If you’ve been going to digital conferences like NEXT for over a decade, you’ll probably remember the talk about “gamification”. In the latter days of Web 2.0 and the early days of the app economy, integrating ideas from games was considered a primary design goal for increasing user engagement with products.

And it is buried in more products than we might think. My daughter recently successfully persuaded me to cough up for some gems in Duolingo so she could rescue her over 300-day streak in the app. I’m more than a little addicted to keeping up my reading streak in Apple’s Books app. People are getting fit thanks to the game-based incentives in things like Zombies, Run. These simple game elements have threaded themselves into our digital worlds.

And yet, in the years since “gamification” was a buzzword, we’ve become a society saturated in gaming culture. As I write this, adult viewers are eagerly awaiting the second series of The Last of Us, adapted from the video games. The Minecraft Movie is making good box office, while audiences are reacting uncontrollably to allusions to online memes about the game in the movie.

Games are a cultural force

The relationship between culture and games is growing ever more complex, and it’s time for us to take it more seriously. “Gamification” now has to be about more than adding the most base of addictive mechanics into what we produce.

It’s easy to forget that gaming is now bigger than the movie industry. Much bigger, in fact. The Economist:

Gaming is the largest sector of entertainment, by most estimates surpassing the sales of film and recorded music combined. Video-game properties also have a built-in fan base. Look no further than the Game Awards, the industry’s annual show, for proof: in 2023 it attracted 118m viewers, six times more than tuned into Hollywood’s mainstay, the Academy Awards.

A Hollywood adaptation is no longer a mainstream stamp of approval on a game, but just one of a range of secondary spin-offs. And you can see the power balance shifting. The Economist again:

“More and more game creators are getting involved creatively” in the development of film and television properties, says Geoff Keighley, who hosts the Game Awards. This can be good, to the extent that it preserves a game’s authenticity and helps it translate to film or television. Of course, creators are also hopeful that an adaptation can propel game sales, as occurred with “Fallout” (2024), a post-apocalyptic show that drove new users to the role-playing games on which it was based.

One could even say that Hollywood itself has been gamified. This is the end of movies as the dominant cultural force. They have been supplanted by the new monarch of culture: gaming.

Understanding the impact of games

And that brings us back to the people who are deeply invested in understanding game culture. The reason so many of the early game-to-screen adaptations were poor was that the filmmakers assumed they were the more knowing creative force. Now that people have grown up spending more time playing games than watching movies, understanding the nature of games is vital.

The problem is that games are a moving target. Adrian Hon, a speaker at NEXT in 2011 and 2015, and who is joining us again this year, has been exploring the shifting cultural nature of games on his blog. For example, here he discusses Jubensha, a cultural phenomenon in Japan:

Gameplay involves “distributed cognition and sensemaking” – that is, individuals analysing raw information (e.g. clues, diaries, evidence) both privately and collectively via discussion, and transforming it into intelligence with the aid of automated systems, instruments, and rules, like pilots in a cockpit flying a plane with the aid of instrument panels and manuals.

His point is that most of the discussion around these phenomena tends towards oversimplification:

Scholars and journalists frequently oversimplify Jubensha by focusing on its detective themes (it’s a murder mystery game!) or its live-action elements (it’s a larp!). But this overlooks the scripted nature of the game, and how information is distributed amongst players.

Why does this matter? Something played on this scale — there are tens of millions of players — is a significant element of the cultural landscape. Games are both influenced by the culture that creates them, but also go on to influence that culture in turn.

Playing our way into the permacrisis

Indeed, research has proven that games are, indeed, a major factor in shaping our culture. From The Cultural Impact of Video Games: A Systematic Review of the Literature:

There is a direct impact between video games and human culture. Although there is still not enough research on the subject, the conclusions of our study and some of the documents analysed allow us to affirm that there is a direct impact.

This, perhaps, should not be a surprise. Our children are growing up in a culture saturated with games, to the point where traditional toys are struggling. Indeed, their sales are largely being buoyed by adult collectors… Gaming is not something that ends with childhood. People who grew up on the early game devices of the 1980s are well into their 50s now, and still gaming. There’s no reason to believe that games will diminish as a cultural force anytime soon.

As that literature review makes clear, these factors bear examining:

Large-scale productions are easily recognised by a marked context and cultural heritage, in which the message implicit in the video game is launched to players with a clear intentionality both in productions aimed at the general public and in more modest productions to impose or extend an idea. However, it is in these larger productions where these issues are more embedded due to the fact that their scope is undoubtedly greater, as well as the economic or socio-political objectives that drive them. In this case, the industry is guided, albeit to a lesser extent by social demands, with commercial and political demands deciding which narratives or cultural spaces are or are not represented. This has an impact on society and the interpretation of certain aspects of society.

As we explore the origins and influential factors in the permacrisis, we should, perhaps, be asking ourselves if the transmission of cultural meaning and ideas – memes, if you like – via games is as significant a force as social media. We devote plenty of time to exploring the cultural and political impact of the social platforms. It’s time to pay the same attention to games.

Picture by Ella Don / Unsplash.