Games Transformed 2025

What can the left learn from Gamergate? How do we build anti-fascist communities that bite back? Can we turn anger away from minorities and towards the bosses and shareholders wrecking the industry for profit?

Join workers, player, academics and organisers to find out together at Games Transformed 2025 - this year’s theme is Smash The Fash!

Games Transformed 2025 will be taking place on Saturday 12th July, with a special academic conference happening the day before on Friday 11th July. Both events will take place at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road E1 5QJ.

Games Transformed is a volunteer-led organisation celebrating games and radical politics. We use games to explore anti-capitalist ideas, build friendship and community, and introduce workers and fans to political organising so they can take the fight to the games industry and beyond!

Follow us on Instagram, and Bluesky to hear announcements about our sessions and speakers!

FULL PROGRAMME - text timetable here

Event Space

Ecosocialist Play vs. Fascist Zero-Sum Games: Making, Hacking, and Playing Games Through Climate Breakdown
Chloé Germaine, Matteo Menapace, Paolo Pedercini
In a world saturated with dystopian game-over narratives, how can games help us imagine a possi-topian future? Join authors and scholars Chloé Germaine (Manchester Metropolitan University), Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria, CMU), and Matteo Menapace (Daybreak) as they discuss their work at the intersection of games and ecosocialist politics. The panel will explore how games can be made, played, and hacked ecologically.

From Gamergate to QAnon: How Fascists Use Games
Max Haiven, Innuendo Studios, Konstanze N'Guessan, Thomas Spies, Total Refusal
Ten years ago, #Gamergate brought the grotesque alliance of far-right misogyny and toxic gamer culture to the mainstream. Now a decade later and games are a key part of how fascist forces mobilize, from the game-like conspiracism of QAnon to the use of multiplayer games for recruitment to the gamification of politics. What can we learn from their success, and how can we ruin their fun?

What can the Left learn from Struggles in the Games Industry?
Tom Nicholas, Chris Bratt, IWGB Game Workers, Equity Audio Committee, STJV, Draughts Workers’ Union, GWU Ireland
Larger than film publishing and music combined, the video games industry is also a laboratory for new forms of exploitation, taking advantage of young workers keen to “do what they love” to earn massive profits. But workers are rising up, and they have a lot to teach labour and social movement organizers about fighting back against 21st tech capitalism and its dystopias. 

Power Up: How we can come together to support the Draughts Workers' Strike?
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Games Transformed, Clapton CFC, Draughts Workers’ Union, IWGB Game Workers
Workers at Draughts board game café are in dispute with their bosses. Games Transformed is mobilising to support them. In the coming weeks, we’ll join them on the picket line outside their workplace - to encourage customers to boycott and demonstrate our power to the bosses. Reps from Draughts Workers Union, the IWGB Game Workers Union, Clapton CFC, and Games Transformed will introduce the workshop, before an interactive planning & organising session. Followed by a raffle in aid of the strike fund!

Billionaires & Guillotines: Live Game Show Edition!
Max Haiven, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tom Nicholas, Meg Jayanth, You...?
In the new board game Billionaires & Guillotines (Pluto Press, 2025), players take on the role of rival plutocrats, vying to grab the wealth of the world before a revolution comes for their heads. For the grand finale of our 2025 festival, join game designer Max Haiven for a raucous live game-show version, where our celebrity guests are the super-rich and you, the audience, are the merciless mob. May the best (or worst) player win!

The People's Letters

Citizen Sleeper 2
Gareth Damian Martin & Quintin Smith
Our most popular session at the first Games Transformed festival in 2023 - Gareth and Quinns return for a chat about Gareth's recently released sequel to Citizen Sleeper and the inspirations behind it.

Anti-Fascist Football Jam
Clapton CFC Members
Clapton Community Football Club has an incredible history! When fans and players got fed up with the mismanagement of Clapton FC, they left and set up their own fan owned club. Now they own their old ground and run it as a bastion of progressive politics and culture. In this session we'll hear how they did it and come up with concepts for our 2025 game jam. The winning game from this year's jam will feature in a fundraising arcade cabinet in Clapton's clubhouse!

