Playing Utopia: Futures in Digital Games – Games Studies Summit

Niklas Luhmann once asked in which forms the future might present itself in the present. One answer is that media narratives inform our ideas of the future. Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir of the future. On the one hand, games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technology. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, games feature utopias much less frequently. Why?

This summit seeks to examine playful utopias from two perspectives. We will investigate utopias in digital games, and we will investigate utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future, as they are, for example, often found in the field of gamification as ‘promises of a better world.

Contact Program Managers:
Gundolf S. Freyermuth: gsf(at)colognegamelab.de
Hanns Christian Schmidt: hcs(at)colognegamelab.de
Benjamin Beil: benjamin.beil(at)uni-koeln.de