[Salon] Max Haiven: Games, The dangerous medium of 21st century politics

When
13/02/2026
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Full Circle House, 89 Ch. de Vleurgat, 1050 Ixelles

Registration

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Games: The dangerous medium of 21st century politics

A salon with max Haiven

Ideas / Salon | Fri 13th Feb | 6.30-8.30 pm

*Doors open at 6.30pm. The speaker will start at 7pm.

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Some 2-billion people a day play a commercial game and the gaming industry is bigger than film, music and publishing combined. Mainstream and fringe political parties and movements around the world are using (or hijacking) games and creating "gamified" experiences with dangerous consequences.

As newspapers were to the 19th century and as radio and TV were to the 20th, so too are games to our 21st century political realities. What are the consequences? What makes games unique is the way they seduce our sense of agency in a world where many feel disempowered and helpless. How is this being used, for good and for ill?

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Haiven is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University. He teaches Social Justice Studies and Media Studies programs and also directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements, produces podcasts and builds infrastructure for the next generation of transformative public intellectuals. His writing has been published widely for both academic and non-academic readers on topics including the imagination, (anti-)capitalism, social movements, art and financialization. Max has produced several research-driven podcasts about themes including financialization and anxiety, conspiracy theories and cultures, Amazon and science fiction, capitalism and play, social movements and psychology and games and (anti)fascism. He also makes and thinks about games. Billionaires and Guillotines is his latest board game.

GOOD READS

The Player and the Played, From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism (forthcoming 2026); Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022); Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020); Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).