The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism with Max Haiven (MIT Press, 2026)

Now, this answer actually is building the perfect bridge to my very next question, because one of the book's key moves is to connect the financialization of the economy with the gamification of everyday life.

Everyday life,

yeah.

You argue that these aren't separate phenomena, but two sides of the same coin.

Now, could you explain that connection and why it matters for understanding our current political moment?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that relationship between financialization and games and gamifications happens at at least three levels.

Probably the most basic level is simply to point out that over the last 20 years especially, video games certainly have become a huge business.

Recently, we saw basically the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia buy Electronic Arts with a sort of massive leveraged buyout.

All around the world, we're seeing hedge funds and other financial interests take a very keen interest in games and esports, recognizing, as many of your listeners already know, that video games and games more generally are perhaps the most important entertainment industry on the planet at this moment.

So on one level, the financialization of games and gamification is just simply the incredible interest the financial sector is taking in this industry, which is so pivotal to our lives in the 21st century.

But then there's a second level as well, which is that the way in which we as social subjects, as subjects of capitalism, are conscripted into a financialized subjectivity The way we are made into players, in my terminology, is occurring through the processes known as gamification.

So probably the easiest place to see this is in the gamification of financial services applications or fintech.

Every practically every bank now has an app that you use to interact with their services.

And most of these apps, like most apps in general, have integrated gamified elements into it.

Little games you can play, little feedback mechanisms, reward systems, leaderboards and different sorts of interfaces that have been imported from the world of video games.

And these are being used not merely to make our experience of banking or investing more fun, but also to nudge us in certain directions that are profitable to the people who own or control those apps, or that encourage us in various ways to deepen our participation.

Many of these gamified techniques are imported directly from casinos and the proverbial Las Vegas.

We can also observe this kind of gamification of finance and financialization of games, as I mentioned, through prediction markets, crypto trading, even house trading, but also in all sorts of other platforms as well.

For instance, like dating apps, which are both in some ways financialized in the sense that they encourage us to make certain kinds of investment to get certain kinds of rewards, but also highly gamified.

So basically everywhere we look in this society, we've seen a kind of confluence of gamification and financialization to recruit us into ever deeper participation in an economy that is only realistically working for the top proverbial 1% of the population.

And then there's a sort of final level, which is the sum result of all of that, what I call an idiom, something that can only be observed as a whole.

And it sort of starts to disappear if you start looking too closely at its constituent parts.

And that's the sense that we are all trapped in a game that we just can't win, that capitalism has been turned into this kind of cruel gladiatorial spectacle that's reflected in television shows like Squid Games or franchises like The Hunger Games or even game franchises like Fortnite, you know, the battle royale of all against all.

And my argument in the book is that this feeling of living in a gamed world What McKenzie work even two decades ago called the game space has really fundamentally reshaped our political sensibilities and our way of understanding ourselves and our relationship to other people in this moment.