Some say that play predates human culture. As Johan Huizinga pointed out in his seminal book on the topic1, even animals can be seen to play—and they didn’t learn it from us!
Whether animals ever formalise their play into games, with rules and rewards and conditions of victory, is another question entirely. But games, and the playing of games, are an essential part of the human experience. Archaeologists have identified game pieces that were in use four millennia ago; the games we learned at home and at school still haunt our dreams and memories, long after we stop playing them. Even if we don’t play ourselves, we love to watch others compete: a major sports tournament such as the World Cup or the Tour de France unites fans across the globe in a way that few things can.
Digital games are a relatively recent development: the first consumer-grade hardware arrived in the early 1970s, well within living memory. Video games became a staple of affluent western childhoods from the late 1980s onward, and were therefore considered childish by association: kid’s stuff, tacky and crude, the sort of thing you’d (probably, hopefully) grow out of. But the kids who grew up with consoles and handhelds inevitably became adults—and many of them went on to careers in computing and other creative fields, inspired by the worlds and games that had captured their imaginations.
Fast forward four decades, and digital games have become a huge economic and cultural force. Minecraft’s daily player count is larger than the population of Sweden, while Roblox’s is bigger than Russia. The global games industry is estimated to be around ten times the value of the movie business—but games are still not granted the same degree of cultural cachet that is granted to cinema.
To their players, however, digital games matter as much as movies, music or literature—if not more. Indeed, those older media are increasingly lining up behind games as leading source of the characters, stories and worlds that ever-growing audiences most identify with and dream about.
At the same time, the production and distribution of digital games sits right on the bleeding edge of technological development. Alongside the stories and characters, tools and techniques developed in the games industry are showing up not only in other forms of entertainment, but also in education, the workplace, and even government. Games are not merely pushing the boundaries; they are spilling over them, leaking in to every aspect of life.
Exciting as it may be, the bleeding edge is an uncomfortable place to sit. With new opportunities come new challenges: fundamental shifts in technology, as well as in economics, politics and culture, are currently upending the established workflows and business models of the games industry. These changes are strongly felt here in Malmö, which—like Sweden more broadly—is home to game-makers of every size and sort, from “AAA” studios to indie developers, and everything in between. Mindful of its early success stories in the sector, Sweden is working nationally to center digital games not just as a business, but a cultural form, and it is hoped that Malmö might be a national node of that programme. The future is always uncertain, of course—but that uncertainty feels more immediate in times like these.
With these circumstances in mind, Media Evolution joined forces with Game Habitat, the community organisation for southern Sweden’s game development industry, to examine the global phenomenon of digital games. Building on our established methods2, we convened a Collaborative Foresight cycle that brought together game developers, creators and players—as well as scholars, artists, students, writers, technologists, and more—to address one core issue: how might we create, access and play digital games in 2036?
Within that overarching question lurk many more, such as:
1) What might our gaming lives look like in ten years time? 2) What sorts of games might we be playing? 3) Where, and how, and with whom might we be playing them? 4) How might they be made, re-made, and made available to us? 5) What might they come to mean to those who play and make them? 6) How will we tell the difference between games and reality—and will we want to?
In this book you will find some of the results of this process, in the form of four possible futures that were developed by the core group participants—24 people from different professional fields spending three days together guided by a foresight facilitator. The core group built upon the contributions of those who attended a preliminary Open Signal Scanning workshop3 at the start of the cycle, and incorporated feedback from those who came to the Community Critique session4 at the midpoint. In other words, the futures in this book are the work of many hands and minds.
Building on a combination of current trends and emerging factors, the four scenarios explore the big-picture possibilities as they might affect game developers and players alike. Each scenario is accompanied by a piece of speculative fiction—authored by Paul Graham Raven, who was also in the room during the process—that brings these imagined worlds to life at an intimate, human scale, where the abstract forces of economics and technology show up in the drama of everyday events.
The stories draw not only upon the scenarios themselves, but also on the conversations that took place throughout the sessions, and the images and ideas that emerged from them—plus a hefty helping of authorial imagination! But the stories do not exhaust the scenarios; they are not the definitive, final word on what these worlds might be like to live in. Perhaps you can imagine them differently? Indeed, we invite you to do so.
The stories and scenarios are not predictions, but provocations. They should be seen as marking the edges of the field of possibility—a field that was expanded greatly by the presence of perspectives from outside the industry, and in some cases even from outside the community of players. The games industry, like many industries, can be something of a bubble, and our individual perspectives are limited and highly contextual. As such, we have much to learn from one another about the futures of play and games—not just in the industry, but in communities and society more broadly.
After the scenarios and stories you will also find three extra contributions, plus an epilogue. Two of these contributions are commentary essays: in the first, the academics and developers Julian Togelius and Ahmed Khalifa look back at the history of AI in games, before looking to its future; in the second, Malmö-based indie developer Bobbi Sand takes on the same topic from a more personal perspective.
There is also an extra piece of fiction courtesy David Polfeldt, a game developer and studio founder turned sci-fi writer and publisher. “Sorocula” is a sweet yet sobering tale of what games might mean to minds other than human—and what humans might mean to those minds.
This book is also illustrated throughout by Jakob Tuchten, who brings more than twenty years of experience as a games illustrator. Drawing on his sketching technique, he has created a series of abstract compositions in which dense, repeated lines form shifting structures, spaces and possible worlds.
In the epilogue, Paul Graham Raven reflects in greater detail on the foresight cycle, and the discussions and debates that informed the stories, as well as the later stages that took the scenarios as a launchpad for thinking about how we might prepare for the futures we want by taking action in the present. We hope you might find this inspiring for your own work! Because, to twist the old line from Pericles, “just because you do not take an interest in games doesn’t mean games won’t take an interest in you…”
