Interview: Respawning the Hero (Briar Dickey)

Briar Dickey (2025) Respawning the Hero: Metapolitics, Historical Fiction Video Games and the Shifting Strategies and Subjectivities of Far-right Influencers, Javnost – The Public, 32:3, 377-393, DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2025.2547523

This interview was conducted by Alex Roman.

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In your article, you analyse how far-right influencers engage with the content of historical fiction video games, both in their reviews of games and in Let’s Plays (content of themselves playing games). What led you to this focus and what new insights does it bring to our understanding of the digital far right?

Video games and, more generally, nerd culture have popped up quite regularly in the scholarly canon on the digital far-right, particularly in relation to the so-called ‘alt-right’ and extreme masculinist cultures. There is now a fairly well-established understanding of the synergy between exclusionary gaming fandoms and a range of reactionary digital cultures.

Outside of game studies, however, there has been limited engagement with what games actually are and why they matter politically – that is, how their structures, mechanics, and modes of participation shape political engagement, enable distinctive forms of communication, and organise the kinds of subjectivities, social relations, and political imaginaries that can be experimented with. Far-right influencers are not only tapping into the specific cultural grievances that surround games; they are also performing and narrating imagined worlds through platformed gameplay. Their discourses don’t only comment on games from the outside, but emerges in and through a ludic (playful, rules-based) environment, producing a continual push and pull between far-right narratives and both the narratives and structural logics of games themselves.

What I find most interesting here is how tensions and antagonisms emerge when far-right actors attempt to express their cultural imaginaries through game environments that place limits on what can be said, done, and imagined. These imaginaries are not simply communicated through discourse about games, nor are they only embedded in reactionary, colonial, authoritarian, or militaristic narratives that some games may offer. Instead, they are actively negotiated, strained, and sometimes destabilised through gameplay itself. This process is also shaped by the political economy of the games industry: large, profit-driven studios, platform logics, and partially manufactured fandoms all structure how games are made, circulated, and engaged with. In simpler terms, games have their own pre-determined structures and exist in a huge industry with its own ideological biases. Whilst this can lead them at times to have a synergetic relationship with reactionary politics, that doesn’t mean that they always allow reactionary actors to do exactly what they want to do, and their attempts to navigate this seems to provoke wild discursive pivots between different constructed subject positions to try and maintain a semblance of ideological coherency.

I think this tension could maybe help us rethink how we understand the digital far right’s relationship to popular culture and storytelling. Instead of interpreting fascist narratives, it pushes us to analyse how political meaning is co-produced through interaction with technocultural infrastructures, which have their own constraints, logics, and affordances to which we should hold up a critical political economic magnifying glass. I try to develop this observation into some reflections on how the analysis of games and technoculture might inform contemporary antifascist strategies, bearing in mind that video games are not just sites where fascist world-building can be comfortably housed, but arenas in which the limits, inconsistencies, and vulnerabilities of fascist world-making can also become visible.

You note that, ‘through the lens of geek masculinity, video games are constructed as property of…men’. Talking about strategies to combat these influencers, do you see increased diversity (beyond historical accuracy or not) as a form of resistance against these influencers?

There are several ways we might understand what “diversity” means in the context of games. It could refer to diversity within the industry itself: more developers, publishers, and decision-makers from marginalised groups. It could refer to diversity in the content of games, meaning stories and characters that make different subjectivities and experiences playable. Or it could refer to diversity among players and gaming communities.

As a gamer and as a leftist who thinks games are politically important, of course I do see value in games that make different subjectivities and political possibilities playable. I want lots of different people to make and play games; I want to play games that make new kinds of worlds feel possible. However as we’ve seen in many other contexts, diversity discourse tends to ignore structural conditions. Materialist analyses such as those by Emil Hammar and Carolyn Jong have helped us to understand how the conditions of imperialism and capitalism shape a games industry which tends comfortably towards fascism. There are reasons why many mainstream games make systems of domination – racism, colonialism, imperialism and so on – playable, and it’s not necessarily because they’re inherently fun.

Likewise, fascism and the type of world it imagines can also be understood as a fluid conclusion of the logics of racial capitalism and colonialism. This is one reason why, as Roberto Toscano argues, we should not understand liberalism and fascism as dialectical opposites, since they both emerge from and embolden the same racial capitalist logics. Our colleagues in the RPRN, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, have also challenged the supposed opposition between reactionary politics and the liberal mainstream.

So, diversity in the gaming industry – like electoral diversity within a liberal democracy still embedded in the logics of racial capitalism – is not in itself a bulwark against the fascist tendencies these systems make ‘playable’. It’s important to keep this political-economic lens in mind, and then turn a critical eye to the persistent narrative that games are the “property” of men, often implicitly white men. This is the narrative of reactionary gamers, but sometimes also echoed in critical leftist accounts that frame gamer conflicts as a story of these men genuinely losing something that was once more theirs than it is now. Even if women, queer people and people of colour are and have been present in gaming cultures and it has never ‘belonged’ to anyone in particular, the figure of the white male gamer who has ‘lost’ what he owned continues to do a lot of work. Because this narrative isn’t rooted in reality, representation alone is unlikely to disrupt the sense of entitlement it sustains, especially when reactionary backlash often comes precisely as a response to real or perceived diversification to again frame it as dispossession. 

