Anthropology of Play and Games
~ A seminar series organised by Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores),
Kellynn Wee (UCL) and the RAI~
Tuesday 9 June 2026, 4.00 – 6.00pm BST
This is an online event. Please register here.
Ludic Fascism:
Ethnographic Perspectives on Play
in the Political Present
Konstanze N’Guessan (The Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum, Germany)
chaired by: Max Haiven (Lakehead University, Ontario)
When we think and talk about the contemporary far right, the affects that come to mind are usually anger, hatred, or perhaps fear. There is a growing scholarly literature on how the contemporary far right uses LARPing, irony, and digital pop culture for political purposes, how far-right terrorism gets gamified, and how far-right discourse profits from algorithmic accelerationism. In my talk I will focus on something that rarely features in analyses of the far right’s appropriation of game, play and digital pop culture: the pleasure of being part of a community of “haters,” the “fun” of posting racist memes, and the ludic dimensions of post-digital fascist practice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among far-right digital activists who continuously framed their activism as “play,” my talk addresses the question of how to make sense of such emic explanations anthropologically. If contemporary (digital) fascism operates according to the principles of play, then what games are played, by whom, what are the rules, and what does being in the game feel like? My analysis offers insights into the performative dimensions of far-right mainstreaming, community-making, and belonging within post-digital attention economies.
In the second part of the talk I unpack the conceptual and epistemic weight carried by the two concepts “ludic” and “fascism.” (1) What do we gain analytically by analysing contemporary, digital forms of metapolitical activism as “playful”? What can be learned about the successes of the contemporary far right if we take the “only playing” claim literally and seriously? How does anthropological play theory help (or not help) in understanding dark, transgressive and ambiguous forms of playing? (2) What is the analytical gain of conceptualizing this as “fascist”? Should we not rather speak of “far right populist”, “extremist” or “authoritarianism”? Building on an emerging reflexive anthropology of contemporary fascism, my analysis of the micro-dynamics of ludic fascism offers an important third way of studying contemporary fascism anthropologically — at “eye level” (Holmes) in a manner that neither naively “humanizes” fascists (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco) nor retreats into a comfortable critical distance that treats the far right as “ultimate Other.”
Dr Konstanze N’Guessan is a social anthropologist currently working as a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum and as an associated postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project NoJoke at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Her work focuses on far-right humour, drawing on several years of digital-ethnographic fieldwork on platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, Discord, and Twitter/X, as well as offline fieldwork observing how far-right actors use trolling and meme culture to connect online communities with real-world activism.
Beyond that her research interests include nationalism and the nation-state, historiography and memory practices, parenting and childhood, youth welfare offices and unschooling, play as epistemic practice and method, LLMs and speculative fiction, and the question of truth in social anthropology. She has conducted field research in West Africa (Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire) and Germany.
Dr Max Haiven is a writer, game designer, and educator and the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, where he directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab. His board game Billionaires & Guillotines is published by Pluto Press and his next book, The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, will be published by MIT. He has written many books and articles and created podcasts on themes including art, finance, imagination, globalization, conspiracies, fascism, and grassroots activism. He is the editor of the VAGABONDS series of short, provocative books and, as part of Sense & Solidarity he offers workshops on strategy and communication for social movements.