How videogames are changing the world: conversation with Marijam Didžgalvytė

Marijam Didžgalvytė is a videogame industry critic, author, and organizer from Lithuania, who currently resides in Copenhagen. She is most known as the author of critical articles on videogames and politics, host of the leftist YouTube channel Left Left Up, and an organizer for a videogame trade union Game Workers Unite. Her recent book “Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Videogames are Changing Our World”, published by Verso Books^[1], takes on a difficult task of analyzing the modern videogame industry through the lens of Marxist materialist analysis. The book is currently being translated to Ukrainian by the Egalite team, with the plans of publishing it in the first half of the 2025. We talked with Marijam about her book and videogames in general, the crisis of the contemporary left, political art, Ukraine and other topics.

Valeriy Petrov: Marijam, please tell us a bit about yourself and how you came up writing a book.

Marijam Didžgalvytė: I'm a typical Eastern European that moved to the UK with my Volga Tatar mum after the 2008 economic crash. I was an art school kid there and a full-time anarcho-activist. I've always played videogames, but relatively recently realized that videogames are a massive space that should be made anti-fascist, because fascists are very much taking it over, right? I've been making content on videogames and politics in a variety of ways for the past six or seven years now. 

The book is a culmination of all of those thoughts and critiques and worries, and it's a materialist critique of the videogames industry, but with a lot of personal notes and anecdotes. It's Verso's first book on gaming which for me feels like it comes about too late. That's the biggest radical publisher in the world and yet they completely have not looked at the biggest cultural industry out there.

For the readers here who are not engaged in videogames in any way, could you please elaborate, why a person who tries to think about social problems through the lens of leftist politics, should be interested in videogames? Why should we, as leftists, play games? Why should we consider games as important art? And why should we talk about them in political terms? I am sure that you have probably been asked this question a million times before, but I think it's worth reiterating for the Ukrainian readers who might not have heard the answer from you yet. 

To me, the answer to your question is relatively simple. I'm trained as an anarcho-activist and anti-fascist and so on. And much of our training also implies that culture is also a space, a terrain of negotiation between political forces. In great Stuart Hall's^[2] words, it's a place where we can push and pull in a variety of directions, and it's not static, it's a place where a battle for ideas happens. And I think we the leftists were so focused on doing it in a variety of cultural realms, but in 50 years of videogames, of the games industry, the progressive word was really nowhere to be found there, so a certain vacuum has developed. So when I heard that in around 2016 or 2017 the videogames industry has gotten bigger than film and music industries combined, it was this huge “Wow!” moment, a glitch in my system. Because I always played games, but I also thought that it was somewhere on the margins, you know? And now you find out that it's bigger than every biggest cultural outlet you know of put together. 

I started researching and it turned out that people like Steve Bannon have been organizing in videogame spaces since 2007. And also I find out all these reactionary networks, and also the fact that those networks have their own influencers. I think there is a temptation to blame videogames for all the ills in the world, but when you actually look under the bonnet, you can see that there are right-wing figures, who plant themselves into the games industry and see it as a very fertile ground to then activate these populations. So again, videogames are not a problem by themselves, they are very much intentionally steered in a particular political direction, which currently is right-wing.

Cover of the book Everything to Play For by Mariam Didžgalvytė, published by Verso Books

And also another moment of realisation for me was when we started organizing the videogames industry trade union in around 2018. It was one of the first ones in the world. The first one would be the amazing and indeed beautifully radical STJV in France^[3]. And it was that time when people started getting in touch with me being like “Hey, I used to be like a Gamergator [Gamergate movement supporter - edit.]. But now I started reading more about materialist politics, Marxist, socialist politics after I heard that game industry workers are organizing. So now I've been converted”. And I could see that it was going to go that way. Of course, we're all capitalist subjects and our material conditions ultimately define our world, but everything happened so fast, and I am now completely convinced that those spaces and culture thereof are completely meshed in the society. And not only it changes the world of us, of those people in the games industry, but as well I think it increasingly is changing the world of people who are not at all anywhere close to games. I mean, only in the last two or three days have we found out that the comrade Luigi Mangione is also a massive gamer, right? So it's all coming together, and I feel like it's a moment of turning the cultural tide in a different direction. You can even make connections between gamers and the election of Donald Trump which is like the biggest global thing there is now and so on. So all roads lead to Rome, I swear to god!

Connected to this, I also wanted to ask you another question. Cinema now is a respected and versatile medium for social criticism. We have cinema clubs for leftists where they watch socially critical cinema and discuss it etc. But if you look historically, cinema was not like this all the time. During the early 20th century it transformed from the marginalized proletarian low cultural practice to the high culture, high art endeavor that it is right now. 

Do you think there is something with videogames as a medium itself that makes them harder to be used as political texts or mediums like cinema? Maybe it is because there are so many technological obstacles, or maybe because videogames are difficult and you have to learn how to play them, instead of just sitting and watching a movie, or maybe it is because many videogames are lengthy so you have to dedicate a lot of time to finishing them? For me it seems like all these factors contribute to making videogames more difficult for people who are not into gaming to just get the political content from this medium in a way that a movie can offer. Do you think there is a possibility for a social space of gaming that would be engaging and more open for this kind of discussion and political thinking?

The short answer is yes, there is everything in gaming to be able to discuss it and to engage with it from a variety of cultural angles. In fact, just listening to you, I thought that videogames are closer to, for instance, book clubs, because you can watch a film and discuss it together and whatnot. But you can’t do it just the same with games because of their length or difficulty. I think you can imagine something like: okay, let's play this level and then discuss it, then play next level and discuss it, and so on. So in this way you can discuss one game in a year, for example.

And then I think — and my point of view has been a little bit unorthodox, given where the games industry stands now — that the most interesting aspects of games as activism are not within single player authored experiences, but within massive multiplayer role playing online games. The relationships and the sophistication of communications, the networks and just generally radical stuff that online gaming communities encapsulate or formulate themselves into is to me some of the coolest stuff that comes out of videogames. And that can include everything from Eve Online players organizing into class war to World of Warcraft gamers organizing currency distribution systems that are horizontal and socialistic. That can mean proper mental health support networks and real celebrations of people's life achievements within League of Legends communities or Starcraft communities. And that of course includes modding^[4] communities which to me is also the pinnacle of art in the sense that they're anonymous, they're basically the Banksys of the videogames, and yet they make some of the most sensorly sophisticated and fascinating pieces of art.

The classic video game World of Warcraft

And then there's just so many other incredible stories, many of which I document in my book, of gamers creating real support and friendship groups, the groups of  altruism and self-organization and solidarity – the kind of cool activism that don’t always see from the left. Many things we do on the left are so much more useless and impossible and ego-driven than some of the ways that gamers were organizing in a very impressive manner. So that's where some of the coolest stuff happens. 

And then there's a whole other sadness that the games industry suffers from a lack of a sophisticated critic circuit. The arts have it, the cinema industry has it. Music has the Rolling Stone, the arts have Art Review and Arts Monthly, the cinema’s critic circuit is huge and films travel around all the different festivals. But it’s different with games. And it’s even getting worse, with a recent massive media layoff cycle. For example just recently there were news that Game Informer is essentially getting shut down^[5]. So in the industry that has the biggest cultural numbers, the media environment is basically non-existent or it's just too small and getting smaller. People are saying it's because everybody's a critic on Twitch and YouTube, which is correct, but it seems to me that it would be in the interest of even the bigger companies to have a richer media ecosystem.

I would also add that there is a certain inequality about what games are talked about in the media and what games are not talked about. For example, and you mentioned this in your book, more than half of the profits from videogames right now are made by mobile games. And mobile games are generally considered a low culture and are not discussed in any serious manner in any big publications. Those publications are about big games, shooters, role-playing games and more traditional genres. But billions of people are playing mobile games and nobody is talking about it.

Absolutely, Taylor Swift finishes her Eras tour with $2 billion, and it's all over the headlines. But that's just the annual income of Dungeon Fighter Online or Genshin Impact. And I think potentially these games are even culturally more significant in some ways. So I think the media is certainly failing us. Every 15 minutes or an hour we have an analogue sports coverage, which is completely irrelevant for the culture, or a BRAT album, which is good, but it only sold a couple of million copies, which is incomparable to the sales of videogames, which are much larger. 

And I think gamers also kind of feel it. They feel that their size is huge and yet they're not treated with the same respect. Not that we need to do this – as far as I'm concerned, the videogames industry should be burned down and rebuilt from the ground up, that's how corrupt it is. But there's a disconnect that people feel between what they think culture is and what they are being told by the mainstream media, and I think that creates a loop of distrust.

