In "The Player and the Played," @maxhaiven.bsky.social theorizes the connections between the financialization of the capitalist economy, the gamification of our lives, and the rising threat of a uniquely 21st-century form of fascistic politics: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262056045/the-player-and-… #OpenAccess
Sep 15, 2026 at 1:16 PM
The Player and the Played
In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Gam...
Video Game Monetization | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Gamified Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism w/ Max Haiven
La cité-jardin Ungemach. Un laboratoire social : un podcast à écouter en ligne
La cité Ungemach peut passer inaperçue avec ses pavillons coquets. Pourtant, elle fut le théâtre d'une expérimentation sociale grandeur nature qui se déroula au pied du Parlement de Strasbourg de 1924 à 1980 : une cité idéale composée de familles modèles.
A Philosophical Game: An Interview with Saul Steinberg by Lauren Kane
November 4, 2021 – Steinberg and George Plimpton discuss how the form of sports reflects on nationhood.
Social fabric: The Price of What Survives
Some reflections on the social fabric (which we've taken to calling 'social capital')
Le capitalisme de la finitude : pessimisme et bellicisme
Traduction française de « Capitalism of finitude: pessimism and bellicosity. Review of Arnaud Orain’s "Le Monde Confisqué" » de Branko Milanovic
Le grand basculement capitaliste
À propos de : Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l'économie, Crise et critique
Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.
Guide to Incrementals/Appeal to Players | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
The Game of Oligarchy | Brewster Kahle's Blog
I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are “fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.
Our Flappy Dystopia
I’m going to get right to it: any critique or reporting on games that doesn’t include an intersectional perspective on the presence capitalism in games is incomplete.
Exploitative Game Design: Beyond the F2P Debate
The past few months have seen a torrent of articles about Free-to-Play business models, often discussed alongside issues of ethics in games (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). These pieces have addressed the effect on addiction-prone players or children, the possibility of corrupting artistic intent, the sheer amount of money being spent, and other advantages and dangers of F2P. While all of this is relevant, I fear that we’re focusing too much on F2P and glossing over the wider ethical issues in game design.
Game Theory | Open Yale Courses
This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colors all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged. It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. New Edition includes:Forward by Zoe Fisher, Mark’s wife, talking about Mark as a personIntroduction by Alex Niven, his friend and colleague, talking about the political significance of the book thirteen years after it was writtenAfterword by Tariq Goddard, the original editor and publisher, describing the writing and editing of the book, its original reception, and Mark’s own view of it"A quick and entertaining read." Socialist Standard "A provocative and necessary read...for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today. " Times Higher Educational Supplement
Capitalism and markets are closely connected, but they aren't exactly the same thing. And once we recognize that it opens up a huge new terrain for different types of social organization. J.K. Gibson Graham wrote on this a lot. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Gibson-Graham
J. K. Gibson-Graham - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
