External influences mentioned in the responses varied from those that increased or reduced the amount of engagement with video games to those that influenced the type of engagement respondents had with gaming. Similarly, they could be direct and forceful (i.e., parents forbidding certain games) or have a softer, more indirect influence (i.e., friends enjoying certain games). Game fictions were an important part of the gaming experience, and while immersion can stem from different elements of game play (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005), respondents mainly discussed imaginative immersion.
Links to NCBI Databases
Based on our results, we suggest alternative approaches that help reduce and avoid these problems. Although gaming can certainly have both beneficial and detrimental impacts on game players, these are not the be-all and end-all of young people’s gaming culture participation, nor did the young people in our study usually frame gaming primarily as a balancing act between the two. The spectrum of beneficial–harmful is only a single, narrow perspective on young people’s participation in the social world of gaming. Providing alternatives to the impact point of view is crucial to how we view games and gaming as culture, as media, and as a part of everyday life. The framing of gaming influences perceptions and attitudes (Kümpel and Haas, 2016), and whether gaming is primarily seen, for example, as a tool, a health risk, a form of art, or an everyday activity impacts how it is perceived, discussed, and studied. Furthermore, knowledge of the different potential impacts of gaming without a broader understanding and critical exploration of the phenomenon can cause its own problems, whether in the form of moral panics (Pasanen, 2017) or unrealistic optimism (Deterding, 2014).
Functional
As demonstrated by the second quote below, a change in participation sometimes impacted only a part of the social world. The fourth group of respondents were those classified as tourists, who enjoyed different aspects of gaming but were nevertheless not very invested in it, transiency and entertainment being common features of their gaming (Unruh, 1979, p. 119). They might regularly play different kinds of games on a variety of platforms and devices or have a history of very intense gaming yet did not view gaming as all that important. This observation shows the shifting nature of DGR and contests common notions of “casual gaming”, stereotypically seen as occasional smartphone gaming limited to a few games (see Juul, 2010). Outside of a clinical context, video games are a therapeutic tool for the mind that helps promote mental health and well-being.
Gaming Beyond Entertainment: How Video Games Are Shaping The Future
Did you know the global gaming industry outperforms the revenue of both the movie and music industries combined? It shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the gaming industry has long been a leader in the tech space. The industry has evolved from a pastime for young kids into a mainstream, multibillion-dollar industry that develops cutting-edge technology.
Data and method
For ease of reading, we have made minor grammar and punctuation changes to some of the quotes during the translation. Because of the contested nature of the word “gamer” (see Shaw, 2012; Paaßen et al., 2017), we have used the word “player” when referring to someone who plays games. We conducted a thematic analysis (see Braun and Clarke, 2021) on the responses, utilizing a combination of data and theory-driven approaches. We familiarized ourselves with the responses and, using the qualitative analysis software Atlas.ti, coded the responses, https://alltimesmagazine.com/the-new-game-generation-how-technology-shapes-gaming-behavior-in-ghana/ first individually and then together, going over the responses several times, coding and re-coding, combining notes, and discussing until we reached an agreement. By exploring new designs that incorporate social impact, we can shape a future where games are a central force in shaping a more connected, more inclusive and more innovative world. If we embrace the potential of games to make the world a better place and build supportive institutions to help them do so, we can create a world where games help lead us toward a brighter future.
- The company went from being a highly successful but niche chipmaker for the gaming industry to the most valuable company in the world, recently topping Apple with a $3.43 trillion valuation.
- Nowadays, when I no longer live with my parents, there are of course no restrictions.
- The earlier discussion on the habit economy focused on the external mechanisms through which games influence user engagement.
- Contemporary games are often transmedia products (Koskimaa et al., 2021), and their fiction unfolds through multiple mediums, inviting varied forms of engagement.
- This would mainly manifest in the ways parents would set rules and limitations on the time spent playing, and the types of games played (see Kutner et al., 2008; Meriläinen, 2021).
The light, the dark, and everything else: making sense of young people’s digital gaming
Think of virtual real estate tours, virtual concerts, remote meetings and immersive training programs. Traditional CPUs are good at solving highly complex calculations, while GPUs are good at doing many slightly less complex calculations in parallel at a very high speed. That was originally meant to help with fast, high-quality gaming graphics, but it also turned out to be the perfect fit for the types of calculations AI models need. We use it not just to communicate but also to transmit values, beliefs, and traditions.
Funding Statement
In 2024, 3.5 trillion hours were spent playing mobile games worldwide, according to PR Newswire. Also, the in-app purchase revenue increased by 8% to $82 billion compared to the previous year. The modern video game has journeyed through the dynamic intersections of technology and human behavior. The recreational pursuit of yesteryear has given rise to competitive careers today. These games are doubling as social spaces where gamers are building an active online community.
- Learning how to play games often requires considerable effort, and game play can in itself be laborious and repetitive (e.g., Orme, 2021).
- Instead, it is intended to summarize our results and suggest positioning and perspectives for future research.
- In this qualitative study, we draw from a thematic analysis of the experiences of 180 game players in Finland, aged 15–25 years.
