this anarchist game, and in the manner of many other cooperative games, ludic violence is redirected outwards, with the game system itself becoming the adversary.19 While players practice subversive forms of cooperation like occupying, looting, barricading, and clashing with the police, it is telling that the game cannot completely forego a competitive element. Although winning requires a successful uprising for the liberation of the city through joint action, the extended ruleset offers sectarian and vanguardist agendas—vectors moving towards the state—that introduce individual winning conditions but remain hidden. Without this feature that injects the manipulative depth of the human psyche into the game, it would simply be much less fun, and certainly less realistic.

For these games a common adversary, whether the capitalist class or a colonial power, legitimizes the temptation of ludic violence, yet the question of the Schmittian distinction between friend and foe remains. Once the dust of the revolution settles and the antagonist is defeated, at which points will the new communist society itself fracture?20 How do freely associated producers relate to each other after triumphing over the counterrevolution? Is there really an interest of the people that is homogenous and universally shared? Surprisingly, games dealing with postcapitalist futures have so far disregarded these essential questions: socialist game worlds are depoliticized at the core, despite Marx having already realized himself that the communist revolution would not mark the end of history but only the closing of the prehistory of human society.

In fact, two types of ignorance regarding the political are common in games with socialist tropes. The first resolves internal conflict through dominance, as in nearly all strategy games where players assume the role of a hive mind, fleet commander, or god-emperor. The second type of ignorance is the fallacy of creating game worlds devoid of conflict altogether. In the first case, games regress into despotic top-down command structures that turn individuals into willing puppets at the whims of the master, such as in the bureaucratic planning game Soviet Republic: Workers & Resources (2019), an entirely anti-political city-builder wrapped in the tristesse of Soviet nostalgia. The tendency is present as well in the game Half-Earth Socialism (2022), a far more critical recent attempt to approach postcapitalist survival as a playful challenge. There the player’s objective as the lead planner of GosplanT, the world’s central planning agency, is to reverse the devastating effects of a warming planet and prevent animal extinction by distributing action points across research projects and policies, offering several paths to metabolic salvation. Due to the focus on environmental concerns, the ecological Leninism of Half-Earth Socialism brackets the process of political deliberation almost entirely. Society appears as a mere numeric value of contentedness or as different factions to be appeased to prevent onself from being run out of office.

Half Earth Socialism, 2022.

The second type of ignorance, the illusion of game worlds devoid of conflict, usually manifests in cooperative games such as Daybreak (2023), in which players take up the role of different world powers to jointly reverse climate change. In the game, the challenge is no longer political but is again reduced to a mere technical problem as consensus is taken for granted. Although not explicitly a socialist game, the obvious intention of Daybreak is to counter the crippling doom of our present through an empowering experience of solidarity by creating a game world entirely lacking in competition. But as a didactic tool, Daybreak fails to simulate the real world in which the luckier countries refuse to give up their living standards and the lower stratum yearns for an equal share of material prosperity. Furthermore, the game ignores free-rider problems, the economic disaster that fossil energy–rich countries would face by terminating their extraction, and the fact that regions closer to the poles might even lack a material incentive to reverse greenhouse effects.

The disposal of conflict in our social imaginary, either by domination or denial, constitutes a fundamental flaw shared by most contemporary games dedicated to a postcapitalist future. One has to acknowledge that in any social formation the idea of a general will remains an illusion; in its absence, every political decision and every social plan carries costs that benefit one group over another, making questions of allocation central to any speculative attempt. However, integrating conflict back into socialist games raises the question of the degree to which disagreement would be haunted by hostility, and of how a less authoritarian form of political organization might appease it. How comradely can deliberation over scarce resources truly be in the absence of market mechanisms or a pacifying bureaucratic authority as the mouthpiece of an alleged general interest?

