Arrowhead Game Studios

Intersectional Pleasures of Anomie: Helldivers 2 and Democracy at Play

Edward D. Smith's DiGRA 2026 paper, "Intersectional Pleasures of Anomie: Helldivers 2 and Democracy at Play," argues that the live-service shooter Helldivers 2 transforms disorder into engagement.

• The paper argues that Helldivers 2's unstable, frequently patched design, with constant balance shifts, chaotic missions, and recurring spectacle, drives engagement by provoking voluntary experimentation, craftsmanship-driven mastery, and communal knowledge-building rather than frustration.
• Author Edward D. Smith frames the appeal as the "intersectional pleasures of anomie," a mechanism located at the convergence of instability, spectacle, communal craft, contradiction, and charismatic meaning-making, grounded in theorists including Durkheim, Benjamin, Veblen, Stouffer, and Weber.
• The paper cites over 19 million copies sold and a Steam peak concurrency near 460,000 as evidence of the game's commercial scale.