Some of these were about the social impact of games and gaming, such as their enduring association with a toxic subculture that first came to light during the “GamerGate” campaigns of 2014 and 2015, and the impact of games—both positive and negative—on the much-discussed “loneliness epidemic”. Others were about the games themselves: the rise of so-called “cozy” games, for example, introducing new styles of gameplay and storytelling, alongside the perceived homogenization of the AAA market.
Others still asked about hardware and software: would virtual reality (VR) ever break out of its narrow niche? What would be the impact of the open-source movement and the burgeoning “indie” scene?
One topic lurked behind all of the others, however, as well as taking up plenty of front-row space in its own right. As in almost every other sector at the moment, the figure of “AI”—thanks in no small part to its being so poorly defined a term1—informed imaginaries that ran the full range from utopian paradise to dystopian nightmare, and everything in between.
This is no surprise, as the signals are everywhere already: generative models are already providing code, scripts, art and assets across the games industry, and a strong backlash is building among many player communities. (Plus, as Julian Togelius and Ahmed Khalifa note in their essay on page 99, other forms of artificial intelligence have been crucial to, or even emerged directly from, the development of digital games.)
It was generally agreed among the participants that the bars to creating and releasing a game are falling far and fast, but the implications of this change were less certain. What sort of games would be released, of what quality? Who would make them, play them, pay for them? Would redundant coders and artists find new opportunities as freelancers or indie developers, or would their skills be snapped up by other industries? Would the resulting churn let nimble newcomers unseat the big studios, or would it just reinforce their rule?
These questions were sharpened by the underlying economic circumstances. Formerly a darling of tech investors, the games industry has in recent years seen restless capital get up and walk away in search of the next big thing. There’s energy and urgency to spare in the sector, without a doubt—the passion of our participants was testament to this—but the uncertainty is palpable. In the words of one participant, “for a long time, games were pulling tech; now tech is pulling us, and it’s uncomfortable. We’ve lost control.”
Throughout the first full day of workshops, participants worked to curate and condense the trends, weak signals, insights and anxieties into a collection of dichotomies: pairs of mutually exclusive possibilities, potentially pulling the industry in different directions along the paths ahead. These included such questions as: will games become an engine of isolation, or a catalyst for community? Will the shift from regular studio employment to a freelance model result in a more diverse games industry, or a less diverse one? Will the available jobs be fewer, or just shittier? Will studios centralise to survive, or will more smaller units become better able to sustain themselves commercially? Will the open-source movement flourish, or will it be enclosed and wiped out by cloning tools2? Will data be more widely shared, or more tightly gate-kept? Will access to generative models and other cutting-edge tech make production more efficient, or lead to bloat? Will those models stay affordable and available to all, or will their providers start pricing out the little people? Will people have more time for leisure and play, or less?
The either/or options of these dichotomies were deliberately drastic, and didn’t always offer a clear choice between outcomes that would be unambiguously good or bad. For that reason (among others), the list of dichotomies expanded and shrunk in response to rolling discussions, to the definition and re-definition of terms, and to a democratic process of elimination and selection, until a final pair were chosen to form the axes of a classic 2x2 scenario grid3.
The first axis asked whether the capabilities and efficiencies of emerging technological tools (such as, but not limited to, generative models) would benefit the many, or benefit only a few. The second axis asked whether game design would be driven first and foremost by technological innovation, or by the human experience of play.
From the outset, I was reminded of Bruce Sterling’s warning, well over a decade ago, that “what happens to musicians will happen to everybody”4. The inevitability of automation and disintermediation by “AI” was broadly accepted by the participants—and perhaps a little too easily, by their own admission! But while there was little denial in evidence, the other four stages of the well-known Kübler-Ross model of grief5 were all present: anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance. There is, as such, a little bit of all those emotions in each of the four scenarios that the core group developed, alongside a range of intriguing ideas and possibilities that show how the seemingly simple core dynamics of the scenario grid might cash out at different scales or levels of the social system in the next decade or so.