Talking about the videogames industry is such a gigantic endeavor because of how huge it is, so I wanted to praise your book for doing it. There can be a series of books just about online multiplayer games because it's such a rich field, but it's only just a facet of this huge industry, within which you have mobile games, art games, single player games, indie games, all sorts of different types and formats. Bringing it under one umbrella is a very difficult task. And it's a very refreshing and interesting approach to try to look at the root of things and to think less about the theme or format of the game and more on the conditions they are made under.

And this is something that actually is much less heterogeneous, it's much more uniting for many people because the problems in the mobile game industry are in very many ways the same as the problems in the AAA industry^[6] etc. And it's all also rooted in the mineral productions and technological infrastructure that supports it. So it's a very interesting approach and I would like you to elaborate a bit more on how you came up with this thought and why you think it is important to talk about material conditions of production of videogames more than about their themes and their formats

I'm very thankful for your kind words, but I'm actually a bit sad that the book is so all-encompassing. At the beginning, I was just going to focus on the Efficacy question, talk about political videogames, and if they are really any good. And Verso said, “Marijam, it's our first book on gaming, many people won't really understand. Can you make a broader book?” Looking at it now, it makes sense and works out well — my book is getting put into Guardian's Best Books of 2024, so it's good and nice that it's mainstream. On the other hand, I also think that it's a failure. Why? Because I think that its very existence implies a condemnation of the left for not understanding or knowing many of these basics about videogames. For example, every time I see my book on Amazon, all I see is that Jason Schreier's book that is just on Activision Blizzard is a number one bestseller^[7]. And I'm like, but that's it, right? Exactly. You just write a whole ass book on just one company. And I think that works, because in one company there’s just so many different political and cultural interests. And it's [Jason Schrier’s book - edit.] selling way more than my book, despite it being all encompassing and inviting and welcoming.

We need to be much more confident and just say “No, we don't need to present the basics anymore! Everybody knows the basics or they should know the basics, we need to go for the jugular”. I hope Verso now would accept submissions on themes like “Eve Online: Games and Culture”, or “The Politics of World of Warcraft”, or something like that. I think the culture is already at the point where you can talk about one specific thing and it will evidently do so much better!

So the gimmick of my book is that it moves a little bit like a videogame: my introduction is my Main Menu, my history chapters are the Tutorial, and then I have chapters as Levels one, two, three and four and the Final Boss. And those levels are meant to become more complex as you read it or the problems within the industry become more and more apparent. The way I came up with this idea was thinking about how most people react to mentioning videogames by saying “Oh, videogames are violent”, or “Oh, they're sexist”. For me it’s the most boring part, but then I thought about it and realized, “Okay so it is the easiest and the least sophisticated way to discuss videogames, so what would be more interesting or more challenging?” Then this level structure clicked in my head: the narrative or the theme of videogame, which is imposed by the author, is where a lot of mainstream conversations about politics in videogames take place. But I think it's the least interesting level of thinking about them. Then I have the Communities chapter, the Efficacy chapter, and the Modes of Production chapter. 

And I’ll explain why modes of production are most important to me. I started being a commentator on videogames and politics circa 2016-2017, which was also the peak of the Women in Games movement. I was invited to the events and talks and I was lucky enough to be nominated for a few things here and there. There was this huge temptation to become a part of that circuit of Women in Games, who are all very self-congratulatory and very corporate liberal feminist. But whenever I would start talking about modes of production in these circles, something wasn't clicking. I never could understand why is it that well-paid successful women in games in the Global North somehow get all of the voice, whereas the women in Democratic Republic of Congo, digging out with their nails the minerals for our hardware, or the women manufacturers from factories in China, who basically make our sexy careers possible, and who I also perceive to be women in games, get none. I was bringing that up, saying that we need to send solidarity to these populations, and these conversations would always be shut down. And that’s when I knew that this is not my gang, that's for sure. 

Gaming for All: A Women in Games Celebration: an event held at The Strong National Museum of Play on November 17, 2022

Then it clicked to me that there's a massive gap between self-congratulatory, even in their own description, diverse Western videogames industry bubble and where real politics happen. If I would have come to Verso and said, "Oh, I want to write a book about how we need more diverse characters or something," they wouldn't be interested. It's because I bring in that materialist critique that the book is hopefully of interest. Because even if all videogames were this Barbieland where everybody loves each other, and everything is just super sweet, our industry would still be extremely toxic and poisonous to the world. For example, a console like PlayStation 4 emits more CO2 in its manufacturing process than entire countries. So what are we talking about?

