Once upon a time, when all the world was analogue, games could only be played together by people in the same place and at the same time. But that was before the internet. One of the most profound and least anticipated ways in which the internet has changed society is that it has allowed more people to play more games together than ever before in history. For the most popular there can be nearly a million simultaneous players around the world at any moment. What’s more, they are deeply immersive; each player can spend hours on them every week. If social media are counted as a form of multiplayer adventure game, which perhaps they should be, then computer gaming is one of the most important forces shaping society’s understanding of itself today.
Even those games which appear as games, and are marketed as such, have become epic constructions of the collective imagination and theatres for almost every human desire. They are not all about hunting and killing. One of the most popular and original, Minecraft, is, on the face of it, a game of building and exploration.
Minecraft is 10 years old this year. It was started by one man, a Swedish programmer named Markus Persson, who gave early versions away. Within five years the game had grown so huge that he sold it to Microsoft for $2.5bn. In the original version, players explored, and shaped or built, an almost unlimited landscape to which they had shared access from their PCs. These worlds were made from a limited number of elements – fire, water, earth, and so on, which came in blocks. They could be excavated and combined to build almost anything, from scale models of the whole of Middle Earth to simulated computers; and every model is open to other players to wander around and perhaps to add to or destroy.
Destruction and hostility are possible because the game is large enough to model a real playground. All sufficiently complex games will provide a creative sanctuary for some children and field of conquest for others – and the children in such a place can be of any age. Microsoft announced last week that it would move Minecraft much closer to the physical world by bringing out an augmented reality version: players will be able be able to build Minecraft constructions that will appear superimposed on the real world in their phone screens and those of every other player in the neighbourhood.
Pessimists already see unparalleled opportunities for bullying and covert vandalism. They are probably right to do so; every other form of communication ever invented has also been corrupted. But there is also something genuinely uplifting in the thought of a new sort of global collaborative game. Play is one of the things that makes us human. Setting the rules and nourishing the culture that encourage good behaviour is not just a task for games, but something urgently needed in the wider world as well. Games today are so important that getting them right will even make the world a little better too.
