It’s hard to turn around in video game circles without hearing someone proclaim that “games are the dominant medium of the 21st century.” Deus Ex and Epic Mickeydesigner Warren Spector has a lecture built around the idea. The author Tom Chatfield devoted the subtitle of his book Fun, Inc to the concept. Journey composer Austin Wintory’s uttered the quip in an interview. Film critics writing about recent documentaries about games have even let slip the admission. If you feel like it, you can trawl through another 400,000 or so mentions of this aspiration. And aspiration it very much is.
Media philosophers like me have our own special, haughtier version. For years now, I have been arguing that games have a unique power to explain complexity. Unlike television and blogs and TED talks and even many long-form books and articles these days, games are the one popular medium that embraces complexity rather than shying away from it. Games endorse and even require systems thinking, the process of understanding the world as a complex network of interconnected parts.
Last year, the game designer Eric Zimmerman made a similar argument in a punchier form, as a “Manifesto for a Ludic Century.” It first appeared on the game enthusiast website Kotaku, whose editors introduced the manifesto by noting that “previous centuries have been defined by novels and cinema,” while this century will be defined by games.
Zimmerman argues that the 20th century was the century of information, dominated by its expression and demonstration through film and the moving image. By contrast, Zimmerman suggests, the 21st century is the century of digitized, exploratory information: “information at play.” Data alone cannot sufficiently explain our world; now we need to grasp systems?—?the complex, intertwined interactions between things. And games are purpose-built to provide experiences of systems. In this “ludic century” (ludus is the Latin word for game), games will offer a new, playful way to develop systems literacy. This new literacy might help us solve seemingly intractable problems, but it will also help us appreciate the intrinsic beauty and pleasure of play.
Zimmerman is hardly alone in angling for a near future driven by games. I’ve got my own take: a theory of procedural rhetoric, in which arguments take the form of playable systems rather than words or images. And back when the would-be ludic century was but a tot, the literacy scholar James Paul Gee argued that video games adopt superior techniques for teaching, including techniques like scaffolding and performance before competence, far better than actual schooling. What would it be like, Gee wondered, if we harnessed the potential in game design for learning of all sorts?
Despite all the aspirational chatter, a decade and a half into the 21st century a ludic century seems unlikely. Impossible, even. Perhaps it’s time to take a step back from grand proclamations about the past or the future of media, and instead treat it with the attention to detail systems thinking supposedly offers.
There’s a paradox at work in systems literacy. For games to embrace a role as windows onto complexity, as depictions of interconnected systems, they must also reject the very idea of dramatic, revolutionary, disruptive change that drives so much of our contemporary understanding about technology?—?or about anything whatsoever.
Real systems thinking assumes simple answers are always wrong. Yet when we talk about the future—even the future of games or of systems literacy—we tend to assume that they will unleash their transformative powers in a straightforward way, through ideas like a century with a dominant medium. We are meant to speak like Pollyannas about “changing the world,” rather than admitting that the very notion of changing the world is anathema to the fundamental promise of systems literacy, namely a rejection of simplicity and a distrust of singular answers.