Moving on through the structure that you had outlined, I think it is very interesting to talk a bit more about communities that are developed around games and communities that develop games. You've been involved both in gaming communities and also in union organizing which is community building in its essence. Can you share a bit of insight about how these practices intersect or how you think they could intersect in the future? How do we direct this energy that is bubbling inside videogames, this chaotic mess, and work with it or translate it into real life organizing in unions in communities of help?

I was lucky to present my book at my beloved annual London Anarchist Bookfair. So at this book fair there was a gentleman who asked me, similar to you, “Okay so you have outlined all these examples of 10 000–20 000 people coming to a protest within a videogame. But how is this really affecting the real world?” What he and many others were really asking were “How is it manifesting in the way that we understand politics and community organizing?” And I think there's a temptation within the left to hope or to even demand political happenings to fit our aesthetic beliefs or the way we understand politics.

And it is my feeling that, in fact, it should be the other way around, in a sense that we should be curious where politics happen. And then we decide if and how we bend it towards our needs. But it is not up to all these armies of gamers to finally come to the left and to say “here, we organize the perfect community support event, can we now please be let in as the perfect political subject that you hope for?” Surely it should be precisely the opposite. It's up to us on the left to be curious what other different aesthetics there are for people to create the self-organizational spaces that spread empathy in a variety of ways. Again, I can list all of the examples and all the different ways that the gaming communities came together and influenced policies, or created amazing fundraising campaigns for all types of really fabulous stuff and so on. I can list 10 of these examples, but still somehow it won't convince the regular lefty that it is anywhere close to whatever we're doing. But what we're doing has been useless a lot of the time as well! So I think this ivory tower we sometimes find ourselves in, saying that we hold some sort of secret of what it means to be a good leftist is a losing strategy. 

The digital world is warping and bending understandings of what even is a community or what is solidarity in a variety of ways. Like local organizing is now taken over by international organizing, so many of us are now online contacting each other all the time. And we're not quite keeping up with any of those trends. I just wonder if we maybe need to completely rethink the aesthetics of it all? I grew up on a Crimethinc.'s Anarchist Cookbook, a very particular aesthetic of what it means to be a good activist: you put patches like a western punk on your clothes, you ride your bike, you skip your food, and you live in squats and ultimately you're an amazing good leftist. So I know how to fit that if I want to. But again, trying to find each other that way sometimes is more useless than what I've seen in those margins of gamergators becoming socialist, because somebody just showed them the material politics. And maybe they don't look like us. But damn, folk online sometimes do cooler stuff like getting policy changed and so on.

Frequent targets of the Gamergate campaign — Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn at the presentation of the new UN Commission report on cyber-violence against women and girls. Photo: UN Women

So it's not about us expecting that gamers will somehow grow up to become proper activists. It's about redefining what activism is while looking into these new experiences of people organizing. 

You're putting it much more succinctly. 

I also think there's an interesting parallel between this and how leftism and socialism is perceived in Ukraine, for example. Ukraine is a post-Soviet country and there's a lot of resentment to the particular aesthetic and particular words that are used to define socialism and left movement because basically Russia appropriated Soviet Union aesthetics and rhetorics in a lot of ways. If you say you are a socialist you're already under some suspicion. But what we've seen when the full-scale invasion started is that a lot of people just practice socialism and communism without knowing that they're doing this because it was the most efficient way to survive. People united in cooperatives and communes, they helped each other, they organized volunteer work and this massive people's self-organizational effort was one of the key factors that helped Ukraine stand up against Russian invasion.

So for us leftists here in Ukraine it's a very important question: how do we speak to the people who are actually practicing socialism without using all the trigger words? How do we redefine the aesthetic of the left movement so that it does not have these connotations? And we can speak with people about actually important stuff like organizing and resisting corruption and capitalism, and not about the colors or the symbols, which is much less important – just like in games, where themes are something that is so much more obvious, but so much less important when we think about how games are produced. 

Just one remark on that theme. It kind of goes both ways, and that's where I've been hard-broken about, and I have no idea how you're feeling about it, but I feel like growing up, us Eastern European lefties, we did the whole thing of trying to follow the Western symbols of what a leftie looks like, Western punk and so on. We did everything to signify to the West or to the world that the Eastern European left exists and this is how we are and this is how we look. And then some fucking awful bullshit war happens, and no matter how much we all tried for the last 20-30 years to tell them “here, we exist, we look like you, we act almost like you”, despite all this they still will not believe that the left even exists in these regions. They will still see us as just puppets of one thing or the other and it's just such a heartbreak… 

But you're right, symbols are something that we must get rid of as soon as possible. I feel like I've grown up trying to do well in terms of being recognized in these spaces, and then when push comes to shove, you're just not seen at all and it sucks. So I’m sharing your pain. 

