Ruminating on an Antifascist Games Criticism

A couple weeks ago Gamers With Glasses posted “Five Theses On Antifascist Game Criticism,” a short manifesto and call to arms for games critics of conscience to become more active resistors against the reactionary tendency within the games industry and its attendant culture. The post has vexed me, despite it being composed of generally very good advice (it’s difficult to disagree with points like “Center and Elevate Marginalized Voices” and “Games Build Community, and Community Builds Power”), primarily because I don’t think it actually got us close to developing a map towards genuine antifascist criticism.

Part of this is because I don’t think I am operating with the same functional definition of antifascism as GwG. From their post, what I gather is that they are operating on an antifascist sentiment, that is to say, they are willing to generally oppose fascism as it appears in front of them, but they are not developing specific strategies or tactics to do so. Here I’m reminded of the “everyday antifascism” that developed during last couple of years of the first Trump presidency, where regular-degular liberal aunts and uncles were calling themselves “antifa” on social media and elsewhere just to really piss off conservatives and fascists within the Trump administration. This had the positive knock-on effect of making it really hard to discern when moves were being made by antifascist researcher/action crews, but over time it also sort of diluted the public understanding of antifascism to the point where it became sort of meaningless.

Everyday antifascism stands apart from, and in some ways unfortunately opposed to, militant or radical antifascism. To quote Devin Zane Shaw wholesale:

“Militant antifascism upholds the diversity of tactics to combat far-right and fascist organizing; it organizes as a form of community self-defense which (at least ideally) builds reciprocal relationships with marginalized and oppressed communities. In addition, it ought to recognize and uphold the “revolutionary horizon” of antifascist struggle: fascism cannot be permanently defeated until the conditions which give rise to fascism are overthrown.”^[1]“Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight.” Three Way Fight, 2 Aug. 2021, https://threewayfight.org/seven-theses-on-the-three-way-fight/

Radical antifascist analysis recognizes that fascists are not merely outcroppings of or responses to capitalist excess or an abundance of state power. As writers like Alexander Reid Ross point out, fascists will burrow anywhere they can find an opening, from state-communist cadres to deep ecology affinity groups to libertarian think tanks and party apparatuses. They’ll use culture war subjects, especially gender and immigration, to find and convert reactionary liberals. They’ll take advantage of baseline anti-authoritarian tendencies, like favoring freedom of speech or being against war, to ingratiate themselves with groups and movements that otherwise wouldn’t find them acceptable. This has caused antifascists to recognize that they are engaged in a three-way fight: that is, a fight against the state and capitalism and against “third parties that are also extremely hostile to bourgeois democracy and capitalism as they stand now, yet are no more sympathetic to our egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values: modern day fascism.”^[2]Three-Way Fight: Armed Resistance and Militant Anti-Fascism – Anarkismo. https://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=4091 Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.

This makes developing a form of games criticism that is explicitly antifascist a bit more difficult, as it can’t really be said that our work as it currently stands serves as a form of community self-defense. But we can find a starting point that might be fruitful, and that is a radical analysis.

attacking the root

I think that if an antifascist games criticism is going to get off the ground the first thing it needs to be committed to is anti-capitalism, and not the kind of “wink-wink, I’m a secret socialist working for a liberal outlet” anti-capitalism that appears in a lot of writing on the internet today. For example, we know why there has been an avalanche of layoffs and studio closures in the games industry between 2023 and 2024. We have seen massive conglomerates buy up rafts of studios only to shut games down before they had a chance to make a mark, lay everyone at given studios off even if they made games that were successful, and then give their executives massive bonuses. This isn’t merely corporate greed, a system gone awry – it is capitalism working as intended, and it should be opposed as such. In that same vein, when an indie developer hires a bunch of contractors but continues to call themselves a “solo dev,” possibly underpaying and overworking those contractors in the process, this can’t be seen as relatively acceptable compared to the last example: it, too, is capitalism working as intended, and it should also be opposed. Ditto all those “cozy” or “wholesome” capitalism simulators that force players into possibility spaces where the only future is more capitalism, and so on.

Secondly, an antifascist games criticism should be committed to anti-authoritarianism. It should be at base skeptical of state attempts to recuperate games and interpellate players through avenues like esports teams and tournaments, military shooters, government-funded sponsorships and development programs, and ads and promotions in large media outlets, and this is before we even reach outright censorship (actual censorship, not “they changed an outfit from being skimpy to slightly less skimpy”), content regulation or storefront control. An antifascist games criticism should be willing to openly criticize industry complicity in imperialism and genocide, much like Tamoor Hussain, People Make Games and Hippolyte Caubet have around Gaza.

Finally, and most crucially, an antifascist games criticism must be committed to confronting fascism and fascists within and without the games industry and surrounding culture. Whether that comes from YouTube outrage merchants with podcast mics, weird asshole memelords with a Steam Curator page, washed-up game developers looking to make a few extra bucks off the “woke” culture war, or fossilized relics from the last major reactionary harassment campaign, an antifascist games criticism should have no problem clearly opposing and confronting them—and just as importantly, supporting and defending others that do the same. Standing in solidarity with and defending other critics, journalists and devs that have become the center focus of right-wing harassment campaigns should be a primary function of any expressly antifascist criticism, without question.

