Gaming the Future: How Games Help Us Play What's to Come

As a genre, science fiction (SF) has secured a venerable spot among our cultural products, especially in the global North, as a forward-looking form of entertainment that can be both engaging and politically and intellectually sophisticated, "an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility" (Csicsery-Ronay, 2012, p. 1).As Csicsery-Ronay explains, when faced with real-world scientific progress and its social impacts, we turn to SF-a fictional playground mirroring present or future scenariosto explore these complexities, process our emotions (e.g., delight, anxiety, or grief), and even just engage in a safe space without losing touch with reality (Csicsery-Ronay, 2012).In essence, we temporarily transform our experiences into SF, allowing us to grapple with them in a way that feels more manageable.This potential is magnified when SF is presented through the medium of videogames, which are ideal vehicles for our speculative imagination, being what Bogost calls "modes of experience."In playing games, individuals assume roles on a spectrum of choice and agency, stepping into "the shoes of someone else" (Bogost, 2011).This type of embodiment is in part what makes the SF videogame form both strange and exciting, in that the player is required to think through, and act upon, matters within a SF framework, which is both liberating and limiting to them on a mental and mechanical level (Krzywinska & MacCallum-Stewart, 2009).