Despite what you were saying before about videogames lacking a comprehensive critical circuit, I would still argue that they are recognized as art today much more than they ever were before. We have art institutions in videogames^[8], we have awards, we have critics. But at the same time, art in capitalist society functions as a commodity, so its emancipatory potential is problematic. So recognising videogames as art does not necessarily make them good and progressive politically.

I have a personal anecdote related to this. My first job was in a mobile gaming company. We were working on a mobile free-to-play game, a match three game. Before we started working on it, our producer came to us and said that we shouldn’t forget that videogames are important, that we're making art here, it's not just work, it's a passion, etc. And then we had several months of crunch and worst working conditions that I had in my life. So for me talking about videogames as art is always a bit ambivalent because what kind of art are we talking about? Is it really emancipatory art that can better our lives and empower us, or is it just a commodity that will serve to perpetuate the current existing order? So my question is how do you see games as revolutionary emancipatory art and if it is possible for game creators and persons who are interested in game making to make videogames in a critical and more conscious way?

When you were describing your work conditions a thought came to my mind. I sometimes think that videogames are not perceived as art quite enough because we lack those kinds of individual suffering figures that we see in the arts. The alcoholic depressive Pollock, the cut-your-ear-off Van Gogh, and all the other sad artists and so on. Whereas in videogames we don't have those kinds of individuals, the couple of famous videogame artists that exist are pretty happy-go-lucky kind of guys. So maybe you cracked it. You're basically saying, if somebody crunches really hard to the point of absolute sadness, maybe that's where we get the suffering artist.

So you're saying videogame industry is mass producing suffering artists.

The more suffering you do, the more art it is!

The game industry is then the highest art possible.

The highest art! Okay, back to your question, it really depends what school of thought you come from. As a good Frankfurt School Marxist, I am of the view that the mode of production determines a piece of art. In this way Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” is an important facet to look through. There is some connection I feel like between the egalitarian goals and the impossibility for digital art as it currently stands to ever get this libidinal feeling, or the sublime, because of its implied guilt due to the mode of production. So to put it shortly, I can foresee how the games will be folded into the Museums of Modern Art soon enough. And there will be good high-end exhibitions about really beautiful and thought-provoking games and we will even have games industry celebrities, maybe even paparazzis, they will hire stylists and they will hire better PR people and they will find a way in the Met Gala^[9] and so on. All of this is coming, I can foresee the golden age of videogames, or at least some of games, crucially, some of games being welcomed by Hollywood in a very glamorous way, which already is kind of happening, but it will be like a proper cultural moment.

But again, does that solve any problems? It is my view that we need to sort out our modes of operating and all the sub-industries that come with making one videogame from hardware to engine to the publishing side to the stores. Like the fact that 90% of the industry is only five companies: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Valve and Apple. Epic could be added to that. We need to sort all of that out before we get our cultural moment, because once it starts being glorified, which will happen, there will be no incentive to change anymore.

The companies Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve

That’s something I've been thinking about since the release of the book. Obviously policy changed in regards to the certification systems for games. But also I think there is a ceiling for digital artists to how much adoration or how much self-worth they can have, because at some point they should ask themselves: “Okay, your piece is at the MoMA, but did you know it killed that many Congolese people or that many people in Philippines and Indonesia?” Next time we're going to see a videogames exhibition at the Tate Modern^[10], I want to see the artists writing an open letter to hardware companies, being like: “Hey, we want to popularize your medium, we want to make art with your hardware, but you need to sort out the the conflict minerals production, the blood money, the corruption. And until then, we will boycott your stuff”. I want to see videogames as art going more in that direction. Other industries suffer from it much less in that way. Even the fashion industry is figuring itself out already and is much more vigorous than videogames are. So as much as I want to be invited to all the curatorial events and be part of the videogame critics circuit, I think that it doesn't lead anywhere, and it's politically flawed, it’s like putting nail polish on a monster.

Sure, but this is not a specifically videogaming industry problem, right? We have all sorts of commodities produced in our world that are hiding the means of their production. And we are not talking about how they are produced. 

