One of my favorite parts of this job – of being a video game critic – is exploring the worlds game designers create and all of their endless possibilities for what “the world” should look like. Game designers, from my perspective, are a little bit like magicians. They take an idea, like “what if you could visit Wikipedia in the 2040s and uncover a mystery while you’re falling down a wiki-hole?” and they bring it into existence. It’s not always fully formed or even flawless, but it is always interesting to me. There is a lot of value in the creation of possibility spaces, and game designers tend to be really good at imagining the limits and opportunities available in other worlds.
Video games are constrained by a lot of things – time, budget, labor issues, the vicissitudes of an industry bent on corporate consolidation – but imagination isn’t one of them. Even in so-called “bad years” for video games, I bet you could find one gem of an indie title that just blows your fucking socks off in terms of the creativity of its world, or the strength of its characters and writing, or even just the novelty of a not-often-used concept. There has never been a year where no good games came out.
Recently there’s been some Discourse about this. Someone has decided to once again raise the “indiepocalypse” banner, and unfortunately this time it’s not a rad creator putting together a series of game collections in the format of a zine. Instead we get to hear the same old argument – there are too many games! no one will play them! you should be fighting climate change instead of creating art of any kind! – that gets bandied about every time this discourse rears its ugly head. (Actually the bit about not creating art of any kind is new. You don’t see that level of commitment to joyless utilitarianism every day.) I don’t want to focus too hard on this discourse or give the person who is single-handedly attempting to keep it going any further publicity, but if your idea for “saving the world” involves “depleting it entirely of culture and cultural objects because they don’t serve any instrumental use to you,” I would like to unsubscribe from your ideology – and your shitty Substack – posthaste.
On the contrary, I believe play and creation are vital aspects of resistance, and that even when worse comes to worst, they are the last values that should be discarded. We need to be able to imagine that a better world is possible, and even more importantly, we need to be able to imagine what those better worlds might look like, and how we might get there.
Part One: Origin Point
While nobody’s ever accused me of being a full-on ray of sunshine, I was a dour teenager. Existing purely on a cultural diet of punk music and horror fiction, I was a cartoon caricature of an angry high school student basically right from my freshman year. Coming of age in the middle of the “war on terrorism” is liable to have that effect, but I think another big reason I was so mad as a kid was 1) undiagnosed mental illness lmao and 2) I had recently been transplanted from a desert town in Southern California where all my cool friends were to a much more socially-conservative suburb of Oklahoma City. When I wasn’t angry, I was much too serious. When I wasn’t being too-serious, I was sleeping. I don’t want to focus too much on myself in this piece but I think this tidbit is important for you to understand the context of what happened next.
I was exposed to anarchism for the first time in between 2007 and 2008. It gave me a political framework through which to view the world, but more importantly, it was the first idea set I’d encountered that said “it’s okay to be upset about things like war and globalization, you’re not the only one,” and “anger and upset should not be the only thing you are able to feel.” Like a lot of disaffected teenagers before and since, my source of radicalization was on the internet, through a publisher called CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective.
Like the guy who wrote the “don’t make any culture anymore” piece, I don’t want to give CrimethInc. – especially early CrimethInc. – too much oxygen. Their brand of anarchism can classically be described as “what if the end of Fight Club was real and we were Project Mayhem?” Historically, they’ve been associated with a subgenre of hardcore called crust, and leaned heavily into the dumpster-diving, poverty-tourist, train-hopping, “drop out of society” aesthetics and ethos of that particular subgenre. I don’t fuck with that, nor do I fuck with either their primitivist/anti-civ critiques or their insistence on holding up figures like FBI informant Bob Black or known pedophile Peter Lamborn Wilson as important figures in anarchist philosophy. They’ve gotten better in recent years, but at this point I’m past recommending them as anyone else’s introduction to anarchism.
What resonated with me out of their early work – and importantly, what’s relevant here – is their positioning of anarchism as a ludic ideology: that is, one of their proposals for how anarchism should be involved an intentional playfulness, a willingness to see games in the motion of everyday life. This was incredibly formative to me in my journey from being a no-fun shithead to being a shithead who sometimes has fun. It also helped me start to turn toward prefigurative politics in general.
Part Two: Dancing Through the Ludic Century
“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!” is a quote often attributed to the grandmother of modern anarchism, Emma Goldman, but she didn’t actually say this. What she said instead is, in my opinion, a lot more interesting.
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
In the driest, most-dictionary-definition-est sense of the term, anarchism is an ideological framework that seeks to replace the society of the state with a stateless society. It opposes domination and hierarchy at every level, from the individual to the structural. The historical origins of anarchism go back centuries, with people standing in opposition to rulers of all types – *and to being ruled* – probably since “civilization” first popped up, but the modern conception of anarchism is tied to the industrial revolution, the French revolutions, and the socialist movements they inspired. People like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin and Ned Ludd are some of the most oft-cited early conceivers of modern anarchism, followed by the power couple of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Errico Malatesta, and so on.
