138. The Play The World Needs Right Now: New Directions for Game Studies
Alexander John Daniel Mirowski, Indiana University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Games have a powerful ability to bring people together. And as the world moves into the third year of pandemic, this is an increasingly critical fact about these playful technologies. The significant increase in the number of people playing games since 2019 raises just as significant questions about how, when, with whom, and at what cost we engage in play in the present moment.
What are the new costs of having fun two decades into the 21st century and three years into a pandemic? Kickstarter, one of the most popular platforms for crowdfunding games, recently announced that it would be moving to blockchain, which prompted an outcry: how can the company maintain its commitment to ethics and sustainability by attaching itself to the electric-power-hungry world of blockchain and cryptocurrency?
What issues will be raised regarding access, equity, and control in playful spaces? Facebook has rebranded as Meta, a company dedicated to being the future hub of Internet activity by building an alternate reality in which we’ll work and play. Our digital futures are apparently to unfold inside a virtual-reality-enabled, avatar-mediated world. But STS knows well that building such a society is not so easy.
This panel invites papers that interrogate these questions and more. The pandemic and climate change require game studies to reconsider its objects of study and its purpose. Let us use this opportunity for reunion in Cholula to ponder the reconfiguration of this vibrant field of study.