But they're not marketing themselves as art, whereas we're claiming this social capital. 

Yes, and videogames can reflect on their own state of events and their own modes of production, like some of the games do. 

And it's also an opportunity. What makes videogaming special is the fact that the gap between the consumer and the producer is much smaller. Most people will know the people who made their games, it's very easy to track them on social media and so on. Sometimes that leads to awful consequences. But there is that dialogue and the question of “what will the players think?” is very important for the game devs and their bosses. Whereas if you buy a shampoo, you probably won't know the people who made it. So I think there's much opportunity for making your opinion seem important. And obviously some people abuse it for dumb reasons, they do review bombing and so on, because there was a gay character in the game or whatnot. But still, just because somebody executes the mechanic badly, doesn't mean that that's not a valid mechanic to potentially use for emancipatory goals. 

I also think that in videogaming particularly there are so many conditions right now for a consumer to become a producer. There are entire games dedicated to learning how to make games. For example Roblox is super popular and it's a platform for creating games. And of course, it's also subject to some horrible predatory practices. But nevertheless, it's a unique artistic medium where by engaging as a consumer, you're also learning how to be a creator and it's much easier for you to become one.

This is where the danger of AI comes in. You already see the leaps and bounds that these engines have in terms of reducing ready-made 3D art. Obviously, we all as people who actually work in engines understand that thus far it's all smoke and mirrors and you can't really control any of them. But even in the last week I've already been seeing some examples of entire arts departments going, which makes me worry. And AI in and of itself is kind of an interesting thing. You can make art, but how you connect that to music or to design is very different. It's connecting all of those AI generated pieces together that I think will be the next engine: the AI generated sounds with the AI generated art that the designer puts together. What the videogames industry might become is just a bunch of producers and not much of anyone else. But there is that worry of mine that the strength of the games industry worker, which to an extent exists now, might be diminished by AI.

Roblox is a platform that allows users to create and program their own games

What can you say about the modern trend of releasing games in a very raw state? Players commonly accept the fact that they are sold broken games and are not ready to defend their consumer rights.

Great question. I mean, the reason why companies, especially AAA companies, release broken games is because their funding runs out and they have not calculated it correctly. And so there's no more money coming in and they just have to cut corners and essentially release just to recoup their costs, because shareholders are waiting for their quarterly reports and hopefully profits. So the structures there are super basic and obvious and affected by all the normal market forces that are at work everywhere else. 

Sadly, what our internet warriors tend to do is blame either individual developers or individual companies without looking at the incentives. Why is it that the industry is so strange and broken that it is more profitable to release a broken game than to give it three more months and to release a much tighter experience? Marketing departments don't talk enough to the game devs as well. The marketing department will announce the release date and that's it. And the reason for this particular date is because there's a market opportunity: some guy knows a guy who works for the Game Awards^[11], who we need to show the trailer to, and also there's that window, because I attended that GDC^[12], and we spoke to other guy, etc. Somebody probably exchanged some cocktails after GDC and decided on the date, and now the whole developers team have to bend over it.

But again, it's not my job, and it's not your job to hope and to encourage perfectly well-released games for the perfect consumer. Games being bad and broken on the release is actually a good exposition of the inside workings of the industry. If they were all perfect, it would be much harder for us to gather attention around the nasty parts of this industry, because the lacquer would be so good around it. And on the other hand there will never be perfect games because their production process is completely tied to the good old mode of production!

I agree that we shouldn't strive for perfect videogames. The idea that there is some kind of a perfect state of a game that it should be released in, is for me a commodity fetishism par excellence. What is unique about videogames, and we can see this in indie game spaces or with some individual developers, is that even if you release the game in the pre-alfa state with a lot of bugs and missing content, it can still get a lot of positive response from players, if it is free and the expectations are so much lower. 

I think what is unique about videogame development is that because of the technological infrastructure the games exist in, it is a very collaborative experience. You can patch and update your game according to the requests or comments from your community. For example, the game that I love, Dwarf Fortress, has been in the making for 20 years and is not finished yet. It was made by one guy essentially, but because it had a unique idea, and because a lot of people got involved and created a community, it received popularity and got this cult status among gamers. So for me game creation is a process and we should think more about the process and modes of production as part of this process, and less about the finite products.