(As an aside, it’s not lost on me that a lot of the people who are most frequently cited as “the first anarchism doers” were white and European, and one of the more heartening trends I’ve noticed over the last decade from anarchist/radical publishers like AK Press, PM Press, Haymarket Books and even CrimethInc. is a larger focus on Black and indigenous anarchism in the US and elsewhere, anarchist traditions in Latin and South America, Korean, Japanese, and Filipino anarchists, anarchisms across Africa, and a larger general focus on decolonization. It’s still imperfect [as evidenced by the apparent inability of this material to penetrate the thick skulls of predominately white and male BreadTubers and Debate Bros] but it’s a marked improvement over when I first got into it, in the dark ages of uhhhh 2008.)
Anarchism is, in my experience, most commonly expressed by the things it opposes: states, hierarchies, domination, bigotries, prisons, borders, etc. These are what we might call the outer bounds or parameters of a possible anarchist society. They’re an important element of the anarchist possibility space, the outer ring of the magic circle. What goes inside, though? What are the things anarchists want to be free to do? This is where most anarchists find themselves at loggerheads, even with other anarchists. Anti-work anarchists believe in a life led primarily for leisure and creativity’s sake, whereas syndicalists view a world where work – and workers – are necessary to keep society running. Anarcho-communists believe that the primary mode of organization post-revolution should be communal in nature, while individualists atomize society to its least-divisible subsection. Gift and participatory economics supporters believe that goods and services should be distributed based on goodwill and participatory decision-making; market anarchists believe that systems of exchange like the one undergirding capitalism should not be discarded wholesale. There are anarchists who believe in full insurrection now baby and anarchists who believe that change will come, but it will be slow. I’ve already mentioned primitivists and anti-civilization anarchists; their nemesis is the anarcho-transhumanist, who believes in the merger of human and machine.
All of this is reductive and every group in that paragraph is going to disagree with me about their portrayal; the point is that for everywhere that anarchists come to a consensus on something they oppose, there are three items they want that they will never, ever agree with each other on.
That being said, there are a lot of anarchist projects out there – some of which you’ve not only heard of, but likely participated in – that help to sketch a general idea of the kind of world we’d collectively like to live in. I’m thinking about Food Not Bombs and other mutual aid activities and orgs, copwatches, bail funds, infoshops, the anarchist black cross network, needle-sharing programs, disaster relief, and more. There’s this erroneous concept of anarchists as agents of chaos and disorder, destroying everything they touch and reveling in the flames. Instead, I think of anarchists as embodying an ideal called for by game designer Eric Zimmerman: “To fully engage with our world of systems, we must all think like designers.”
Part Three: Anarcute, Tonight We Riot, Bloc by Bloc and Creative Resistance
Three games came out in a relatively short timespan that all interrogate radical politics at a particular inflection point: the violent protest. I think it’s incredibly fascinating. Bloc by Bloc and Anarcute released within two months of each other in 2016, and Tonight We Riot came out in 2020. In each game, you play as a group of radical protestors whose goal is to liberate society from the shackles of state authority and corporate control.
In Bloc by Bloc, a tabletop game by Out of Order Games, you and up to three other players each embody a particular revolutionary faction trying to fight and win against an oppressive police force before the larger, scarier federal military shows up. In order to win, players must act in solidarity with each other and secure as much of the city as possible. While the common enemy is the state, each revolutionary faction – Workers, Students, Neighbors and Prisoners – has their own set of goals that sometimes conflict with everyone else’s. When push comes to shove, players can either cooperate with their fellow radicals in securing the streets from the cops, or they can undermine the movement for their own personal gain. Each round represents a night, and at the end of the tenth round either the players have won or the state has arrived to reassert its control over the population after nearly two weeks of upheaval.
Anarcute is a top-down beat-em-up game where the proverbial riot is a protest bloc dressed in cutesy animal masks to beat facial recognition software and the action can best be described as “you control a Katamari that eats cops.” The enemy is once again the state; what Anarcute portrays – albeit, in a cartoon fashion – is the repression technologies that militarized police forces like to employ to quell protests, whether or not they’re peaceful or violent. It is also excellent at showing the necessity of collective solidarity: the group gets stronger the more people – and the more diverse range of people – are able to participate.
As the more recent game of the bunch, Tonight We Riot takes Anarcute‘s general premise and slaps a more specific communard aesthetic on it, but the concept is the same: liberate people, collect bricks and Molotovs, and throw them at the cops and all the weapons of war they’re clumsily using to push you back. Defeat the ruling class, celebrate a free working class, enjoy the means of production you’ve taken back and all the fruits of your labor that come from them.
Each of these games operates on a presupposition that police are the initiators and escalators of violence in any given protest situation. Having been to my share of tense protests and having seen many more go horribly awry largely due to police provocation, I would say this presupposition is largely correct, though maybe don’t quote me as any sort of expert on that.
