Episode 160 - Gaming the System

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Lana Polansky, a Montreal-based video game critic, designer and journalist whose writing has appeared on Vice, Paste, and Kill Screen, among other outlets. After charting her personal journey to the intersection of gaming and left-wing politics, Lana explains the experimental impulses behind the category of indie games, with the help of a series of essays for the digital arts and culture outlet Rhizome detailing how the concept of empathy has become a buzzword in the industry.  Lana then gives listeners a lay of the land with respect to labor conditions for game workers and their efforts to organize, including her retrospective on Gamergate and the function of far-right cultural politics as worker suppression in a completely neoliberal industry, the new campaign by the Communications Workers of America in collaboration with Game Workers Unite to help unionize workers at game companies, and her own work with Game Curious Montreal, the “radical book club for games” bringing gaming enthusiasts together with local social justice organizers.  You can follow Lana on Twitter @mechapoetic, tune in to her weekly Twitch streams at twitch.tv/mechapoetic, keep up with her independent work on her personal website sufficientlyhuman.com and her other other independent work at patreon.com/Lana Polansky.  If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!