At the more concrete end of games and gaming—what we might call the “nuts and bolts” level—we encountered ideas such as the possible persistence of game characters and assets not just within their native game, but across a whole interconnected ecosystem of play that erases the barriers between games and reality: trophies and triumphs tied not just to individual players but to families or clans, capable of being passed down through generations like precious heirlooms. At the same time, the trend for customisation could lead to a hyper-individualised experience, in which the mechanics of a game might be completely detached from its original IP, plot or art style, endlessly reskinned to suit the player’s whims and preferences from moment to moment.
The question of discoverability came up more than once, also, as a tricky flip-side of lowered barriers to development and release: if ever more games can be made ever more quickly and ever more cheaply by ever more people, how will players find the gems among the trash? Perhaps a new class of professional curators will arise to meet this challenge—but systems of influence rarely remain pure and free of corruption, even (or perhaps particularly?) when operating at the subcultural scale. Meanwhile, the urge to attract an audience and keep it close—or even captive—may result in powerful proprietary hardware being given away as loss-leaders to entice players into a particular studio’s ecosystem. This approach might also be seen as securing another vital resource, namely data on player preferences and habits… but those players, increasingly aware of the value of the data they produce, may find ways to keep it closer to home, and use it as leverage.
The (re)formation of social groupings around games and gaming was also a regular feature of the scenarios: the “data cooperatives” just mentioned, for example, as well as the growing demographic influence of the senior or “third-age” gamer, with joystick in hand from cradle to grave—and perhaps better able to influence development decisions, by merit of their relative financial advantage over younger players. Meanwhile, the leakage of games and game-like mechanics into other spheres of life, particularly the workplace and educational contexts, will continue to provoke both enthusiasts and opponents.
Those refuseniks might find allies among the indie developers who choose to reject the efficiency of “AI”-assisted production in favour of a “frictionmaxxing” approach (as discussed in Bobbi Sand’s essay on page 89), building communities and scenes around old-school manual methods, or the construction of unique, bespoke hardware: games that can only be played in one place, and maybe even only at one time, as an antidote to ubiquitous access and predictable play-styles. It also seems certain that games and gaming culture, as they become ever more visible and recognised as part of the broader cultural landscape, will continue to be a site of contestation and culture-war, as well as a medium through which the skirmishes and battles themselves might be carried out.
For there will surely be a politics of games—and indeed, there already is, which is one reason why we find some familiar forms at this most abstract level of the enquiry. We have already compared games to music, and so we should not be too surprised to find versions of the “punks versus corporates” dynamic—which is not much newer a thing in games than it is in music, in truth, though it is perhaps being fast-tracked to prominence by the economic and technological changes already discussed.
But the question underlying that binary, which we might simplify as the struggle between artistic authenticity and commercial viability, dates back to the Romanticist movement in European art, if not even further—and it remains unresolved. The same is true of the broader sociopolitical backdrop: here, as in most foresight exercises that allow sufficient time and scope, we find the foreground topic of games woven into the fabric of both hypercapitalist market societies and top-down regulatory states.
Again, neither of these totalitarian outcomes is likely—and prediction is not the point of the exercise. Scenarios like this show don’t show us destinations, but rather directions of travel: the imaginary end-points of ideological trajectories that have been with us for centuries. It might be described as disappointing that we can’t get beyond those two poles of possibility, even in our imaginations—indeed, some participants at the community critique session of the foresight cycle said exactly that—but I would argue that it shouldn’t be surprising.
To reiterate, a scenario suite like this is intended to explore the extreme edges of the possible. However, to consider games as an industrial and commercial phenomenon is to keep those extremes somewhere within the bounds of the economic system as we currently understand it. What is particularly interesting about how this plays out in our four scenarios is the extent to which it is possible for the fundamental logic of games themselves, as well as the fundamental logic of their production, to integrate with either system. Perhaps, if gamification and synthetic worlds continue to become ever more important parts of everyday life, a new alternative may emerge from within the duality—or an as-yet undiscovered exit from it might be found.
