Some bore might object that Lenin is yawning in this picture, but according to Gorky, that day Lenin “grew angry when he lost, even sulking rather childishly.” Maxim Gorky, “V. I. Lenin,” in Lenin and Gorky: Letters Reminiscences Articles (Progress Publishers, 1973), 271.
The addictive potency that had cast its spell on Duchamp also gives us a dialectical glimpse of what the anthropologist Natasha Schüll, in her studies on slot machines (Addiction by Design), would call the “machine zone,” a loss of autonomy or a state of self-dissolution as the result of a gravitational force that would much later absorb an entire generation of juvenile gamers grinding their lives away in virtual worlds. While Duchamp acknowledged the game’s addictive potency, admitting to still being “a victim of chess” in a 1952 Time interview, he simultaneously praised its sublime beauty in an address to the New York State Chess Association: “The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem … I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
The sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, such as Circuit (1931–32), which traps the player in an indefinite loop, and No More Play (1931–32), which distorts the game board into a scorched battlefield, similarly make games unplayable and transpose ludic objects into the gallery space.
Hito Steyerl, “On Games: Or, Can Art Workers Think?,” New Left Review 103 (January 2017): 105; “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age,” exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Centre Pompidou-Metz (2023) and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf (2022–24).
I am not alone in this inquiry. Marjim Did recently published a comprehensive study examining the emancipatory potential of video games, Everything to Play For (Verso, 2024). Max Haven is also working on a book concerned with anti-fascist games, The Player and the Played (MIT Press, forthcoming).
In social simulation games like the successful Animal Crossing series, no matter how many chores are completed and commodities are hoarded the additive logic of achievements never results in a qualitative in-kind change in the state of the game world. However, in modeling real-life consumerism and simplified social interaction, the popularity of the series during the Covid-19 lockdowns—in particular among neurodivergent players—remains a highly interesting cultural phenomenon given its ostensibly sedative and comforting character. For the distinction between an extensive and intensive space, see Manuel DeLanda, “Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Virtual,” in Deleuze and Space, ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 80–88.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Routledge, 1949), 11.
There also exists a more innocent use of games in education, one that is less normatively charged and aims at the acquisition of knowledge such as language skills and computer-code literacy. Whether the cultural development of gamified education is a net positive, or will cripple intrinsic motivation by making personal growth reliant on external stimuli like achievement badges and nudging sound effects, does not further concern us here. Assuming this cultural technique works as intended, it would indeed increase degrees of freedom by enabling subjects to lead a self-determined life through their acquired knowledge. The instrumental intention of using games to create new ethical subjects, on the other hand, curtails liberty as it objectifies players, who are coerced to embody the normative truth propagated by the game. Where the former reinforces means, the latter dictates ends.
With over four million copies produced, the game was part of a larger propaganda campaign centering on the caricature of Kohlenklau, reminding Germans that there is a potential saboteur to the war effort slumbering in everyone. As an adaptation of the Game of the Goose with fifty fields of three different types, the game’s objective is to reach the finish line first by dice rolls. There exist three types of fields: neutral, positive, and negative. Black ones represent good conduct regarding energy use, which allow the player to move forward, while red fields stand for wasteful behavior. For instance, the red field 19 admonishes the player who “uses the vacuum cleaner before 9 p.m. when the defense industry needs the electricity. KK (Kohlenklau) is at work! (move back to 13).”
The game Let’s Give Resources to the Factories (1930) is based on game mechanisms similar to the aforementioned fascist race game. The description of Let’s Give Resources to the Factories reads: “The collected scrap goes to the factories. From old iron comes brand new machines, and from torn paper clean notebooks. In this way the pioneers help the state.”
As quoted by Larisa Kocubej, “Reise nach Moskau,” in Argon und Ares, ed. Ernst Strouhal (Campus, 2017), 271. Translation by the author. Likewise, the instrumental elevation of chess to a state doctrine in order to prove the superiority of the Soviet system can be traced back to the same period, when Nikolai Krylenko, then chairman of the Soviet Chess Federation, demanded in 1932: “We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art's sake.’ We must organise shock-brigades of chess-players, and begin the immediate realisation of a Five Year Plan for chess.” Quoted in Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (Longmans, Green & Co, 1939), 575.
Lizzie Magie, “The Landlord’s Game,” in The Single Tax Review, Autumn 1902.
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on Balinese Cockfights,” in Daedalus, no. 101 (Winter, 1972): 27. Without a doubt, there exists the capacity for cooperation and empathy in most of us, even a lust for it. But there are different affective economies at play; the reward systems simply work differently and the soothing oxytocin-induced comfort of solidarity is unfortunately the weaker sensation here.
On the overcoding of physical violence by the economic power of capital, see Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Grove Press, 1963), 85–86.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoarde and Geoffry Nowell Smith (International Publishers, 1971), 230, 235.
For Gramsci, both aspects of revolutionary politics are to a certain degree warlike. The distinction between the two modes of confrontation can perhaps be better framed in terms of the symbolic vs. the material, or the psychological vs. the physical, rather than peace vs. violence. Where the former raises class consciousness and wins over hearts, the latter realizes this potentiality by mobilizing bodies into the street. In that sense, the war of position could also be regarded as virtual potentiality, while the war of maneuver actualizes the revolution.
On queer gaming, which cannot be explored further in this essay, see Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruhberg and Adrienne Shaw (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Amanda C. Cote, Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games (NYU Press, 2020).
Another example of a well-designed cooperative game that channels revolutionary violence outwards by means of an elaborate ruleset is Spirit Island (2017). In this game, players embody island spirits to mutually coordinate Indigenous resistance against the colonial ambitions of foreign settlers. The logic of externalizing violence applies also to player versus environment (PvE) games in the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974). Surprisingly, raiding—the coordination of a large player association (friends) against game bosses (foe) in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like Everquest (1999) and World of Warcraft (2004)—has often been described as a proto-socialist form of cooperation despite its organizational resemblance to military command structures led by a guild master. Note how many such guilds have adopted the custom of so-called dragon kill points (DKP)—de facto labor certificates—to distribute acquired game loot among its members, not on the basis of need but on the principle of contributions measured in labor time. For a discussion of the DKP system, see Krista-Lee Malone, “Dragon Kill Points: The Economics of Power Gamers,” Games and Culture 4, no. 3 (2007).
We are talking here not only about the latent risk of a hierarchy between cadre elites and ordinary workers, but also about what some orthodox Marxists have historically dismissed as secondary contradictions: the struggle between men and women over reproduction, persistent tensions between ethnic groups, the generational divide between the old and young, and an enduring opposition between industrialized North and exploited South. These are only some possible rifts in the social fabric of a future society.
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000), 102.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (Norton & Company, 1962), 60.
C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Pierre Clastres, “Archeology of Violence: War in Primitive Societies,” in Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (1980; Semiotext(e), 1994).