Despite Gramsci having developed his terminology for the analysis of revolutionary struggle within capitalism, it might still be productive to project it onto an environment of freely associated producers deliberating on how to best satisfy their needs in the face of social and natural constraints. While such a comradely conflict should obviously never ignite a lethal war of maneuver, maybe we should still acknowledge some violent residue in the way people will relate to each other. A less utopian conception of a socialist mode of production might be better envisioned as an endless war of position potentially regressing to political maneuvering by different factions aspiring to dictate their account of a social hierarchy of ends—thereby dragging with it the shadow of Carl Schmitt. In such an agonistic framing of politics, as the political theorist Chantal Mouffe writes, “the ‘other’ is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an ‘adversary,’ i.e., somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question.”21

Drawn from the insights of his deep dive into the human soul, Sigmund Freud similarly regarded the adversarial logic of aggression as an essential part of the human condition and considered the communist belief that private property corrupted human nature an “untenable illusion.” Freud claimed that the abolition of private property would only

deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property.22

This view would later be taken to an extreme in Konrad Lorenz’s theory of aggression, which turns violence into the force of life, standing of course in stark opposition to the Kropotkian tradition of mutual aid. Torn between these two poles, today the idea of a human nature becomes increasingly problematic, but, as built environments, games demand that their creators somehow position themselves in this regard because certain assumptions about the world will always be inscribed into the law-like ruleset of the game system itself.

Against the shallow utopianism of cooperative games, serious games truly embracing an alternative political dimension to our capitalist present should therefore focus less on specific content like climate change and center gameplay instead around agonistic forms of socioeconomic deliberation. In that sense, the ruleset of a socialist resource-management game should be characterized by a certain openness, with space for autonomy and player interpretation. This could be achieved by offering both individual and collaborative winning conditions. To a degree, by addressing players through overlapping agendas as political subjects, the inquiry into human nature could be delegated back to them, thereby maximizing their agency that, for game theorist C. Thi Nguyen, constitutes the essence of games.23 Such a focus on player agency would break radically with the manipulative and paternalistic character of educational games that hard-code a compulsion for solidarity in cooperative games—presupposing some docile submission to a greater good hardly to be found anywhere in the real world.

In stark contrast to the games mentioned above, the purpose of political games should not be to social-engineer the human psyche and mold players into a given normative truth. Instead, game mechanics should center on the development of an institutional framework that accords space for deviant behavior—even for players wishing to see the world burn. Much more can be learned from engaging with consequences and resistance to change than from acting as if disagreement among people were nonexistent. From such an institutional ­angle, the game’s scope radically expands by offering a space to negotiate possible socioeconomic configurations highly relevant to our present that is so marked by the lack of a progressive vision of the future and the current regression into fascism. The greatest challenge, however, remains how to translate this insight into concrete game mechanisms that so far seem to be dependent on conventions of victory points or token schemes, as the established vehicles for emulating things like bargaining power and economic pain.

Regardless of the exact scenario or player positions in such a game, one role that has to be present is that of the state as a bureaucratic parasite attempting to detach itself from the social body. While some players will choose to merge with it in order to dominate the rest, others might wish to ward it off by all available means. Similar to the function of war as the central mechanism of primitive societies against social stratification and the formation of the state machine described by Pierre Clastres, by embracing ludic violence such games would, in their own right, become war machines that might fulfill a similar function of domesticating hostility for the coming society.24 They would become playful gateways to explore relations of power while fostering vigilance towards the Stalins among us—these Machiavellian psychopaths clawing their way upwards who have not only shaped large parts of our shared history through malicious scheming and intrigues but also demonstrate the greatest affinity for competitive violence within games. Instead of leaving them the playing field, we must confronted them head on, first on the ludic training ground and later in politics proper. On the other hand, this apprehension about the repressive state apparatus might also lead us astray, and the best preparation for a postcapitalist future has already been created in the game Kolejka (2011), a queuing simulator that throws socialist consumers into the desperate struggle to get all the items on their shopping list.