Time to stop playing: No game studies on a dead planet

Emil L. Hammar; Carolyn  Jong; Joachim Despland-Lichtert

doi:10.7557/23.7109

Authors

Emil L. Hammar Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2640-5949
Carolyn Jong
Joachim Despland-Lichtert

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/23.7109

Keywords:

Games, patriarchy, imperialism, fascism, crises, capitalism, white supremacy, global warming, climate change, border, immigrants, games industry, video games, surveillance, military, police, prison, game development, academia

Abstract

This article highlights the interrelated crises that the games industry, its digital game consumers, and the academic field of game studies are embedded in and responsible for reproducing. By couching our analysis in Marxist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist understandings of how our social relations arise from the historical-material basis of society, we identify several different conditions of modern digital games that everyone working in and around games should confront and take seriously, especially regarding contemporary and future impacts and restrictions on the type of research and education we are able to conduct. These crises emerge from social and economic structures including imperialism, racism, militarism, fascism, and patriarchy. To better confront them, we broadly define the causes from which the morbid symptoms we witness arise in primarily Western societies and how they manifest in the games industry, its consumers, and its academic institutions. Based off these aspects, we extrapolate their trajectory in how they will change and adapt to the future of games and of their study, as the ecological and social crises intensify and reverberate. This allows us to propose potential strategies for radically confronting and potentially overcoming the looming crises related to war, patriarchy, white supremacy, famine, destitution, fascism, and climate apocalypse.

Author Biographies

Emil L. Hammar, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

Emil Lundedal Hammar (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His research expertise intersects between game studies, political economy, critical race theory, and cultural memory studies, where his doctoral thesis addressed how digital games, race, colonialism, and political economy intertwine to reinforce dominant hegemonic understandings of the past. His current research focuses on labor conditions, gender diversity, and platformization in the Nordic game industries.

Carolyn Jong

Carolyn Jong is a labour organizer and game developer. She graduated from Concordia University with a PhD in Humanities in 2020, where her research focused on GamerGate and the Alt-Right in connection with capitalist crisis. She has been an active participant in anti-fascist, feminist, and labour organizing for many years, and is a founding member of Game Workers Unite Montréal.

Joachim Despland-Lichtert

Joachim Despland-Lichtert currently works as a game developer in Montréal and teaches at Concordia University. He is a founding member of Game Workers Unite Montréal and has been organizing around labour and social justice issues both inside and outside the games industry for many years.

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