Gamifying Contentious Politics: Gaming Capital and Playful Resistance

Abstract

This article uses the Bourdieusian tradition to examine the relationship between gameplay elements and contentious politics. When investigating Chinese progressive social movements, this study found that the development of local gaming industries has conditioned three ways in which gameplay elements are employed to organize “playful resistance”: game as an action tactic, game as the mechanism for critical pedagogics, and game as a tool for public education . Gaming capital has become a useful resource for organizing contentious activities and disseminating progressive political views. Two forms of gaming capital are identified: one is the technical competencies needed to design games; the other is the cultural capacity to imagine social movements through game design mechanisms. This article shows how playful resistance challenges both authoritarian governance and the capitalist logic of gaming, offering a glimpse into how the actual process of gamification has taken place in a non-Western context.

Why Games for Leadership?

“…Games can be used to shape beliefs and attitudes within the leadership process. Using games for influence in the leadership process is particularly clear when activists recently employed such a strategy for resistance against an authoritative government (Huang & Liu, 2022). When labor‐rights activists were arrested in a region outside of Hong Kong, information about their arrest was censored and misinformation was distributed through local newspapers.…”

Activismo lúdico y desconexión moral en videojuegos políticos: Un modelo de análisis a través de Fursan Al-Aqsa

“…La convergencia entre las manifestaciones de la cultura del juego, las dinámicas políticas y el entorno mediático digital ha generado un amplio número de implicaciones (Walz & Deterding, 2014) desde sus primeras manifestaciones hasta sus equivalentes digitales (de la Cruz et al,2023;. De ahí han surgido otros fenómenos que superan las barreras estrictas del juego, como la gamificación política (Lerner, 2014) que se han empleado en iniciativas como la playful resistance (Huang & Liu, 2022). La permeabilidad de los elementos lúdicos en contextos no tradicionales, inherente a la gamificación, ha migrado hacia el ámbito de las plataformas y redes sociales, dando lugar a un playful activism, entendido como "una forma de actuación basada en las posibilidades que empodera la participación de usuarios comunes en eventos sociopolíticos emergentes mediante plantillas adaptables de creación de contenido memético" (Cervi & Divon, 2023).…”

Playful Activism: Memetic Performances of Palestinian Resistance in TikTok #Challenges

“…In the study of social movements, play has been found to be a popular practice among activists, infusing movements with creativity, and ludic qualities that enrich civic participation (Shepard, 2012). Internet communication technologies provide a plethora of tools that allow activists to explore, experience, and experiment, “playful subversion” (Fróes & Tosca, 2018) or “playful resistance” (Huang & Liu, 2022). The affordances of social network sites extend an invitation to audiences who are conventionally hard to reach to engage in a playful acquaintance with political issues (Cervi et al, 2021).…”