Conspiracy Plays - Hugh Davies on the temptations of alternate reality (EoP01)

On this first episode of THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY we speak with Hugh Davies about alternate reality games and gaming and the paranoid world of conspiracism. More information: https://weirdeconomies.com/podcasts/exploits-of-play THE EXPLOITS OF PLAY is a 10-episode podcast about how games and play have moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It is produced by Weird Economies and hosted by Max Haiven. Dr. Hugh Davies is an artist, curator, and researcher. Working across digital media, academic scholarship, and creative practice, he explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of art and technology. He’s written two books on game culture and ethnographies of play and is currently a research fellow with a focus on Chinese Platform Studies at RMIT in Melbourne. Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).