Though frequently written off as indifferent to anything beyond their own pleasures, many fans of video games recognize and even bemoan working conditions in the game industry. For the most part, though, they’re not inclined to see this as a political problem, let alone one with political solutions.

One recent essay, “Gaming Under Socialism,” is an attempt to change that. Written by Paolo Pedercini, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria, the piece is not so much a critique or a manifesto as a sorely needed exercise in “radical imagination.” It tries to take seriously the question of what socialism can do for games (and, by extension, what games can do for socialism).

The game industry, Paolo argues, is a particularly useful lens for examining capitalism in the information age — and thinking about how we might make things better. As he puts it, “we can imagine a [near-future socialism] without resorting to fictional technologies or elaborate space exploration allegories.”