This 10-episode podcast series  explores how games and gamification have moved from the margin to the centre of the weird capitalist economy. It jumps beyond the commonplace and largely uninteresting observation that video games have become a major entertainment industry. It also takes for granted that tech and speculative capital have invested heavily in technologies of gamification as a means to gain and hook new users. Instead, it looks to the deeper sociological roots and effects of these trends and the way they are reshaping many spheres of life, from economics to sexuality. And it meditates on what this means for resistance… the good, the bad and the ugly.
Join us for episodes on the gamification of love, on the playfulness of conspiracism, on the myth of the “cheating other,” on the tyrannical rise and rule of game theory, on the appeal of the Hunger Games… and much more!

The Exploits of Play

On this first episode of THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY we speak with Hugh Davies about alternate reality games and gaming and the paranoid world of conspiracism.

More information: https://weirdeconomies.com/podcasts/exploits-of-play

THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY is a 10-episode podcast about how games and play have moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It is produced by Weird Economies and hosted by Max Haiven.

Dr. Hugh Davies is an artist, curator, and researcher. Working across digital media, academic scholarship, and creative practice, he explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of art and technology. He’s written two books on game culture and ethnographies of play and is currently a research fellow with a focus on Chinese Platform Studies at RMIT in Melbourne.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Weird Economies's podcast

Conspiracy Plays - Hugh Davies on the temptations of alternate reality (EoP01)

From military strategy to the corporate imaginary, from public policy to the worldview of Big Tech, game theory has dramatically reshaped power and the way live. On this second episode of THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY we speak with S. L. Amadae about how game theory and its elemental puzzle, the prisoner's dilemma, won the war for our hearts and minds, and the dire consequences for our world. 

More information: weirdeconomies.com/podcasts/exploits-of-play

THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY is a 10-episode podcast about how games and play have moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It is produced by Weird Economies and hosted by Max Haiven.

Dr. Sonja Amadae teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Helsinki and works as a research affiliate at MIT. Dr. Amadae writes on the foundations of liberalism and the philosophy and history of political economy. Her 2016 book, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy as well as an earlier book, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism shows us the world that game theory built and how this model of human behavior became so prevalent.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

The Game at War with the World- S.M. Amadae on the powers behind the prisoners' dilemma (EoP02)

From Squid Game to Hunger Games to Fortnite, how did the trope of  cruel, inescapable games become so central to the stories that animate 21st century neoliberal capitalism? With tom Boland We explore how the game changes the player and how this fits into western literature's beloved 'character arc', as well as the new-age obsession with personal transformation. 

More information: weirdeconomies.com/podcasts/exploits-of-play

THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY is a 10-episode podcast about how games and play have moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It is produced by Weird Economies and hosted by Max Haiven.

Tom Boland is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University College Cork. His main research interests are in critique, culture, unemployment and welfare though recently Dr. Boland has been interested in the proliferance of dystopian games media such as The Hunger Games and “Squid Game”.

All Against All - Tom Boland on our modern gladiators and the real-world hunger games (EoP03)

Leading game scholar, game designer and game company impresario Mary Flanagan joins us to talk about themes in her new book (co-authoered with Mikael Jakobsson) Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Along the way we speak about the yet fully realized potential of games to transform society.

Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer who pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play. She is the founding director of the research laboratory and design studio Tiltfactor Lab, a professor of Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and the CEO of the board game company Resonym which publishes original games and goods for social innovation.

Frontiers of Play - Mary Flanagan on games, colonialism, and imagination (EoP04)

Race and capitalism have always shaped one another, but what do we make of their relationship in an age when both systems increasingly toy with our lives in apocalyptic ways? How has the rhetoric of the cheat become part of a vicious racist reactionary politics, and what's the role of humour and fun in the struggle for a better world?

Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in London. She writes on issues of systemic injustice, racial capitalism, social reproduction, climate crisis and collective survival and is the author of The Futures of Racial Capitalism (2024), Rethinking Racial Capitalism (2018) and Dangerous Brown Men (2008).

THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY is a 10-episode podcast about how games and play have moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It is produced by Weird Economies and hosted by Max Haiven. For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:
Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh
Host: Max Haiven
Producer: Halle Frost
Sound editor: Faye Harvey
Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

The Cheating Other - Gargi Bhattacharyya on how racial capitalism scams us twice (EoP05)

The worldwide gaming market is estimated at $347 billion. That's a hefty chunk of change, power and influence which lies in the hands of an exceptionally few game makers primarily in the global north. How does the culture of an industry like gaming leak into the broader political sphere? Episode 6 of "The Exploits of Play" features guest Thiago Falcão who is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Digital Media at the Federal University of Paraíba. He is the current president of the Brazilian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association - Digra, which he helped found in 2022. He researches the relationships between entertainment, video games, and neoliberal capitalism, with a broad focus on issues related to work, politics, and financialization dynamics in these media.


For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.


Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Gaming Authority - Thiago Falcão on exploitation & far-right politics in the games industry (EoP06)

On the blockbuster "reality" tv show "Love Island," an even number of conventionally attractive cis men and women compete to partner up and win the audience's affection in a spectacle that, like most of its kind, sees producers push heteronormative cliches to their absurd and humiliating limits. On this episode, theorist and author Sophie Lewis joins us to explore the show's popularity in a late capitalism era marked by pervasive "heteropessimism" and the relentless gamification of romance.

Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic, freelance writer, and independent scholar with teaching affiliations at Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. In 2022, they published Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation from Verso and they have an upcoming book called Enemy Feminisms set to be published in 2025 from Haymarket Books.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:
Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh
Host: Max Haiven
Producer: Halle Frost
Sound editor: Faye Harvey
Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

"It Is What It Is" - Sophie Lewis on Love Island and the banality of capitalist eros (EoP07)

In an age when our most intimate connections with others are mediated by gamified interfaces, it’s high time to revisit how the game of love became the plaything of capital. Alfie Bown joins us for episode 8 to explore the joys and horrors of the ero-tech and the burning question: can hookup apps, dating sims and thirst traps can be reclaimed for the common good?

Alfie Bown is editor of "Everyday Analysis" and "Sublation Magazine". His books include Post Comedy, which is forthcoming in 2024, Dream Lovers, Capitalism and the Gamification of Relationships from 2022, Post Memes from 2019 and the PlayStation Dream World from 2017.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:
Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh
Host: Max Haiven
Producer: Halle Frost
Sound editor: Faye Harvey
Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Toyed With - Alfie Bown on the gamification of love (EoP08)

What if we handed some of the most consequential decisions about the future of humanity and the planet to a bunch of game-obsessed nerds? From artificial intelligence to the future of money, from the way we find love to the way we come to know our bodies and communities, Silicon Valley has become one of the most revolutionary and transformative forces of our times. What games do they play? In this episode Christian Nagler helps us understand with a deep dive into the ideology and fantasy of the “longevity community” seeking to leverage unimaginable wealth and technological utopianism to beat death at its own game.

Christian Nagler is a writer and artist. His work looks at (and performs) the imbrications of embodiment and global economics both in his everyday life and in projects like Market Fitness, and Yoga for Adjuncts he researches critical ethnography, political theory, and media and cultural studies at UC Berkeley.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:
Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh
Host: Max Haiven
Producer: Halle Frost
Sound editor: Faye Harvey
Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

The Singularity Bluff - Christian Nagler on Silicon Valley's Dangerous Dreams (EoP09)

What is the anti-capitalist game? For several decades, Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux of the game-changing Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination have been using play and games as methods of class war: from the disruptive frivolity of Reclaim the Streets marches to a Carnival Against Capitalism that shut down the London Stock Exchange; from the Climate Games that crowdsourced playful interventions against greenwashing to the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. On the final episode of "The Exploits of Play" we speak to Jay and Isa about their past “work” as well as their current activities, including at the ZAD: the autonomous “zone to defend” at Notre Dame de Landes, near Nantes, France, the subject of their 2021 book We Are Nature Defending Itself.


Jay Jordan is co-founder of Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000) and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, and co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003) and A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible (Minor Compositions, 2011). Isabelle Fremeaux is a popular educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London. Along with Jay Jordan, she is a coordinator of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Together, they are the authors of "We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones" from Pluto Press in 2021. That book details their role in the struggle for the ZAD: an autonomous community in Western France that for decades fought back against state repression and is today a beacon of hope for radical ecological activists in that country and around the world.


For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.


Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Our Moves and Movements- Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux on playfully subverting capitalism (EoP10)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a research and creativity workshop for the radical imagination active around the world and locally in Thunder Bay, Canada.