I think there's this kind of Digital Baroque, as I call it, that is about to crash. I give this example in the book. The most famous and most expensive restaurant in the world called Noma in Copenhagen is shutting down this year. Why is that? There were around 60 or 70 cooks in it, it's basically an assembly line. But there was an investigation by the Financial Times into the fact that the owners don't pay their army of interns. They will have maybe 20 actual chefs and then 50 interns who basically do everything for them. And after this investigation, Noma goes like, OK, you know what, we're going to start paying our interns. And within three months of them starting to pay their interns, their overheads became so expensive, that even at $1,400 a meal, running business became too expensive. And so they announced that they're shutting it down. It's not profitable for them to remain open because there's only that much that a person will pay for a meal, for them to be profitable, to release it on such a high-end structure. So I think that there is a certain ceiling to how polished videogames could be and also what kind of price you can ask for them.

The Noma restaurant in Copenhagen

The question or a theme that I wanted to touch on specifically is videogaming and the videogame industry in Ukraine. I can talk a lot about it, but I just wanted to say that a lot of things that you are writing in your book and the way you're presenting it helped me structure my understanding about gaming here in Ukraine. 

Let me take a step back. So there is a question about how do you make a political videogame, what is a political videogame and how do you politicize game creation. I think there are a lot of unique answers to these questions in Ukrainian experience, both on the level of theme and on the level of community organizing. Not as much on the level of modes of production.

For example, there was an explosion of videogames about war in Ukraine when the full-scale invasion started. I made some of these games too. A lot of my friends did them and there are hundreds of games on Itch.io about the war in Ukraine right now, which is great. I think a lot of game makers in Ukraine who worked as designers, programmers, artists felt an urge to share their experiences and make games about what they see and share a message that Ukraine is resisting. Also some of these games are large-scale productions.

So there's a lot of interesting games that reflect this historic moment. And for me as I think for many people in Ukraine, who are in videogame development, the question of “should videogames be political?” was answered. Yes, they should be political and we use them as a political tool, as an artistic medium to express our thoughts on Ukraine, on war, on Russia, etc. And of course videogames were used like this before, but it was the first moment they realized it.

But also it goes a level higher. A lot of people have gotten much more engaged in videogames production and modes of presentation. A huge problem for many Ukrainians is a lack of Ukrainian localization in many videogames. So there were a lot of efforts from both studios and fans and modders to create Ukrainian localizations both in text and voice over. For example, there's been recent news that they made a full localization for Half-Life 2 with all the voices, texts and textures. So it was a huge movement and it's still going.

Also it's very interesting how it clashes with business interests. For many years  Ukrainian localization was not viable because it was deemed not profitable, because the Ukrainian market was small, etc. I worked in a studio that produced a game in Ukraine but it had no Ukrainian localization because of this reason. And when the full-scale invasion started this question was raised by the team of our game designers and writers. We united and started working on this localization in our free time. And people were absolutely okay with this. Of course, it should not have been happening this way, we should have been paid for regular work, but we were very proud of the game we were making and wanted it to be localized for our fellow Ukraininans. 

One last thing that is of note here is that a lot of people have gotten much more sensitive to who produces videogames and if there are some connections of videogame studios with Russia. They boycotted some games and had campaigns to ban these games or their publishers and shame them for being on the Ukrainian market. So people now are much more sensitive to who produces videogames and where.

Despite this, there are still a lot of shitty practices in the Ukrainian game dev industry. There were several scandals, especially in smaller studios and startups, with people being laid off in one day, left without salary, threatened badly. But for me there is a hope that the community that forms around these issues of Ukrainian language in games or banning Russian games will also get more sensitive to the things like developers being laid off or not paid properly or other common bad practices that are common in our industry. For me it's a very interesting time and very interesting opportunity. Maybe you have some comments or thoughts on this topic.

Oh gosh, thank you. For the last few years there's been this massive elephant in the room, this empire expanding occupation currently taking place and we are talking about videogames. Sometimes I do feel like "what the fuck am I doing?" On the other hand, I think you point out that precisely, the days still come one after the other if you're lucky enough. It's a very fascinating intersection that you just described where you're essentially trying to make products or parts of an industry or these commodities more attractive and yet then you're beaten by the same practices or ways of operating that the industry does. I feel sometimes as well that we're doing so much to improve the industry that's still fundamentally broken and has solidified the particular ways of operating and sure doesn't care about war. Business is still business – it's show business, not show friends, right? So if they want to do layoffs they can still squeeze the hell out of workers and then they will still buy them because who gives a shit, right? On a personal note it's been wonderful to see Lithuania where I come from, welcoming parts of the Ukrainian games industry and giving it a lot of love.

