Games Against Borders Symposium, with The ReImagining Value Action Lab and Games Transformed Festival, London

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I will join other game-makers, artists, scholars, and thinkers to assemble in London for a one-day facilitated symposium on the topic: Games against borders. Together with my collaborator Louis Cook, we will bring our insights from developing ‘Sound, Sensors and Surveillance’ a Bitsy game by Angela YT Chan and Louis Cook to the day’s sessions that will explore the role of radical games.

“This event is a sequel to the 2025 symposium “What is the Antifascist Game,” organised by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab in partnership with the Games Transformed Festival for radical games and play, which this year will take place on from October 30 until November 1 and will be dedicated to racial and migrant justice.

Some key discussions will be:

The urgent situation of hardening border control
Reactionary, far-right and fascistic forces In the UK and beyond are organising to strengthen the border
Games, the game industries, and gamer culture are far from innocent
Games can also offer profound opportunities to challenge these systems of domination
How can games develop a play- and game-ful opposition to bordering?
How can the power of games to break and transgress borders?
Borders are neither natural nor inevitable
Games don’t just recreate the border ideologically, they also do so materially
Games are among the most important platforms for the radical imagination, for transversal solidarity and for subversive pleasure in the 21st century

This symposium is being hosted by RiVAL: The Reimagining Value Action Lab with support from the Games Transformed festival and is being coordinated by Max Haiven, Briar Dickey and Nick Koppenhagen.”