- As a result, players develop micro-behaviors that mimic real-world cooperation and leadership dynamics.
- How cultural markers from gaming are changing how we consume products and communicate our values.
- Gaming is participation in the social world of digital gaming, a socially constructed sphere of interest and involvement that individuals engage with varying intensity and attachment, and is influenced by social, personal, and cultural and societal factors (Unruh, 1979; Meriläinen, 2023).
- The popularity of games and their ability to shape culture have also affected how we market products.
- Sometimes the act of playing games was a side activity, for example, watching television.
Social Impact And Advocacy
Game fiction affords players opportunities to experience themselves and their everyday surroundings differently, and to toy with alternative ways and modes of being (Cremin, 2015). In addition to experiencing game stories in the games, some respondents engaged with them in other media (see Koskimaa et al., 2021) or expanded on the stories by writing their fanfiction, cosplaying as game characters, or drawing them (see Creativity and expression, below). These structures and phenomena are present in everyday interactions; as key game culture participants, young people both construct and dismantle barriers to participation and are included and excluded by them.
Consumption Habits
- Players‘ perception of their skill could encourage or discourage them from playing games or influence game choices, while some respondents had physical limitations to their gaming.
- Whether it’s games development and publishing or esports and streaming, gaming is a sector that has gone global.
- The content and values embedded in games have the power to influence, shape, and potentially challenge societal norms.
- This magazine is all about how the metaverse is blending the physical with the digital, shaking up business, entertainment, and even how we live day-to-day.
- The current gaming landscape is an intersection of Artificial Intelligence, immersive design, and computational innovation.
- Not only does it generate billions in revenue every year, but it also employs hundreds of thousands of people across the globe.
- Expect more advanced gaming features—such as the metaverse—to infiltrate nongaming business activities.
- Outside of a clinical context, video games are a therapeutic tool for the mind that helps promote mental health and well-being.
These barriers are forcing innovation from video game developers for new hardware that is more comfortable to enhance the gaming experience and lower cost. As a result, gaming has been at the forefront of VR-related hardware innovation such as controls, screens, headsets, speakers and consoles to create an enhanced consumer experience. The communities of different games are often ungrateful towards the creators of the games and towards other players. The complex challenges to be solved to finish a video game help to develop cognitive skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and decision-making. Educational games are increasingly incorporated into curricula to complement teaching.
Gaming Culture: A New Language for the Digital Age
Team Arena Net, the developers of Guild Wars 2, caught wind of this player’s misfortune, shared the post, and raised thousands of dollars from other Guild Wars 2 players. While these developers only set out to build a game, they also created a network of support that served a member in dire need. Games, through their rules and narratives, construct frameworks defining success, respect, and community values.
The History of Video Gaming
We present our analysis organized by the four main themes derived from the DGR theory (Figure 1). We start with the Level of engagement to demonstrate the considerable differences in young people’s engagement with game cultures, followed by the Personal meanings of gaming. We then explore the Internal and external influences that shape individuals‘ relationship with gaming and conclude with the different ways gaming takes place in the theme Ways of engaging with gaming.
However, the distinction between leisure and labor also relates to gaming more generally. Learning how to play games often requires considerable effort, and game play can in itself be laborious and repetitive (e.g., Orme, 2021). This framing also connects to fundamental societal discussions on the value of play and leisure, seen, for example, in some of our respondents‘ use of professionalization to justify gaming.
Gamification And Interactive Learning
In order to create more dynamic games, technology will interpret user behavior and emotions. Through Machine Learning (ML), games can recognize player behavior and modify the scenarios in real-time. In other words, the game’s design would entice players to return time and time again.
Closely related to the dimension of escape and relaxation, the elements of fantasy and immersion common in gaming were an important part of gaming for some respondents. The strong emotions elicited by games (see Lankoski, 2012), the ability to figuratively cross the borders of everyday life, and the different immersive qualities of games (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005) were all brought up in the responses. In the coding process, we identified different aspects that we considered relevant and interesting, to capture a detailed and diverse picture of young people’s gaming.
Problems of inclusion and exclusion can also come about through skill differences, as players‘ different levels of skill can make it difficult or even impossible to play certain games together. Exclusion can also stem from lacking resources (i.e., not affording to buy games and gaming devices), tying into larger societal issues of inequality (Apperley and Gray, 2020). Different levels of production of gaming cultures are not separate categories, but a continuum that can be examined on the scales of professionalization and labor. Video game content creation can be seen as a form of labor, often discussed through the term playbour (Törhönen, 2021).
Video games have become a vehicle for social commentary and political activism, with various games from This War of Mine to Undertale and many more exploring topics such as inequality, discrimination, climate change and ecological destruction. Many of these games include a moral choice that the player must make, which forces a confrontation with the player’s values. The importance of game representation is becoming a key subject for many game developers.
How Global Tech Ecosystems Are Redefining the Futu…
This said, few participants discussed long-term changes in their gaming participation. Much of previous research on youth gaming has focused on the impact of gaming, typically examined through variables such as gaming motives and spent time, on different aspects of wellbeing. The development of video games drives technological innovation in computer hardware and software, graphics and artificial intelligence, often pushing the limits of practical technology.