You kept on saying how we are creating videogames that are used as tools, and I want to disagree with that definition. There's artists signifiers and then there's artists tools and I think those are different. Now I'm talking on a much more abstract level and completely removing myself from this particular context. But for the most part a lot of the self-described political art that markets itself to find a community, I think of as a signifier. It is made for or attracts a public that thinks similarly to yourself, which is completely understandable, it's a piece of expression. I've been lucky enough to familiarize myself with quite a few fascinating videogames coming from both Ukraine and also Palestine, in which people are describing their personal experiences, which I think is extremely powerful. 

But I think it's different from when the game becomes a tool in a sense of not only trying to find a way to change somebody's mind, but also to make some action in the world. There is a growing genre of games that instead of just engaging in institutional critique, are doing something tangible, for example, making an automatic phone call after you complete a level to dox a fascist, or automatically delete a file on enemy's hard drive for every enemy you shoot, or something along those lines. There are some interesting mechanics that we can play with. 

I have an example from the Ukrainian experience. At the start of the full-scale invasion some Ukrainian hackers created a browser game where you have to combine numbers. It was a clone of 2048. The idea behind the game was that while you are playing and staying online, the cpu of your computer is used to thwart cyber attacks from Russia or DDOS Russian propaganda sites. For me this is a good example of using games as tools. 

I'm so sorry I didn't include it in the book!

So you've mentioned games as signifiers and games as tools. I would also say that there is a third way of thinking about games as games. What if the game itself and the act of playing it is actually already fulfilling and politically charged? So even without talking about signifiers and some other utilities that games can bring, the game, the act of playing itself is important, right? As I've grown up, I've become accustomed to playing games as a way to relax or to process my thoughts or feelings. And there is just something inherently important about this allure of games, don’t you agree?

It's very Situationist of you. I love it. Absolutely, these are natural things that are now caught in the vines of capitalism. It's devastating. And the fact that I didn’t even mention it as a category is just a sad sign of this. 

For example, I think chess or some casual mobile games are very, very politically important specifically because they fill this niche. And the really tricky question for me as a game creator is: ok, we can make a game that is a signifier of something. We can make a game that is a tool for something. Those are two more straightforward ways. But how do we make a politically charged and critical game that also feels this aesthetic need that people have? How do we create a leftist chess, for example? This is an open question, of course, and I'm really curious what you think about it. And also I think that the framework you’ve provided is very important for any person who is engaged in game development to think about: is your game a signifier, a tool or a game?

I think you're talking about the game designer's dream, that the game will create that libidinal, affect-filled feeling that, for example, a healthy competition is meant to bring up. There is a reason why there is a surge of endorphins if you do a good enough combination of cards, or shoot Rocket Launcher and Lightning Gun correctly in Quake Champions. It is a wonderful feeling that nothing else hits. It is very chemical. There's that joke that the best paid jobs in the videogames industry are the game economists' jobs, because they are very good at putting a dollar sign on particular parts of the game that will create that kind of rush. Which sometimes is also abused for all the wrong reasons. And what you're saying is if we cross that over with some sort of political righteousness at the same time, wouldn’t that be the perfect combination? 

I have a doubt about that, because I think that guilt and shame are still somewhere around us given how the industry operates. We can have all sorts of ideas about the bright future of creativity, but the question is whether we're going to be still locked into three online stores, four hardware brands and two engines. That's where it all collapses on itself. I think that some of the best creativity that is currently on display is individuals like yourself, who are thinking of new ways to take all of our political learnings and to produce them in an inventive manner to people with whom we want to have a dialogue with.

I would like to return to what you were talking about before. In the 2022 Venice Biennale^[13] the piece that moved me the most was a Belgium pavilion. You come into the pavilion, and it's about 12 or 16 television screens, so you have to put on headphones and watch little films, four to six minutes each. And they show children from all corners of the world playing their local games, whether that's marbles or skipping rope, or a mountain of massive industrial tires. And it just shows how different the games are, but also how similar the kids are in their reactions and how universal it is. And I just sat there bawling my eyes out completely, it was something so internationalist, tender, affiliated, playful. And at some point it hit me that they all have to become subjects of that world that we suffer from, and the piece captures that perfect little moment before and it's very very moving. So the dream is to be able to bring back the variety of ways we play and enjoy ourselves under more ethical circumstances and not being ravaged by wars and exploitation.