And what about “AI”? The scenarios are deeply informed by both hopes and fears around automation and generative models, though it should be noted that the core group could see this as being to some extent driven by availability bias6: the tendency of the most immediate issues to crowd out our consideration of other, less obvious challenges. That said, foresight—much like science fiction—is not really about “the future”, so much as it is concerned with the present. This is why foresight is a practice, not a product. Think how different the futures of games would have looked just ten years ago, compared to how they look now. Given another ten years, who’s to say what the most urgent question will be? The only way to know for sure is to wait and see.
That's not to imply that we will or should wait passively! Technology is far from the only concern; the more social aspects of games, and of the industry that develops them, are at least as important, if not maybe more so. And many people—including many of our participants, and perhaps many of you reading this book—have agency in their own work as developers and artists and producers, and/or in their own choices as players, with which to shape the ecosystem of games as it changes, and to take active steps toward different possibilities.
During the final day of workshops, the core group identified sectoral problems or challenges that had been surfaced by the scenario development process, and worked on them using a method called causal layered analysis (CLA)7. Originally developed by the noted foresight scholar and practitioner Sohail Inayatullah, CLA precedes by first deconstructing a problem into its underlying causes, worldviews and metaphors, and then rebuilding it from the bottom up, in hope of changing the story into one that might serve us better in times to come.
Here we saw those enduring stereotypes of games and gaming taken apart and remade into more desirable, aspirational alternatives. From the gamer as a malnourished male shut-in, wasting the best days of their lives on frivolous and empty accolades, came a much broader identity engaged in healthy, socially beneficial activities: the new metaphors included games as a “gymnasium for the mind, and the directive to “eat your vegetables, play your games”.
The challenge of entering the industry, meanwhile, especially for those who don’t fit with the prevailing demographic bias, was reimagined as a spur to rethink games as a broader, more inclusive culture, and as a part of culture more broadly, rather than the “nerd realm” it’s sometimes still seen as. By focussing on their own values, and remembering how important a role games can play in the lives of players, developers can help rebuild the scene from the ground up, by “being the change they want to see”. Here the emerging metaphors emphasised cultural value and community spirit: after all, “it takes a village to make a game”.
Finally, the closely related problem of economic viability, wherein too few games make enough money to make it as viable products, became a challenge to seek new markets through new means, finding and serving broader audiences with games and concepts that would previously have been too niche to get off the ground. Leaving behind the “buy or die” mindset and the imperative for infinite growth will be a challenge, but as games become more accepted as a cultural force, variety will surely follow.
These are not solutions so much as they are shifts in perspective: new ways of looking at the landscape of the present, informed by thinking hard about the possibilities of change through the lens of preference. No one person, no one company or organisation, will be able to decide the future of games. Indeed, there will likely not be one single future of games, experienced equally everywhere, but rather an unevenly distributed selection of different futures, playing out at different speeds in different spaces. But we can influence where we end up by deciding together what it is that we want, and making decisions that take us toward the more desirable outcomes, and away from the less desirable ones.
Exactly how those futures will play out remains to be seen—but we’re sure that some of them can be found, albeit in fragmentary form, among the scenarios and stories in this book. But you really don’t have to take our word for it! To repeat: foresight is a process rather than a product, and it doesn’t belong to us, or to anyone else—just as whatever future we end up living will be shared. We therefore invite you to take an active role of your own in shaping the times to come: to imagine, examine, and experiment; to collaborate, discuss, and explore. The futures of games are yours to envision, to make, and to play.
DR PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN is a writer, arts-based researcher and creative critical foresight consultant, who helps organisations and individuals understand how the stories they tell about times to come can shape the lives they end up living. You can find out more about him at paulgrahamraven.com, or subscribe to the research journal of his futures practice at worldbuilding.agency.