In an interview with CrimethInc., one of Bloc by Bloc‘s designers, TL, said, “Creating Bloc by Bloc allowed us to explore social upheaval through the lens of systems thinking. A game is a great way to simulate the cybernetic forms of control exercised by institutionalized power. And it allows players to experiment with emergent forms of cooperative strategy to liberate themselves from these oppressive systems. There really isn’t another medium out there that enables this sort of emergent systems approach to telling these stories.”
I have my doubts about this, as these games aren’t really operating in the realm of the real. Each game is obviously a fantasy world, reliant on the magic circle to imagine a future where urban conflict against a massive authoritarian state would result in a net positive outcome for the rebel group – a world where everyone involved in the protest is not only okay with but even hype as fuck to do some property destruction and send some cops to the hospital. As real life protests – even ones that have gone down in the history books – have demonstrated, that’s rarely the case (and often for good reason). The truth is, as always, a lot more complicated than fiction. It’s still fun to make total destroy in the video game, though.
Part Four: But What About After?
If there’s going to be a revolution, there will also likely be a post-revolutionary period, and things will not go the way anyone planned for them to go. This isn’t to cast aspersions on anyone’s policy prescriptions for a better world or whatever, just an acknowledgement that “the future is unwritten,” maybe a little nod to Mark Fisher and his idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, etc. So many pieces of revolutionary speculative fiction seem to end with “and they lived happily ever after.” Everything post-rev was perfect. The end. This feels just incredibly patronizing to me. Conflict doesn’t end because capitalism is destroyed. But I’m preaching to the choir here, I think.
Anyway, I’m stupid, and my imagination can’t pierce this particular veil. That’s why I’m so enamored by game designers in general; they can do what my brain seems incapable of doing. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own small, personal hopes for what a better world looks like. I’ve even thought about how we might get there from here. This is almost certainly boorish naïveté on my part, so Twitter clowns get ready to clown on me, your time has arrived.
The first thing to deal with is state borders. People migrate. It shouldn’t matter why they migrate from one place to another, all that matters to me is that they are able to do so safely. Borders and their enforcement aren’t just unsafe, they’re unjust, arbitrary, cruel and destructive. No one is illegal.
Second, and simultaneously: land back. Indigenous land should be returned to indigenous hands. I’ve heard pushback on this, including from some fellow white anarchists, that mostly amount to “what if they tell us to move?” and I don’t see this as a good enough reason to not return the land to its rightful stewards. If someone in your punk house kicks you out, that’s not a violation of anarchist principles, Jeremy, it’s an affirmation of them. Freedom of association also allows for people to disassociate from you. The world is a big place, especially without borders. There’s room for everyone to coexist without colonizing someone else.
Third: reparations will be fully paid to the descendants of the victims of the slave trade, as well as any Black or brown person who suffered in our white supremacist system. Just because there’s no state doesn’t mean all that generational trauma and the centuries of systemic racism that came with it are just going to go away.
Fourth: Gender has in fact been abolished. Sexuality is fully fluid. There’s no more rules about how you can identify, fuck it, we’re all doing it live.
Fifth: regardless of where you are, you will be able to obtain food, clothing, medical care and shelter without sacrificing a shred of your dignity.
Sixth: in order to course-correct from climate change, we will need to practice “de-growth.”
Seventh: all prisons will be abolished, and justice will be shifted from a carceral outlook to a restorative one.
Eighth: all work will be truly voluntary, and done with the goal of meeting people’s needs as they arise. This obviously includes cultural objects like music and movies and art, weird substack indie game guy. People will do what makes them happy, when it makes them happy.
Ninth: you will be free to pursue whatever educational endeavors you want, whenever you want.
Tenth: before we do abolish prisons/carcerality I think we should have one “reverse jubilee” for surviving war criminals propped up by any and every state. Henry Kissinger, your moment WILL come.
Is any of this likely to happen? Probably not. Is this a complete list of rules and bylaws you can implement in your version of the better world right now? Fuck no, Jesus Christ it would be a disaster, this is half-formed as hell, what are you thinking? Do I know how any of this will work or be implemented? Nah. Like I said, I’m stupid. But these are some of the things my anarchism, coupled with a relatively new interest and understanding of complex topics like colonialism and prison abolition, has led me to hold dear over the years. There is a lot of “activism” I’ve wanted to do, but I’ve felt so hamstrung over the years by my own lack of knowledge or reticence with posting or talking about my own viewpoints that doing this feels like I just cleared a blockage out of my political and spiritual sinuses. I needed to affirm that I don’t have the answers but I still want something, I still want a better world. I want to live up to the ideal of anarchism as a ludic ideology, a framework of playfulness and creation that can overcome the entropy and homogenousness of the world as it is.
Maybe a game designer or two has some ideas?