Can board games be part of challenging the dangerous tide of reactionary cultural politics presently washing over the United States and many other countries? The authors frame this threat to progressive social movements and democracy as entangled with a cultural politics of reenchantment. Thanks in part to the rise of ubiquitous digital media, capitalism is gamified as never before, yet most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Here, a gamified reactionary cultural politics easily takes hold, and the authors turn to the example of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy as a “dangerous game” of creative collective fabulation. They explore how critical scholars and activists might develop forms of “enchanted inquiry” that seek to take seriously the power of games and enchantment. And they share their experience designing Clue‐Anon, a board game for three to four players that aims to let players explore why conspiracy theories are so much fun . . . and so dangerous.
Board Games as Social Media: Toward an Enchanted Inquiry of Digital Capitalism
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). He is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he codirects the ReImagining Value Action Lab.
Adam (A.T.) Kingsmith is a writer, technologist, and mixed media documentarian working at the intersections of political economy and critical mental health. His recent books include Anxiety as a Weapon: An Affective Approach to Political Economy (2023), Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination (2020), and One Road, Many Dreams: China's Bold Plan to Remake the Global Economy (2019). He teaches at OCADU and Humber College and is cofounder of EiQ Technologies, an emotion-AI start-up based in the Design Fabrication Zone at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is a sociologist and writer. He is associate professor of sociology at University College London, where he leads the Sociology and Social Theory Research Group, and an editor at the British Journal of Sociology. Komporozos-Athanasiou is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (2022). His second book project, Real Fake: An Intellectual History of Distortion, documents the historical role of market technologies in shaping our collective understandings of reality and truth. His public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Guardian, Public Seminar, Roar Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, and other publications.
Max Haiven, Adam (A.T.) Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou; Board Games as Social Media: Toward an Enchanted Inquiry of Digital Capitalism. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 2023; 122 (4): 795–809. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779388
Download citation file:
Advertisement
