Games city plays

Alexan­dra A. Arga­mako­va
Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy, Russ­ian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences

Oleg V. Uppit
Media jour­nals such as InLib­er­ty, Reed.media, Skill­box

Games city plays

Abstract.The arti­cle explores the pre­con­di­tions for the expan­sion of social games. They include: (1) the progress of vir­tu­al real­i­ty tech­nolo­gies and plat­forms; (2) the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of social life and the growth of smart cities con­nect­ed with the imple­men­ta­tion of tech­nolo­gies into dif­fer­ent social process­es, gov­er­nance and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-medi­at­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions; (3) social exper­i­ments in the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of city inter­ac­tions, prac­tices and spaces; (4) devel­op­ments in the the­o­ry and prac­tice of social games, which pro­vide new strate­gies for plan­ning and orga­ni­za­tion; (5) futur­o­log­i­cal imag­i­na­tion influ­enc­ing the ways of social change by pro­to­typ­ing alter­na­tive sce­nar­ios of the com­ing future. From the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives the author shows how the demar­ca­tion between the real and the vir­tu­al, life and game, activ­i­ty and enter­tain­ment can be smashed or blurred in the future. Exper­i­ments in the appli­ca­tion of gam­ing mechan­ics and prin­ci­ples for social goals are grow­ing in num­ber. As the result, a ques­tion aris­es whether it is prob­a­ble for VR/AR/MR tech­nolo­gies to trans­form the life of peo­ple into some big mul­ti­play­er game? Social effects of gam­i­fi­ca­tion can bring in democ­ra­ti­za­tion and human­iza­tion of soci­ety as well as the new patho­log­i­cal and destruc­tive forms of games with human con­scious­ness and per­son­al­i­ty. The future soci­eties will bal­ance between two alter­na­tives such as cyber-utopia and gam­i­fied dig­i­tal dic­ta­tor­ship. Thus, social devel­op­ment depends on our con­scious imag­i­na­tion of futures and design of actions and coun­ter­ac­tions in rela­tion to the alter­na­tive sce­nar­ios of social evo­lu­tion.

Key­words: dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, games, vir­tu­al real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy, smart cities, future, phi­los­o­phy, urban stud­ies.

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20181449

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