New research: Games For Better Futures
The videogame industry one of the most significant ‘imagination infrastructures’ of our times. Games allow players to inhabit new roles, inhabit new worlds, tell new stories and more. There have never been more amazing video games to spark our imaginations about reality.
And yet the games industry is also in crisis. Funding is challenging, especially for more adventurous indie studios. So is getting attention among the enormous amounts of games being released all the time. AI is threatening jobs. The industry is unsustainable in terms of its environmental impacts, its social and economic practices and more.
What would it take to transform the videogame industry in such a way that it could really fulfill its potential as a medium that opens up better futures?
A new research paper published in the journal Ecology and Society by researchers Kyle Thompson, Joost Vervoort and Mae van Veldhoven investigated this question. The paper is a collaboration between the STRATEGIES and ANTICIPLAY projects, and draws on insights from seven workshops held over the last years with game developers, funders, researchers and others across the sector.
Notable is the creative methodology used in these workshops: the organizers used the concept of ‘Seeds of Good Anthropocenes’, an approach to imagining better futures by drawing on inspiring examples that already exist in the present. In fact, the article is part of a Special Issue entirely dedicated to the use of this method. The team also used the ‘X-Curve’ – an approach to describe the bottom-up transformation of different sectors.
These methods were used to create a new pathway for the videogames industry. Four themes emerged:
Unionization as a platform for broader sustainability goals, to challenging "crunch culture," and push companies to take ecological commitments seriously.
New funding structures: government incubators, private patronage, and civic funding models could support the kinds of games that wouldn't otherwise get made.
Games as activism: bringing together the worlds of entertainment games and real world action, by modding games into protest, building games around activist practices, using play as a site of social and ecological disruption.
Degrowth aesthetics: a shift toward resource-light aesthetics would allow for the aesthetics of games to be coherent with the social goals of such games. There is already a big appetite for resource-light aesthetics among indie game players that could be built upon.
A key insight drawn from the process is that such changes to the industry create a fertile ground for games that imagine new, radical futures; and that changing the aesthetics, play and worlds of games makes a new industry possible as well. These recommendations became part of the way STRATEGIES discusses the future of games with policy makers and funders.