The Future of Games in Society (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25102)

Abstract

The Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25102: The Future of Games in Society, addressed the growing disconnect between gaming’s massive global influence - reaching over four billion players in a $230+ billion industry - and its unrealized potential for societal benefit. While digital games drive technological innovation in, for example, AI, data science, and HCI, and serve as social infrastructures and educational tools, the field faces significant challenges including exploitative monetization, health concerns, and a widening academia-industry gap, that limits research impact. This extends to public policy, where games research is not serving the public interest. This interdisciplinary workshop convened stakeholders to develop strategic directions that realign gaming’s influence with societal imperatives, and to establish a bold vision for the future role of games in society. The initiative established a number of key priorities, notably: 1) Ensuring that games promote and facilitate human flourishing; designing games that promote mental health and wellbeing and that promote inclusive online communities. 2) Realizing the potential of educational games to transform education; such as embedding evidence-based learning in education systems. 3) Building sustainable, large-scale research infrastructure, thus enabling industry-academia-policymaker collaboration. Furthermore, utilizing the scale of games for large-scale behavioural research. 4) Developing standardized evaluation frameworks. Enhancing the rigour, assessment, evidence, and knowledge generated from games research and mobilizing this to ensure the positive impact of games on society. This Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop aimed to unify fragmented efforts into a coherent agenda so that digital games realize their potential as instruments of meaningful societal benefit in our increasingly digital world.