Mini-Series: The Politics of Video Games

October 22, 2021

EP37: Save the Whales (ft. Torulf Jernstrom, Mary Flanagan & Maru Nihoniho)

We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we take a journey to save the whales.
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August 27, 2021

EP31: Moral Kombat (ft. Liana Kerzner, Cyril Lachel, & Henry Jenkins)

On this episode: guest host and lead producer Jay Cockburn travels back to the 90s, and looks at the story of Mortal Kombat. The game was violent, gory, glorious. It was a youth rebellion in miniature. Parents rebelled against the rebellion, staging their own petulant counter-revolution, and politicians embraced it. It triggering a moral panic and even congressional hearings into violence in games. But why did it happen, who did it serve, and what does it tell us about our own culture?
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May 19, 2021

EP20.1: Solid Strunk (ft. Trevor Strunk of No Cartridge)

In this bonus episode, we talk more with Trevor Strunk of No Cartridge. Trevor has a forthcoming book called Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture. It’s coming out this November
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May 14, 2021

EP20: The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed (ft. Destiny, Trevor Strunk, Cypheroftyr & T.L. Taylor)

It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff. On your right, a StarCraft player-turned-Twitch intellectual: Steven Bonnel II, better known as Destiny.
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March 5, 2021

EP13.1: Gamers of the World, Unite! (w/ Paolo Pedercini)

In this bonus episode, Gordon Katic speaks with Paolo Pedercini, a professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and a game developer who runs Molleindustria. Pedericini’s games offer systemic critiques of capitalism, and invite players to wonder whether video games can be a source of organizing and consciousness-raising.
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This episode was part of a mini-series we produced on the politics of video games, which you can find in full here.

The world of video games has long been a fixation of our politics. For leaders, they serve as a reliable site to gin up the next moral panic, be it about childhood violence, declining attention spans, or social atomization. However, gamers are pushing back. Now, videogames are becoming real sites of political work, including labour action, social theorizing, and organized activism. Furthermore, videogame streamers are becoming a new kind of public intellectual, spending hours discussing social and political theory with their 100s of thousands of followers. Today, young people are more likely to learn about philosophy from these debate bros than they are from the kind of academics we often highlight on this podcast. This is all to say, our politics isn’t so much about videogames anymore; our politics is being made by videogames—from how we think about political ideas, to how we organize the workplace, and how we organize our social worlds. On this series, we examine the emerging politics of videogames, examining our new gamer intellectuals and gamer activists.

These episodes received funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. It was housed at UBC, also with advice from Lennart E. Nacke at the University of Waterloo.

Mini-Series: The Politics of Video Games

EP37: Save the Whales (ft. Torulf Jernstrom, Mary Flanagan & Maru Nihoniho)

EP31: Moral Kombat (ft. Liana Kerzner, Cyril Lachel, & Henry Jenkins)

EP20.1: Solid Strunk (ft. Trevor Strunk of No Cartridge)

EP20: The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed (ft. Destiny, Trevor Strunk, Cypheroftyr & T.L. Taylor)

EP13.1: Gamers of the World, Unite! (w/ Paolo Pedercini)