Anti-Fascist Game Design
Quinns, Paintbucket Games, La Horde, Grant Howitt
As in film, Nazis have often featured in video and board games as evil villains. It's definitely fun to shoot Hitler, but many wonder if such representations are enough to confront the threat and the allure of fascism. This panel brings together game designers who take anti-fascism seriously (and not so seriously) and are reimagining what it means for interactive media.

Indie Wargaming
Mira Manga, Annie Norman, HATE Club, Ben Rose
Self-publishing rules and making their own miniatures seems a lot more utopian than the all-hungry might of Games Workshop so we're planning a panel about the indie miniatures scene

Kitbash the Fash: A Co-operative Nazi Zombie Squishing Killbot Miniatures Game
HATE Club, Mira Manga, Annie Norman, Ben Rose
The culmination of our all day fascist-smashing killbot miniatures workshop where participants will build, paint, and make rules for their miniature before taking part in a co-operative nazi squishing tournament in the evening.

Showcase Room

Billionaires and Guillotines
Max Haiven
In Billionaires & Guillotines, 2-5 players take on the role of plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.

ANTIFA: The Game
La Horde
ANTIFA: The Game is a cooperative simulation where you play a local antifascist group facing down the far-right, working together to mobilize the community and counter the fascist threat. Beyond the fun gameplay ANTIFA: The Game is envisioned as a central part of a broader organizing strategy.

Mad as Hell
SoulMuppet Publishing
The evils of capitalism have torn holes in the fabric of the world, allowing demons to hunt the vulnerable and make life hell. As Radicals in tabletop roleplaying game Mad as Hell, you'll work with a Community to hunt these monsters down and bring an end to the quiet violence that brought them into existence. Co-creator Zach Cox will run a session of the game for up to 5 players.

The Fall of Home
Joanne Winter
The Fall of Home is a dice-less, gmless, collaborative storytelling game about home, and leaving it behind. Walk its crumbling ruins and describe what they used to be, what they meant to you then, and how you feel about them now.

Class Room

Addressing Play Inequality
Alex Johansson

Alex Johansson discusses the urgent need to address play inequality, where hundreds of games release a month yet millions go without sufficient play in their lives. He talks about his experience of delivering Plug in and Play in Rotherham and his recent research into games for the elderly and people with dementia. A rallying cry of hope and optimism for a playful future for all!

Organising 101
IWGB
This training session will teach the basics of workplace organising, from what a union is to how to build the power you’ll need to deliver collective change. This training will be delivered by the grassroots member’s led Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) who represent workers in both the video game and boardgame industries. With their over a decade of victories for precarious workers, there’s no better union to deliver this training!

Meal Deal
Caleb Elliott
Pedal hard, run red lights, dodge cops, while delivering food, hustling for tips, and trying to make enough money to survive.
Meal Deal is a push-your-luck card game about the brutal realities of the gig economy.

The Game of War
Class Wargames
Class Wargames is an avant-garde movement of artists, activists, and theoreticians engaged in the production of works of ludic subversion in the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. In this space they share classic and recent games to level-up class struggle.

Access statement

Games Transformed tries hard to ensure our events are accessible to everyone. Pelican House is an accessible venue and we have carried out an access check for the festival. The access statement is available here. Free tickets are available to the unwaged and asylum seekers by emailing gamestransformed@gmail.com

Creche
A free creche is available for children aged 3 - 11 from 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM BST on Saturday. The creche is in a large, naturally cool basement room of the Scarlett Letters Bookshop. Unfortunately, it is not wheelchair accessible. The creche will be staffed by volunteers with DBS checks and experience with childcare. They will run a den building session, crafts, and read them books. Parents are welcome to bring children of any ages to sessions they are attending but we cannot guarantee the content of these sessions will be suitable for children.