Class Wargames: the book, the website, the lifestyle!

For some years I have been corresponding with Dr. Richard Barbrook of the University of Westminster. Richard is one of the members of Class Wargames, “an avant-garde movement of artists, activists and theoreticians engaged in the production of works of ludic subversion in the bureacratic society of controlled consumption”.

http://www.classwargames.net/

Richard interviewed me for a radio program, and had in past used my games (Red Guard and others) as study material for students in one of his course for the BA in Politics program, where students studied and dissected different types of games, and then went on to make their own.

I finally met Richard in person last September when I went to London for the first Connections-UK conference. Richard attended Connections, and we also spent a very pleasant afternoon walking around his neighbourhood in Stoke Newington, talking in the wonderfully green and large Clissold Park. Richard was in a very good mood because he had just finished the manuscript of his book, Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism:

Now the book has been printed, and will be launched on October 24 at Red Gallery in London – coincidentally, the same day of the year that I was launched!

You can order a copy from Housmans Bookstore if you live in the UK, I understand that in North America you can get a copy from Autonomedia or AK Press. And you can always get your free electronic copy, made available under a Creative Commons license:  http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/classwargames-web.pdf

“Like H.G. Wells, Guy Debord saw wargames as a valuable means of ludic subversion of established societal and military hierarchies. In this impressively eclectic and erudite book, Richard Barbrook explains with infectious enthusiasm how he and his group have striven to use ludic ideas to inspire and inform a new generation of radicals.”

– Philip Sabin, Professor of Strategic Studies at King’s College London and author of Simulating War

(and yes, I do show up in a couple of footnotes in the book, just as I do in Philip Sabin’s book. They also serve, who only stand at the bottom of pages….)