Next time you fire up a games console, you could also be shifting the Overton Window to the far, far Right. That’s the belief behind a ‘scholarly journal’ which is currently soliciting submissions. Key questions include:
● How are fascist games and play entwined with the hyper-capitalist and games industry [sic] and its exploitation of workers throughout its supply chains, from the extractive mining operations to the self-exploitative hustle of ‘independent’ developers?
● How is ludic fascism connected to resurgent patriarchy, racism, nationalism, colonialism and genocide (in Palestine and beyond), revanchist politics, and rampant and violent Transphobia?
These and other burning issues of the day will feature in a special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, an “international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical academic study of games and play” spawned (and no doubt respawned, FPS fans) by Septentrio Academic Publishing based in Tromsø, Norway.
Briar Dickey, Max Haiven, Konstanze N’Guessan, Thomas Spies, and Sarah Thorne were inspired by a similar July 2025 discussion at London’s Games Transformed festival, and this is the sorry outcome. According to this quintet of streetfighting editors,
the fascist threat is rising. Far right, neonationalist and ultra-conservative parties, politicians, and pundits have taken advantage of growing inequalities and alienation to gain power and influence.
Games—analogue and digital—are part of this process and it will ultimately require ‘anti-fascist games’ to counter the problem.
The issue is framed here in a way that, far from open inquiry, activism is posing as scholarship. It speaks to the capture of academic institutions, especially beyond the ‘hard’ sciences, by the far Left. For the editors, it’s a matter of faith that fascism is on the rise and that more and more routine activities were either always complicit in fascism or have recently fallen under its sway. It’s likely their future contributors will be expected to toe this line.
Such (un)thinking is not without precedent. Over the summer a serious book on the links between yogis and other ‘gurus’ and actual fascists was popularised in the press to present “modern postural practice” as being “fascist yoga.”
