The Political Economy of Game Design (Odd Columns, #10)

More than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.

In the Empire of Empty Ghosts: On and Against the Emerging New Dualism (Odd Columns, #8)

The solid and the ethereal, though, have traded traits, and the result is something new and unfamiliar. We no longer have the “spiritual” and the “material” – I would argue that what we have is the “informational” and the “totemic”.

Heat Death and the Vampire Horizon

The tendency of profits to decline is is what drives the supposed innovation of the capitalist system: the need to always move to a different horizon of extraction, to find untapped sources of value that can stave off this heat-death for just a little longer. Sometimes the state intervenes and slaps them away from one horizon of extraction (see: child labor laws,) but this only rarely happens.

Oedi-Politics

Oedi-Politics is the intrusion of patterns of behavior and thought characteristic of family dramas – specifically those characteristic of the bourgeois nuclear family – into the realm of the political. It is the adoption of maternal, paternal, and filial roles by political actors and the determination of future courses of action by the relationship between these roles. In short, when people should be coming to agreements, making compromises, working through problems, they are instead defaulting to playing house. Everything else becomes secondary, and poisoned by this.

On Dis-Identity Politics: How Our Social World is Continuously Created

Consider: In the absence of other human beings, what identities do we possess? If you found yourself on a desert island, far distant from other human beings, would you still think of yourself as being an American or a Briton or a Catholic or an Atheist or anything of the sort? Or would, after a period, these identities simply slip from you like dead skin, leaving you just as a person trying to survive in the wilderness?