Games and the future
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Robbie Fordyce
15 May 2021
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On the role that video games might have for us in thinking and preparing for the future.
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- Overview
Fordyce, R., 2021. Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire. Games and Culture, 16(3), pp.294-304.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020962430
01. Overview
When we tell stories about what the future might hold we are often constrained by our present circumstances. If we look back to the way that different generations and cultures have tried to present what the future looks like, they change remarkably. Cyber-punk, diesel-punk, and solar-punk are all moments where we can see different values about what authors think needs to change, or what might happen if we don’t. They’re very much tied up in the era in which they were produced. The future that people dreamed about in the 1890s was very different to what people dreamed about in the 1980s.
In 2005, William Uricchio argued that we could use games to explore how history works, and that maybe we could use the simulated, chaotic, and random aspects of game environments to explore what history could be. I’ve inverted Uricchio’s idea to suggest that we could also use games to explore what the future could hold, and maybe (maybe) break out from some of the material or social limits to what we can do in the future. It’s published here: Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire.