Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire

Abstract

The worlds of games are important places for us to think about time, as demonstrated by historical game studies in evaluating the past, but there is a role for games to help us consider the future as well. Because games are, to some extent, systems, they facilitate a systems thinking approach that connects the material to the immaterial. Because games also tend to be action-based, they allow thinking through of acts as well as representations. Games allow us to think about a time and place that is different from the present and how it might operate as a system that we could live in. I argue that a post-autonomist method of game analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming.

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years afterGames of Empire

“…Each article highlights the theoretical productivity of Games of Empire but also some of its flaws, the latter in two respects. Firstly, in relation to theoretical developments within autonomous and post-Marxist thought, as well as developments within Deleuzian practices of analysis (Bonenfant, 2021; Fordyce, 2021). Secondly, in relation to empirical developments within the game sector and game culture, including the reproduction of racialized and gendered desire in ‘independent games’, the emergence of games as apps, the growth of unionization and an even more globalized production and distribution network (Bulut, 2021; Mejeur, Butt, & Cole, 2021; Nieborg, 2021; Ruffino & Woodcock, 2021).…”