The closest analogue to this in gaming cultures are esports which are becoming both increasingly popular and more institutionalized in the vein of traditional sports (Brock, 2017; Scholz, 2019; Törhönen, 2021; Ruotsalainen, 2022). One respondent described both following esports and having esports streams on as “background noise” rather than something fully engaged with. Several respondents compared their experiences with games to other media such as books and movies. Echoing the notion of the active audience (see Behrenshausen, 2012), interactivity (see Christopher and Leuszler, 2023) was typically seen as the key difference. As discussed in the background section of this article, learning is often mentioned as an important gaming benefit, and the learning dimension was brought up by many of the respondents.
Content creators are often not paid for this labor and it is quite common that they do not expect to be compensated either. However, there was also present an interesting continuum of ways of engaging and producing content for games or even full games for free as a hobby and simultaneously having a job related to games. Personal gaming can be seen as the activity of playing alone and solely engaging with the game rather than other mediums and meanings conveyed through them. Indeed, some of our respondents would explicitly mention that their gaming relationship consisted exclusively or almost exclusively of playing video games. Gaming appeared as a mundane part of their everyday life despite sometimes very intense gaming. However, when asked about negative gaming experiences or worries over gaming, some respondents specifically mentioned that gaming was not a problem for them if they were discussing intensive gaming, aware that it could be interpreted as such.
After removing redundancies and merging overlapping codes, the process resulted in 437 individual codes that ran from single mentions (e.g., “Worry over too much sitting”) to broad topics mentioned by the majority of the respondents (e.g., “Gaming with friends”). Next, we grouped codes to make larger subthemes (e.g., “Gaming and gender” and “Public discussion of gaming”), experimenting with a variety of configurations. We then looked at these groupings through the lens of the DGR theory, as discussed next. If you’re one of the billion or so people who play online games regularly, you know that those games can afford community and social support. Whether it’s a persistent fantasy world like World of Warcraft or something more casual like Candy Crush, gaming can offer friendship, cooperation and shared experiences.
From minimalistic pixel designs to billion-polygon environments, gaming demonstrates advancements in technology and storytelling. We will also focus on its parallel impact on user habits to understand how innovation redefines engagement. According to Koski (2008), the most common form of following sports is spectator sports.
Several actors, both individuals and organizations, in the fields of gaming, academia, youth work, and media education also distributed the questionnaire through their public accounts. Following gaming cultures sometimes also happened in relation to changes in playing routines, as previously discussed under the main theme of Level of engagement. With age, consuming content could become more common than playing video games in respondents‘ lives, presumably at least in part because of convenience. Negative discourses about video games in public discussion both in Finland and globally, as well as the societal stigma around gaming that these discourses reinforce, were brought up by multiple respondents.
How cultural markers from gaming are changing how we consume products and communicate our values. Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent from the participants‘ legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements. The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because of privacy considerations, but will be made available through a public repository later for further research use once anonymized. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
The cutting-edge solutions pioneered in games are also often appropriated for other purposes, including research in virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and more. Not only does it generate billions in revenue every year, but it also employs hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Whether it’s games development and publishing or esports and streaming, gaming is a sector that has gone global. The earlier discussion on the habit economy focused on the external mechanisms through which games influence user engagement.
Well, I wasn’t even allowed to play Minecraft until I was 12 years old, because my parents thought it was too violent as you can kill cows and pigs in it. Nowadays, when I no longer live with my parents, there are of course no restrictions. They have sometimes wondered that I play, say, GTA V, when they don’t think it sounds like my kind of game at all. Competition was a dimension where different goals and mentalities sometimes clashed.
And many industries outside of gaming have adopted these innovations to boost productivity, improve the client experience, increase engagement and boost sales. This year’s Under 30 class continues to demonstrate how young pioneers from diverse backgrounds are changing the gaming industry. Of the 30 nominees selected by the judges, 14 are women or non-binary, and 14 identify as people of color (some entries are shared by multiple cofounders).
Respondents discussed not only their preferences but also voiced their views on how they perceived competition as influencing gaming more broadly. Some respondents saw esports and the professionalization of gaming as a reason for gaming becoming too competitive (see Blamey, 2022). Echoing the different gaming mentalities mentioned above, these respondents saw a focus on competition as antithetical to relaxed fun and enjoyment (see Brock, 2017).
Besides regional variations, this disparity illustrates the universal reach of mobile gaming. The transition from bulky consoles to compact smartphones marked a turning point in the gaming industry. The smartphone leveled the ground, bridging any gaps between high-end and entry-level players. Individuals and families have chosen to file a video game addiction lawsuit claim with TorHoerman Law. These cases only emphasize the broader societal significance of the habit economy.
As a result, players develop micro-behaviors that mimic real-world cooperation and leadership dynamics. Over time, such a dynamic blurs the line between recreational play and habitual engagement. As a report by Ernst & Young pointed out, popular games like Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox have incorporated several aspects of the metaverse, including virtual worlds where players meet to play games and use features like in-game chats and in-game payments.