This is a tall order to ask of games critics writ large, many of whom are alienated from each other through distance and the nature of the position they find themselves in as freelancers. Demanding they take on a radical analysis or engage in militant strategies while they’re still at the mercy of editors with tight budgets and outlets with tighter publishing guidelines and no guaranteed protections against that very same harassment ecosystem would be like asking them to jump off a bridge with no guarantee the bungee cable will hold.

So in that light, let’s revisit some of GwG’s “Five Theses,” going backwards:

Games Build Community, and Community Builds Power

In order for us to build an antifascist critical apparatus that is effective, we’re going to need to build up communities of support and care. Using specific games as a focal point for those communities is a good idea; No Escape‘s discord server has really grown alive as a place where its members can talk about fighting games and shmups and other sicko stuff. These communities should also be built to feel and be safe, and places where people can get basic support and even mutual aid.

However.

It really cannot be overstated how extensively various government and even corporate bodies have built up webs of surveillance that they use against us every single day. Taking an explicitly antifascist position as enumerated above means that at some level you are willingly making yourself a target for surveillance, state harassment and possibly even imprisonment. Creating public digital social spaces like Discord servers is fine, but THEY SHOULD NEVER BE USED FOR ORGANIZING BEYOND SETTING UP A BOOK CLUB OR A MOVIE NIGHT.

Beyond that, you need to make sure that your communication is protected. You’ve probably heard people extol the virtues of using Signal as the ideal end-to-end encrypted messaging app, but even then, Signal will only do so much if you don’t take advantage of its various in-app features, like disappearing messages, group permissions, and “View Once Media.” You will need to learn how to practice good opsec, develop affinity groups that can compartmentalize information, be vigilant against infiltration, and treat your electronic devices, especially your phone, like they’re just giving everything over to the police at all times. Does this mean that by creating an expressly antifascist community you are going to be breaking laws or committing crimes? Not necessarily, but with some of the fragile egos being set up in positions of power, especially in law enforcement, you can never be too careful.

Joy Still Matters

A group of Jewish anarchists put together a list just the other day of actions we can all take to counter fascism, very much in the same vein as the original GwG list. To quote them directly here:

“Make people soup and do not stop inviting them over for soup! Be a reason for living.”

“Make art and display it in public. Draw, paint, or write a colorful sign about your dreams, your hopes for a better world, or to celebrate something that you love about this one. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think of yourself as an artsy type. If you can, get together with others to do this; share art materials, space, and ideas. Wheat paste (or wallpaper paste or glue) your finished work in public — somewhere you and others will see it when going about your daily lives. You’ve now made a material change to your surroundings. It will make people smile. It will make people feel less alone. It will make visible your resistance as well as visions. It also won’t last forever. Nothing does. You can always make more.”

“Engage in play with others as a gateway to imagining other worlds and experimenting with getting there while cultivating camaraderie and goodwill. Hold game nights. Invent your own versions of group “sports” such as capture the flag, tag, and soccer, and gather folks in a park to make riotously merry. Self-organize a queer Purim spiel or other DIY theatrics, and simply be silly (and/or use your performances to make fun of the social order and dream up ways it might tumble). Add playfulness to your banners, events, organizing, and actions.”

Joy and playfulness are nonnegotiable. They are not up for debate or compromise; they are never due for the chopping block in the process of defending ourselves from and fighting back against fascists. Joy and play are the reason we’re here in the first place, the reason any of us decided to pick up a pen or start typing away at a keyboard and write about games. We cannot give them up, and we should fight as hard as we can to defend them as core values.

We Need to Center and Elevate Marginalized Voices, While Also Taking Steps to Safeguard Each Other

Historically whenever right wing harassment campaigns have spun up, their targets have been Black women, trans people, and other marginalized people whose only “crime,” so to speak, was to a) exist in a space contested by cishet white men, and maybe b) write or create something that was critical at a baseline of the impact misogyny, transphobia, anti-Blackness, etc. had on that space.

When we cover games by marginalized developers, or when writers from marginal backgrounds contribute their perspectives, we should, without hesitation, be willing to throw down for them. Proclaiming ourselves to be antifascist games critics and not doing so would, at bare minimum, be foolish. Part of creating an antifascist criticism is building “reciprocal relationships with marginalized and oppressed communities,” and if we’re in the relative position of safety to do so, we should show up to take some heat off whenever and wherever possible.

By redefining ourselves as being part of an antifascist criticism we are engaging in difficult work. It is hard even to see what forms this work would take, because currently there are layers upon layers of rot and entropy in place to stymie us at every turn. Writing about games is itself stuck to a system that benefits state-capitalism and shies away from directly confronting any “audience,” even/especially if that audience is hostile to basic ideas of egalitarianism or freedom, if it means losing that audience’s potential support or money. It will be difficult to write about games and gaming from an antifascist perspective if it feels like there’s no chance of breaking through.

But difficult doesn’t have to mean impossible. Reactionaries and fascists do not own video games; this is not fully ceded ground, and critics already operate independently of the main profit nexus all the time. We have a shot at creating a better world, a video game culture that isn’t steeped in bigotry and led by the nose by a bunch of shitheads. We should take it – in whatever form it takes.