This guest post is by Dr Rob Gallagher, joint Programme Director for the King's Digital Futures MA and a Lecturer in Games and Immersive Media.
Can studying video games really help you to shape the digital future? While hundreds of millions of us now play games, many pundits continue to see them as a trivial distraction – fun, perhaps, but ultimately a bit of a waste of time.
This view ignores the fact that fact that videogames have grown into a dynamic and diverse cultural form. The sheer scope of mega-budget cinematic blockbusters like The Last of Us: Part II or Red Dead Redemption 2 can be dazzling. But there’s a lot more to the medium, from quirky indie adventures to experimental art games and soul-baring interactive autobiographies.
Games can give us a taste of experiences we never knew could be fun - as the gloriously cathartic hose ‘em up PowerWash Simulator proved. They can be both heartwarming and thought-provoking, as the subversively queer “dad dating simulator” Dream Daddy shows. But they can also lay out roadmaps for a more sustainable tomorrow or explain what it’s like working in the gig economy, as titles like Green New Deal Simulator or The Uber Game show.
And it’s not just the stories games tell or the situations they simulate that make them significant. Game worlds like those of Animal Crossing New Horizons and Fortnite have also become places where players connect with friends, earn money, attend concerts or even stage political protests – functions that came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Looking further back, games have played an important historical role as the friendly face of computation, helping to convince a sceptical public that interacting with digital devices could be fun. Today we’re used to seeing computers not just as tools, but as vehicles for creative expression, social connection and play – and videogames are a big part of the reason why.
Today, games are exercising a growing influence on other areas of culture. Even if you’re not a gamer, many of the interfaces and services you interact with on a daily basis will be examples of ‘gamification’ – the application of techniques pioneered by videogame designers to other fields.
When we compete for likes on social media, earn points for booking a hotel room, or level up on Duolingo these are all instances of gamification. Whether see such techniques as clever ways of motivating users or as devious means of manipulating them, there’s no denying their ubiquity.
For many scholars gamification is just one symptom of a broader process of ‘ludification’, one that has seen us coming to understand more and more of our lives through the language and logics of games. True of education, romance, politics and health, this is also true even of work. In fact, it has often been argued that a blurring of distinctions between work and play, labour and leisure is one of the defining characteristics of digital culture today.
This might sound like a welcome development (after all, who wouldn’t want their job to be more fun?). But the reality can be less appealing – a matter of mounting pressure to monetise our hobbies, to be productive even when we aren’t on the clock, and to treat life as a competition where we always have to be looking out for opportunities to game the system and steal a march on our rivals.
So digital games are not just a fascinating new(ish) medium. They also offer us a way into some of the biggest questions confronting us today – from our relationship with technology to the nature of digital creativity, the platformisation of everyday life to the future of work.
These are the kinds of questions that the King's Digital Futures MA takes up. Looking at a whole range of digital technologies – from videogames to generative AI, social media platforms to streaming services and cryptocurrencies – the course uses will help you to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to build brighter digital futures: