[Salon] Max Haiven: Games, The dangerous medium of 21st century politics

When
13/02/2026
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Full Circle House, 89 Ch. de Vleurgat, 1050 Ixelles

Registration

a) House Member Ticket - FREE
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b) Ideas Member Ticket – €20.00
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c) Non-Members Ticket – €35.00
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d) Concessions – €10.00
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Games: The dangerous medium of 21st century politics

A salon with max Haiven

Ideas / Salon | Fri 13th Feb | 6.30-8.30 pm

Over the past decade, the extreme right around the world has been startlingly successful at hijacking video games and their adjacent online spaces (chatrooms, message boards, fan culture) for recruitment purposes.

Their success is due, in no small part, to the fact that many games implicitly echo far-right and fascistic values: the use of apocalyptic violence to restore the world to order; the domination and exploitation of territories and people; megalomaniacal world-building (and world-razing); the ruthless reduction of everything to a means to an end. But this is not a talk about fascist themes, tropes, or ideology in games. Nor is it about the ways fascistic politics are supported by the political economic structures of the massive game studios and the platform-mediated independent game scene.

This talk is an exploration of a moment of capitalism - a gamed capitalism, a financialized system where we willingly transform ourselves into competitive players, where cheating is normalized, and where we are exploited via our agency. What are the consequences of being played in this way?

Join us and find out.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Haiven is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University. He teaches Social Justice Studies and Media Studies programs and also directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements, produces podcasts and builds infrastructure for the next generation of transformative public intellectuals. His writing has been published widely for both academic and non-academic readers on topics including the imagination, (anti-)capitalism, social movements, art and financialization. Max has produced several research-driven podcasts about themes including financialization and anxiety, conspiracy theories and cultures, Amazon and science fiction, capitalism and play, social movements and psychology and games and (anti)fascism. He also makes and thinks about games. Billionaires and Guillotines is his latest board game.

GOOD READS

The Player and the Played, From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism (forthcoming 2026); Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022); Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020); Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).