LEO BOIX recommends a film that portrays how fascism feeds on ignorance, machismo and myth in isolated communities abandoned by the state
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Class struggle at the video games console
BEN COWLES recommends an excellent Marxist critique of the video-games industry
Playing with Marx: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
Chris Searle speaks to Syrian/French flautist NAISSAM JALAL
With thousands of AI‑written, edited or ‘polished’ books being sold, LAURA BEERS hears an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel‑writing machines’
ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
(Haymarket Books, £12.99)
ON THE face of it, Marxists might not seem to have all that much to say about video games and gamers might not necessarily have all that much interest in Marx. But Jamie Woodcock’s brilliant book explains why they both should.
Marx made his video game debut in 2015 in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. And it was while playing through a sequence where one of the villains belittle the game’s protagonist while delivering a monologue on the industrial “miracle” that brought him his cup of tea, that Woodcock realised the vast complexity of the video game industry.
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