I’m inspired by Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to make things “unusable for fascism.” Toscano proposes doing this to class, challenging the frequently mobilised figure of the “white working class” as a coherent political subject. We should probably do the same to the white male gamer. But we should also ask what it would mean to make games themselves unusable for fascism. That means questioning the societal context from which games emerge, the capitalist logics of the industry, its relationship to the military-industrial complex, and so on. Ultimately, it also means recognising that intervening in fascism through culture is only useful insofar as it helps us disrupt and reimagine the systems that make it possible and powerful – rather than trying to offer more diverse options to an imagined group of slightly fascist white male gamers who are just waiting to be persuaded to the left by the right game, TV show, movie, story, narrative or whatever.

Your conclusion reckons with the current state of “far-right studies” and debates ways to move forward. If at all, how have your thoughts about your conclusion changed since publication?

In my conclusion, I was beginning to give form to an anxiety I’ve been feeling about the broader context of my work: the more culturally and discursively oriented corner of so-called “far-right studies.” I repeat an insistence on explicit anti-racist and anti-fascist commitments in research on the far right (see Joseph-Salisbury et al., 2024; Mondon, 2024; Tebaldi & Jereza, 2024, etc.), and ask whether my own and similar work can move beyond interpretation toward intervention. To be clear, this is paired with a suspicion towards policy-making: I completely reject the idea that scholarship should serve state apparatuses of surveillance, control, or sanctioning.

Cultural and discursive analyses of the digital far right can be useful, but I’ve increasingly felt that trends in this scholarship – particularly interpreting, deconstructing, and explaining the stories fascists tell and their appeal – don’t always point most productively toward counter-strategy. In my article, I begin to grapple with the role of such research and tentatively suggest that counter-strategy should “directly [address] the anxieties and longings to which far-right imaginaries so often appeal, offering compelling alternatives in their place.” I do in this section begin to gesture specifically towards the question of what narratives we should be offering – what stories we build against the far right, and who we build them with. Bernard Forchtner (2025:412) in the conclusion to the special issue zooms in on this, situating it within broader debates on counter-narratives and what kinds of “shared grounds” might be tactically invoked without reproducing regressive politics.

To clarify my own position: I don’t think the goal of antifascism should be to convince fascists not to be fascists. Nor do I believe the problem of fascist resurgence could be solved by somehow preventing “the masses” from being seduced by the wrong stories simply by telling better ones. I’m also sceptical in general of an underlying assumption which seems to treat “the far right” as a discrete formation which exists outside the liberal mainstream, but somehow contaminates it through cultural manipulation. In short, the specific stories reactionary actors tell matter less than the structural conditions that make those stories compelling and desirable in the first place.

So, what I was beginning to gesture toward wasn’t simply telling “better” stories through games, but using the antagonisms between game environments and fascist play to reveal the weaknesses, contradictions, and incoherencies of fascist world-making. A cultural antifascist strategy doesn’t need to find “shared ground” with fascists themselves – addressing the needs, desires, and anxieties to which fascism offers false solutions can happen without validating fascist politics. I think it’s also important to be cautious around the figures of “the masses” that fascist discourses try to make real (like the white working class or the white male gamer) so that our counter-strategies don’t themselves reify coherent political classes that don’t really exist. Yet it’s equally important to remember that fascism does offer reactionary solutions to contradictions and disillusionments that are very real. The question, then, is whether the ludo-narrative possibilities of games can help us imagine transformations of those conditions, or ways to resist and intervene from within them. 

If we want to think about what stories games can tell, or make playable, while bearing all of this in mind, they are strategically interesting because they let us structurally embed, rehearse, and experiment with different ways of organising social life. Games can model and test social relations, resistant subjectivities, and political systems. For example, at the level of everyday cooperation, some multiplayer games like Overcooked or It Takes Two force coordination, collaboration and interdependence. At the level of individual subjectivity, games like Tonight We Riot put players into the subjectivity of antagonistic resistance against the oppressive state. I’d personally love to see games that explicitly model medium- to large-scale political organisation – think colony-building simulators or city-builders – that deliberately break the norms of their genres and experiment with reimagining social and political relations. Could games explicitly model mutual aid, collective decision-making, resource redistribution, or other challenges to racial capitalist norms?

Of course, none of this means games alone can dismantle the structures that sustain oppression, especially when they’re tangled up in those structures themselves. Single-player experiences, in particular, are arguably wrapped up in forms of control that feel politically limited or even authoritarian. But if we take seriously the ways games shape what’s possible, playable, and imaginable, we can start to see how resistance might be rehearsed, and counter-worlds built, even if only in miniature. For me, the bigger lesson for antifascist work is that cultural and discursive interventions don’t have to preach or convince. They can intervene by opening spaces, testing possibilities, showing the limits, contradictions, and vulnerabilities of the worlds we want to challenge, and most importantly by giving people the tools and the steps to actually practice new ways of resisting and existing.

Finally, as a little addendum, this interview also gives me an opportunity to slightly qualify my own use of the term “metapolitics” in the article. I think I and perhaps others use it a little too uncritically as shorthand for the far right’s cultural strategy. Not to advocate a ban on the term: Ico Maly for example is totally right that contemporary reactionary actors seem to consciously adapt Nouvelle Droite theory to new media environments. My gripe is that the buzz around ‘far-right metapolitics’ too easily turns it into a trendy replacement for what we would otherwise just understand as cultural hegemony, which the Nouvelle Droite itself appropriated. In other words, we risk letting the far right’s own rebranding of an antifascist scholar’s – that is, Gramsci’s – work become our analytic shorthand.

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Briar Dickey is a PhD researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the ECHO Research Group. His work focuses on (anti-)fascism, the far right, (digital) games, subjectivity, gender, and resistance.

Alex Roman (they/them) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Bath. Their research concerns anti-gender politics in the United Kingdom and the United States, particularly through the lens of necropolitics and ontological security.

Briar and Alex are members of the RPRN.

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